Rocket to the Enaissance

man's hope for cultural vitality lies beyond the earth

In a Slow but Irresistible Explosion fueled by the energies of the Renaissance, European civilization started expanding into the unknown some four and a half centuries ago. No longer did Western man huddle around the Mediterranean, for he had discovered a new frontier beyond the sea. We know the very day he found it – and the day he lost it. The American frontier opened on October 12, 1492; it closed on May 10, 1869, when the last spike was driven into the transcontinental railroad.

In all the long history of man, ours is the first age with no new frontiers on land or sea, and many of our troubles stem from this fact. It is true that, even now, there are vast areas of the Earth still unexploited and even unexplored, but dealing with them will only be a mopping-up operation. Though the oceans will keep us busy for centuries to come, the countdown started, even for them, when the bathyscape Trieste descended into the ultimate deep of the Marianas Trench.

There are no more undiscovered continents; set out toward any horizon, and on its other side you will find someone already waiting to check your visa and your vaccination certificate.

This loss of the unknown has been a bitter blow to all romantics and adventurers. In the words of Walter Prescott Webb, the historian of the Southwest: "The end of an age is always touched with sadness. . . . The people are going to miss the frontier more than words can express. For centuries they heard its call, listened to its promise, and bet their lives and fortunes on its outcome. It calls no more . . ."

Professor Webb's lament, I am glad to say, is a few million years premature. Even while he was writing it in the small state of Texas, only a thousand miles to his west the vapor trails above White Sands were pointing to a frontier unimaginably vaster than any that our world has ever known – the frontier of space.

The road to the stars has been discovered none too soon. Civilization cannot exist without new frontiers; it needs them both physically and spiritually. The physical need is obvious – new lands, new resources, new materials. The spiritual need is less apparent, but in the long run it is more important. We do not live by bread alone; we need adventure, variety, novelty, romance. As the psychologists have shown by their sensory deprivation experiments, a man goes swiftly mad if he is isolated in a silent, darkened room, cut off completely from the external world. What is true of individuals is also true of societies; they too can become insane without sufficient stimulus.

It may seem over-optimistic to claim that man's forthcoming escape from Earth, and the crossing of interplanetary space, will trigger a new renaissance and break the patterns into which our society, and our arts, must otherwise freeze. Yet this is exactly what I propose to do; first, however, it is necessary to demolish some common misconceptions.

The space frontier is infinite, beyond all possibility of exhaustion; but the opportunity and the challenge it presents are both totally different from any that we have met on our own world in the past. All the moons and planets of our Solar System are strange, hostile places that may never harbor more than a few thousand human inhabitants, who will be at least as carefully hand-picked as the population of Los Alamos. The age of mass colonization has gone forever. Space has room for many things, but not for "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . ." Any Statue of Liberty on Martian soil will have inscribed upon its base "Give me your nuclear physicists, your chemical engineers, your biologists and mathematicians." The immigrants of the Twenty-first Century will have much more in common with those of the Seventeenth Century than of the Nineteenth. For the Mayflower, it is worth remembering, was loaded to the scuppers with eggheads.

The often-expressed idea that the planets can solve the problem of over-population is thus a complete fallacy. Humanity is now increasing at the rate of some 100,000 souls a day, and no conceivable "space-lift" could make serious inroads into this appalling figure.

With present techniques, the combined military budgets of all nations might just about suffice to land ten men on the Moon every day. Yet even if space transportation were free, instead of being fabulously expensive, that would scarcely help matters, for there is not a single planet upon which men could live and work without elaborate mechanical aids. On all of them we shall need the paraphernalia of space-suits, synthetic air factories, pressure-domes, totally-enclosed hydroponic farms. One day (continued on page 38) Renaissance (continued from page 34) our lunar and Martian colonies will be self-supporting, but if we are looking for living room for our surplus population, it would be far cheaper to find it in the Antarctic, or even on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

No: the population battle must be fought and won here on Earth. Some of the obvious means – birth control, compulsory abortion and infanticide – are odious and/or contrary to the religious convictions of large segments of Earth's people. Though the planets cannot save us, this is a matter in which logic may not count. The weight of increasing numbers, the suffocating sense of pressure as the walls of the ant heap crowd ever closer, will help to power man's drive into space, even if no more than a millionth of humanity can ever go there.

Perhaps the battle is already lost, here on this planet. As Sir George Darwin has suggested in his depressing little book, The Next Million Years, ours may be a Golden Age, compared with the endless vistas of famine and poverty that must follow when the billions of the future fight over Earth's waning resources. If this is true, it is all the more vital that we establish self-sustaining colonies on the planets. They may have a chance of surviving, and preserving something of our culture, even if civilization breaks down completely on the mother world.

Though the planets can give no physical relief to the congested and impoverished Earth, their intellectual and emotional contributions may be enormous. The discoveries of the first expeditions, the struggles of the pioneers to establish themselves on other worlds – these will inspire a feeling of purpose and achievement among the stay-at-homes. They will know, as they watch their TV screens, that history is starting again. The sense of wonder, which we have almost lost, will return to life; and so will the spirit of adventure.

It is difficult to overrate the importance of this, though it is easy to poke fun at it by making cynical remarks about "escapism." Only a few people can be pioneers or discoverers, but everyone who is even half alive occasionally feels the need for adventure and excitement. If you require proof of this, look at the countless horse-operas now galloping across the ether. The myth of a West that never was has been created to fill the vacuum in our modern lives, and it fills it well. Sooner or later, however, one tires of myths (many of us have long since tired of this one), and then it is time to seek new territory. There is a poignant symbolism in the fact that the giant rockets now stand poised on the edge of the Pacific, where the covered wagons halted only two lifetimes ago.

Already, a slow but profound reorientation of our culture is under way, as men's thoughts become polarized toward space. Even before the first living creature left Earth's atmosphere, the process had started in many segments of our society. Space-toys for the very young have been commonplace for years; comic strips and movie serials such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon have been read and watched by millions; cartoons and "Take me to your leader" jokes have been enjoyed by vast numbers of people. Increasing awareness of the Universe has even, alas, contributed to our psychopathology. A fascinating parallel could be drawn between the flying saucer cults and the witchcraft mania of the Seventeenth Century. The mentalities involved are the same.

As the exploration of our Solar System proceeds, human society will become more and more permeated with the ideas, discoveries and experiences of astronautics. They will have their greatest effect, of course, upon the men and women who actually go out into space to establish either temporary bases or permanent colonies on the planets. Because we do not know what they will encounter, it is scarcely profitable to speculate about the societies that may evolve, a hundred or a thousand years from now, upon the Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan and the other major solid bodies of the Solar System. (We can write off the giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which have no stable surfaces.) The outcome of our ventures in space must await the verdict of history; certainly we will witness, on a scale their author never imagined, the testing of Toynbee's laws of "Challenge and Response." In this context, these words from the abridged Study of History are well worth pondering: "Affiliated civilizations . . . produce their most striking early manifestations in places outside the area occupied by the 'parent' civilization. The superiority of the response evoked by new ground is most strikingly illustrated when the new ground has to be reached by a sea-passage. . . . Peoples occupying frontier positions, exposed to constant attack, achieve a more brilliant development than their neighbors in more sheltered positions."

Alter "sea" to "space" and the analogy is obvious; as for the "constant attack," nature will provide this more competently than any merely human adversaries. Ellsworth Huntington has summed up the same idea in a memorable phrase, pointing out that the march of civilization has been "coldward and stormward." The time has come now to pit our skill and resolution against climates and environments more hostile than any that this Earth can show.

As has happened so often in the past, the challenge may be too great. We may establish colonies on the planets, but they may be unable to maintain themselves at more than a marginal level of existence, with no energy left over to spark any cultural achievements. History has one parallel as striking as it is ominous, for long ago the Polynesians achieved a technical tour de force which may well be compared with the conquest of space. By establishing regular maritime traffic across the greatest of oceans, writes Toynbee, they ". . . won their footing on the specks of dry land which are scattered through the watery wilderness of the Pacific almost as sparsely as the stars are scattered through space." But the effort defeated them at last, and they relapsed into primitive life. We might never have known of their astonishing achievement had they not left, on Easter Island, a memorial that can hardly be overlooked. There may be many Easter Islands of space in the eons to come – abandoned planets littered not with monoliths but with the equally enigmatic debris of another defeated technology.

Whatever the eventual outcome of our exploration of space, we can be reasonably certain of some immediate benefits – and I am deliberately ignoring such "practical" returns as the multi-billion-dollar improvements in weather forecasting and communications, which may in themselves put space-travel on a paying basis. The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worth-while are the search for knowledge and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument; the only point of debate is which comes first.

Only a small part of mankind will ever be thrilled to discover the electron density around the Moon, the precise composition of the Jovian atmosphere, or the strength of Mercury's magnetic field. Though the existence of whole nations may one day be determined by such facts, and others still more esoteric, these are matters that concern the mind, and not the heart. Civilizations are respected for their intellectual achievements; they are loved – or despised – for their works of art. Can we even guess, today, what art will come from space?

Let us first consider literature, for the trajectory of any civilization is most accurately traced by its writers. To quote again from Professor Webb's The Great Frontier, "We find that in general each nation's Golden Age coincides more or less with that nation's supremacy in frontier activity.... It seems that as the frontier boom got under way in any country, the literary genius of that nation was liberated . . ."

The writer cannot escape from his environment, (continued on page 48) Renaissance (continued from page 38) however hard he tries. (If Lewis Carroll had lived today, he might have given us not Alice, but Lolita.) When the frontier is open we have Homer and Shakespeare or – to choose less Olympian examples nearer to our own age – Melville, Whitman and Mark Twain. When it is closed, the time has come for Tennessee Williams and the Beatniks – and for Proust, whose horizon was a cork-lined room.

It is too naive to imagine that astronautics will restore the epic and the saga in anything like their original forms; space-flight will be too well documented (Homer started off with the great advantage of being untrammeled by too many facts). But surely the discoveries and adventures, the triumphs and inevitable tragedies that must accompany man's drive toward the stars will one day inspire a new heroic literature, and bring forth latter-day equivalents of The Golden Fleece, Gulliver's Travels, Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe or The Ancient Mariner.

The fact that the conquest of the air has done nothing of the sort must not be allowed to confuse the issue. It is true that the literature of flight is very sparse (Lindbergh and Saint-Exupéry are almost the only examples that come to mind), but the reason is obvious. The aviator spends only a few hours in his element, and travels to places that are already known. (In the few cases where he flies over unexplored territory, he is seldom able to land there.) The space-voyager, on the other hand, may be on his way for weeks, months or years, to regions that no man has ever seen save dimly through a telescope. Space-flight has, therefore, very little in common with aviation; it is much closer in spirit to ocean voyaging, which has inspired so many of our greatest works of literature.

It is perhaps too early to speculate about the impact of space-flight on music and the visual arts. Here again one can only hope – and hope is certainly needed, when one looks at the canvases upon which the contemporary painters all too accurately express their psyches. The prospect for modern music is a little more favorable; now that electronic computers have been taught to compose it, we may confidently expect that before long some of them will learn to enjoy it, thus saving us the trouble.

Maybe these ancient art-forms have come to the end of the line, and the still unimaginable experiences that await us beyond the atmosphere will inspire new forms of expression. The low or non-existent gravity, for example, will certainly give rise to a strange, other-worldly architecture, fragile and delicate as a dream. And what, I wonder, will Swan Lake be like on Mars, when the dancers have only a third of their terrestrial weight – or on the Moon, where they will have merely a sixth?

The complete absence of gravity – a sensation which no human being has ever experienced since the beginning of the world, yet which is mysteriously familiar in dreams – will have a profound impact upon every type of human activity. It will make possible a whole constellation of new sports and games, and transform many existing ones.

• • •

All our esthetic ideas and standards are derived from the natural world around us, and it may well turn out that many of them are peculiar to Earth. No other planet has blue skies and seas, green grass, hills softly rounded by erosion, rivers and waterfalls, a single brilliant moon. Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals who share our world. Whatever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale. It is even possible that the physical environments of the other planets may turn out to be unbearably hideous; it is equally possible that they will lead us to new and more universal ideas of beauty, less limited by our Earth-bound upbringing.

The existence of extraterrestrial life is, of course, the greatest of the many unknowns awaiting us on the planets. We are now fairly certain that there is some form of vegetation on Mars; the seasonal color changes, coupled with recent spectroscopic evidence, give this a high degree of probability. As Mars is an old and perhaps dying world, the struggle for existence may have led to some weird results. We had better be careful when we land.

Where there is vegetation, there may be higher forms of life; given sufficient time, nature explores all possibilities. Mars has had plenty of time, so those parasites on the vegetable kingdom known as animals may have evolved there. They will be very peculiar animals, for they will have no lungs. There is not much purpose in breathing when the atmosphere is practically devoid of oxygen.

Beyond this, biological speculation is not only pointless but distinctly unwise, since we will know the truth within another ten or twenty years – and perhaps much sooner. The time is fast approaching when we will discover, once and for all, whether the Martians exist.

Contact with a contemporary non-human civilization will be the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our race; the possibilities for good and evil are endless. Within a decade or so, some of the classic themes of sciencefiction may enter the realm of practical politics. It is much more likely, however, that if Mars ever has produced intelligent life, we have missed it by geological ages. Since all the planets have been in existence for at least five billion years, the probability of cultures flourishing on two of them simultaneously must be extremely small.

Yet the impact of even an extinct civilization could be overwhelming; the European Renaissance, remember, was triggered by the rediscovery of a culture that flourished more than a thousand years earlier. When our archaeologists reach Mars, they may find waiting for them a heritage as great as that which we owe to Greece and Rome. The Chinese scholar Hu Shih has remarked: "Contact with strange civilizations brings new standards of value, with which the native culture is re-examined and re-evaluated, and conscious reformation and regeneration are the natural outcome." Hu Shih was speaking of the Chinese literary renaissance, circa 1915. Perhaps these words may apply to a terrestrial renaissance, a century hence.

We should not, however, pin too much hope on Mars, or upon any of the worlds of our Solar System. If intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe, we may have to seek it upon the planets of other suns. They are separated from us by a gulf millions – repeat, millions – of times greater than that dividing us from our next-door neighbors Mars and Venus. Until a few years ago, even the most optimistic scientists thought it impossible that we could ever span this frightful abyss, which light itself takes years to cross at a tireless 670,000,000 miles an hour. Yet now, by one of the most extraordinary and unexpected breakthroughs in the history of technology, there is a good chance that we may contact intelligence outside our Solar System before we discover the humblest mosses or lichens inside it.

This break-through has been in electronics. It now appears that by far the greater part of our exploration of space will be by radio. It can put us in touch with worlds that we can never visit – even with worlds that have long since ceased to exist. The radio telescope, and not the rocket, may be the instrument that first establishes contact with intelligence beyond the Earth.

Even a decade ago, this idea would have seemed absurd. But now we have receivers of such sensitivity, and antennas of such enormous size, that we can hope to pick up radio signals from the nearer stars – if there is anyone out there to send them. The search for such signals began early in 1960 at the National (continued on page 83)Renaissance (continued from page 48) Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia, and many other observatories will follow suit when they have built the necessary equipment. This is perhaps the most momentous quest upon which men have ever embarked; sooner or later, it will be successful.

From the background of cosmic noise, the hiss and crackle of exploding stars and colliding galaxies, we will someday filter out the faint, rhythmic pulses that are the voice of intelligence. At first we will know only (only!) that there are other minds than ours in the Universe; later we will learn to interpret these signals. Some of them, it is fair to assume, will carry images – the equivalent of picture-telegraphy, or even television. It will be fairly easy to deduce the coding and reconstruct these images. One day, perhaps not far in the future, some cathode-ray screen will show pictures from another world.

Let me repeat that this is no fantasy. At this very moment millions of dollars' worth of electronic equipment are engaged upon the search. It may not be successful until the radio astronomers can get into orbit, where they can build antennas miles across and can shield them from the incessant din of Earth. We may have to wait ten – or a hundred – years for the first results; no matter. The point I wish to make is that even if we can never leave our Solar System in a physical sense, we may yet learn something about the civilizations circling other stars – and they may learn about us. For as soon as we detect messages from space, we will attempt to answer them.

There are fascinating and endless grounds for speculation here; let us consider just a few of the possibilities. (And in a universe of a hundred thousand million suns, almost any possibility is a certainty – somewhere, sometime.) We have known radio for barely a lifetime, and TV for an even shorter period; all our techniques of electronic communication must be incredibly primitive. Yet even now, if put to it, we could send our culture pulsing across the light-years. Perhaps our TV has already been picked up by Outsiders: in which case they have received examples of our culture at its lowest, instead of at its highest and best.

Music, painting, sculpture, even architecture present no problems, since they involve easily transmitted patterns. Literature raises much greater difficulties; it could be transmitted, but could it be communicated, even if it were preceded by the most elaborate radio equivalent of the Rosetta Stone?

But something must be lost in any contact between cultures; what is gained is far more important. In the ages to come we may lock minds with many strange beings, and study with incredulity, delight or horror, civilizations that may be older than our Earth. Some of them will have ceased to exist during the centuries that their signals have been crossing space. The radio astronomers will thus be the true interplanetary archaeologists, reading inscriptions and examining works of art whose creators passed away before the building of the pyramids. Even this is a modest estimate; a radio wave arriving now from a star at the heart of the Milky Way (the stellar whirlpool in whose lonely outer reaches our sun gyrates) must have started its journey around 25,000 b.c. When Toynbee defined renaissances as "contacts between civilizations in time" he could hardly have guessed that this phrase might one day have an astronomical application.

Radio-prehistory – electronic archaeology – may have consequences at least as great as the classical studies of the past. The races whose messages we interpret and whose images we reconstruct will obviously be of a very high order, and the impact of their art and technology upon our own culture will be enormous. The rediscovery of Greek and Latin literature in the Fifteenth Century, the avalanche of knowledge when the Manhattan Project was revealed, the glories uncovered at the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb, the excavation of Troy, the publication of the Principia and The Origin of Species – these widely dissimilar examples may hint at the stimulus and excitement that may come when we have learned to interpret the messages that for ages have fallen upon the heedless Earth. Not all of these messages – not many, perhaps – will bring us comfort. The proof, which is now only a matter of time, that this young species of ours is low in the scale of cosmic intelligence, will be a shattering blow to our pride. Few of our current religions can be expected to survive it, contrary to the optimistic forecasts from certain quarters.

• • •

The examples I have given, and the possibilities I have outlined, should be enough to prove that there is rather more to space-exploration than shooting mice into orbit, or taking photos of the far side of the Moon. These are merely the trivial preliminaries to the age of discovery that is now about to dawn. Though that age will provide the necessary ingredients for a renaissance, we cannot be sure that one will follow. The present situation has no exact parallel in the history of mankind; the past can provide hints, but no firm guidance. To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus – far, indeed, beyond the first ape man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor of all of us came crawling out of the sea.

For this is where life began, and where most of this planet's life remains to this day, trapped in a meaningless cycle of birth and death. Only the creatures who dared the hostile, alien land were able to develop intelligence; now, that intelligence is about to face a still greater challenge. It may even be that this beautiful Earth of ours is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt where we were born, and the sea of stars on which we must now venture forth.

There are, of course, many who would deny this, with varying degrees of indignation or even fear. Consider the following extract from Lewis Mumford's The Transformation of Man: "Post-historic man's starvation of life would reach its culminating point in interplanetary travel. . . . Under such conditions, life would again narrow down to the physiological functions of breathing, eating, and excretion. . . . By comparison, the Egyptian cult of the dead was overflowing with vitality; from a mummy in his tomb one can still gather more of the attributes of a full human being than from a spaceman."

I am afraid that Professor Mumford's view of space-travel is slightly myopic, and conditioned by the present primitive state of the art. But when he also writes: "No one can pretend . . . that existence on a space satellite or on the barren face of the Moon would bear any resemblance to human life" he may well be expressing a truth he had not intended. "Existence on dry land," the more conservative fish may have said to their amphibious relatives, a billion years ago, "will bear no resemblance to piscatorial life. We will stay where we are."

They did. They are still fish.

It can hardly be denied that Professor Mumford's view is held, consciously or otherwise, by a very large number of Americans, particularly those older and more influential ones who determine policy. This prompts certain somber conclusions, which are reinforced by the successes of the Russian space effort. Perhaps the United States has already suffered that failure of nerve which is one of the first signs that a civilization has contracted out from the future.

Anyone sufficiently cynical, and sufficiently well-informed, could produce ample evidence of this from the record of the United States' space program. The rivalry between the various services is notorious, and the full fantastic story of the Pentagon's dealings with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (which was reluctantly permitted to launch the first American satellite) is almost a textbook example of the saying "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." There is no indication that, in this case, the gods had to exert themselves unduly.

The whole structure of American society may well be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands. No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into such essentially non-creative, and occasionally parasitic, occupations as law, advertising and banking. (Some of my best friends are – or were – lawyers, ad-men and bankers; but truth must out.) Nor can it afford to squander indefinitely the technical man power it does possess. Not long ago Life magazine published a photograph that was a horrifying social document; it showed seven thousand engineers massed behind the car that their combined efforts, plus several hundred million dollars, had just produced. The time may well come when the United States, if it wishes to stay in space, will have to consider freezing automobile design for a few years – or better still, reverting to the last models that were any good, which some authorities date around 1954.

It does not necessarily follow that the Soviet Union can do much better: if it expects to master space by its own efforts, it will soon find that it has bitten off more than it can chew. The combined resources of mankind are inadequate for the task, and always will be. We may regard with some amusement the Russians' attempts to "go it alone," and should be patient with their quaint old-fashioned flag-waving as they plant the hammer and sickle on the Moon. All such flurries of patriotism will be necessarily short-lived. The Russians themselves destroyed the concept of nationality when they sent Sputnik I flashing across a hundred frontiers. But because this is perfectly obvious, it will be some little time before everyone sees it, and all governments realize that the only runner in the much-vaunted space race is – man.

Despite the perils and problems of our times, we should be glad that we are living in this age. Every civilization is like a surf-rider, carried forward on the crest of a wave. The wave bearing us has scarcely started its run; those who thought it was already slackening spoke centuries too soon. We are poised now, in the precarious but exhilarating balance that is the essence of real living, the antithesis of mere existence. Behind us roars the reef we have already passed; beneath us the great wave, as yet barely flecked with foam, humps its back still higher from the sea.

And ahead . . . ? We cannot tell; we are too far out to see the unknown land. It is enough to ride the wave.