Do we need to justify pushing our limits? Doing so is at the very heart of the urge to explore, which is embedded in our species. Recently, while doing some research on Amelia Earhart, I ran across a post on Maria Popova’s extraordinary site The Marginalian, one that examines the realm of action within the context of the human spirit. Back in 2016, Popova was looking at Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), the famed journalist and commentator, who not long after Earhart’s fatal flight into the Pacific discussed the extent of her achievement and the reasons she had flown.
Here’s a passage from Lippmann’s New York Herald Tribune column, written on July 8, 1937, just six days after the aviator and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared somewhere near Howland Island between Hawaii and Australia. Lippmann asks whether such ventures must be justified by a utilitarian purpose and concludes that what is at stake here transcends simple utility and speaks to the deepest motivations of our explorations. It is a belief in a goal and the willingness to risk all. Practicality carries little weight among those who actually do the deed:
“The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.
Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighted by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints, the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.
No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.”
Image: Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E. During its modification, the aircraft had most of the cabin windows blanked out and had specially fitted fuselage fuel tanks. The round RDF loop antenna can be seen above the cockpit. This image was taken at Luke Field in Hawaii on March 20, 1937. Earhart’s final flight in this aircraft took place on July 2, 1937, taking off from Lae, New Guinea. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Scanned from Lockheed Aircraft since 1913, by René Francillon. Photo credit USAF.
Lippmann’s tribute is a gorgeous piece of writing, available in The Essential Lippmann (Random House, 1963). Naturally, it makes me think of other flyers who rode those same winds, people like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Beryl Markham, who in 1936 was the first to dare a solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic from east to west. As I’ve recently re-read Markham’s elegant West With the Night (1942), she as well as Earhart has been on my mind. What a shame that Earhart didn’t live to pen a memoir as powerful, but perhaps Lippmann in some small way did it for her.
This sounds idealistic, reminding me of Cabal’s speech at the end of the movie “Things to Come”.
And yet, is it really true? Other great achievements were done for the expected rewards that would put the achiever higher up the social pyramid. This was effectively spelled out in “The Right Stuff”, about test pilots reaching the top of the pyramid.. I don’t think there is much doubt that this was the motivation of Scott and his ill-fated race to the South Pole. Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel were done for monetary reward, even though they are revered as one of the best pieces of Art ever done. Before science became a profession, it was done by comfortably wealthy gentlemen who we believe just “wanted to discover and know”, yet we know there was more to it than that, given the rivalries. Even today, the need to be the first to discover something new is jealously guarded and fought over, for both status and monetary reward. Lindbergh wanted to win the Orteig prize, and he parlayed the social reward into a run for US president (for which we are lucky that his abducted child derailed his likely win and the consequences that would have resulted). Was Earhart really not interested in the social rewards for succeeding in her around-the-world flight?
Human motivations are complicated. Heroes rarely meet one’s high expectations on contact. Buzz Aldrin was certainly complicated, more so than Neil Armstrong. He pushed to be the first to step on the moon, to get the glory of being first, and to be the one most remembered in the history books. But because Armstrong was the first, his name is the one that is most used when the subject is the first moon landing. Elon Musk’s ego is clearly driving his desire to be the first on Mars, whatever other “more noble” reasons he wants to dress up his actions.
Lippman’s words are uplifting, but I don’t believe they are true, any more than church sermons, corporate mission statements, or the histories written by the winners.
Let’s be careful making assumptions about what Lindbergh might have done had he become president. He received an award from Germany and that made many assume he was pro Nazi. He was for America not entering the war up to Pearl Harbor after which he changed his views and tried to reenlist in the Army which the president blocked. Lindbergh then went to the combat zone and flew 50 combat missions as a civilian risking his life for his country though unrecognized by the government. After the war he bacame an environmentalist and humanitarian respecting all cultures and peoples. He also innovated and invented including cruise control for aircraft and an early version of an artificial heart.
John Bruning’s 2020 book Race of Aces gives a fascinating account of the air war in New Guinea, and along the way describes Lindbergh’s flying and the units he flew with. Evidently his study of the P-38’s engines allowed pilots in that area to adopt techniques that provided much greater range for the aircraft.
Lindbergh was an American First supporter. He did not want the USA to enter the war, nor support the combatants in Europe. This would likely have resulted in Britain being successfully invaded by Germany. It was FDR’s help for Churchill before Pearl Harbor that saved the UK.
Lindbergh publicly stated that he would prefer the US to ally with Germany, because of his white supremacist and eugenics views. His Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism would have further tilted that balance.
We don’t know what President Lindbergh would have done had Japan still bombed Pearl. Would he have just fought Japan, or would he have used troops in Europe? His work in WWII was undertaken in the Pacific theater, so again, we don’t know how he felt about fighting Germany.
As Lindbergh was very much supportive of Germany and against Russia, would it really have been unexpected if he had allowed Germany to conquer Western Europe and then fight Russia on a single front, and therefore quite possibly conquer Russia?
Had Japan not invaded Pearl, it seems pretty clear how WWII would have ended in Europe.
As I said, people are complicated. Lindbergh was not the man portrayed by Jimmy Stewart in The Spirit of St. Louis.
You’re spot on Alex. I just watched The U.S. and the Holocaust, the Ken Burns documentary and they say much the same thing as you about Lindbergh. He was clearly a racist and antisemitic. He wanted to “defend the white race” only and he wanted the U.S. to remain out of the war against the Nazi regime. He greatly admired Hitler and the Nazis although he was apparently taken aback by some of the more extreme treatment of the Jewish people by the Nazis. In fact Roosevelt was convinced he was a Nazi. No Jimmy Stewart there.
Another good source on Lindbergh and his times is Susan Dunn’s book 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election amid the Storm, which I read a couple of months ago. Dunn does a fine job of weaving all the threads together in an extremely interesting presidential race.
Lindbergh later stated that his real hope during the war was that Hitler and Stalin destroyed each others systems preserving Western Democracies.
I don’t think Lindbergh has nearly as much to answer for as president Roosevelt whose quiet policies of white supremacy and soft eugenics actually allowed many Jews to die for lack of support.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/m-project-franklin-delano-roosevelt-jews
Eisenhower restored Lindbergh’s commission in 1954 and he went on to advocate for minority cultures and environmentalism.
In the end, I can’t help still admiring Lindbergh and forgiving his statements which were very much a part the times he lived in nearly a century ago now. We should not judge Lindbergh solely on his views before WW2 but over his whole life.
I recommend this 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-history-behind-plot-against-america-180974365/
If you thought that everyone in the USA was against the Axis powers, think again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
There is also the 2020 miniseries The Plot Against America based on the book by Roth.
The last episode was quite scary.
Yes, human motivations are complicated, but you seem to imply that everone does these things purely for some outside reward, in other words, there’s no intrinsic motivation, only extrinsic. But that’s just not true. Sure, the test pilots’ stunts may have been motivated by them wanting more fame and status, but they’d hardly go into this line of work just for that.
And sure, Scott raced Amundsen to the south pole in large part for the prestige he would get, but to even enertain the idea he got to have had at least some interest in polar exploration. If it was just for the rewards, there are plenty of much easier and safer ways to go about it.
As for Michelangelo, if you really think he painted the Sistine chapel just for money and fame, you understand artists about as much (or rather as little) as the AI “art” people on twitter. First and foremost, it’s about being able to express yourself, to create. The fame and money are just convenient things that enable you to do more of it.
So yes, as you said. Human motivations are complicated. Diferent people are motivated by different things, and yes, some are in it just for material or social rewards. But those people tend to be rather boring and most explorers and great artists are driven by a combination of both. And some even are driven by the intrinsic motivations – curiosity, restlesness, the urge to create – first and foremost.
When I said complicated, I thought it was clear that individuals have complex motivations. Not binary, but mixed. For example: Nobility AND social standing AND remuneration. Individuals have complex motivations, not populations of single motivation individuals with different motivations.
haven’t you have experienced this personally? For example – you may love a subject at university, you study hard, but you also get graded, and a top grade brings satisfaction, as well as recognition by others, which buys you social standing and other rewards due to that status, which…
You don’t think all those other benefits are not motivators to reinforce your study?
Though a longtime lover of space exploration I’ve seldom bought into much of the motivations put forward to justify it. THIS is the real justification as far as I’m concerned.
Grazie, Paul, per questo bellissimo, e commovente articolo.
Un saluto, a tutti I lettori, di questo bellissimo sito.
Raffaele Antonio Tavani
Via Google Translate:
Thank you, Paul, for this beautiful and moving article.
Greetings to all readers of this beautiful site.
Raffaele Antonio Tavani
I enjoy thinking about cosmic scale space travel and exploration.
One of my favorite themes to muse on is the notion of traveling into a hyperspace, perhaps one of 4 to 6 spatial dimensions for which we could travel in long duration epoch voyages to island universes. Still science fiction at this point but none-the-less fun to contemplate.
Light-sails are another fun topic. The reality of The Planetary Society’s ongoing success with Light-Sail 2 is just one of multiple efforts to make solar sails a useful technology.
Truly, exploration is a hall-mark of our society’s endeavors.
@James M Essig,
Do you know where the concept “…the notion of traveling into a hyperspace,… ” that is the idea of ‘hyperspace’ may have arisen ?
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine Saint-Exupery.
And… “Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851).
http://www.powermobydick.com/
Amelia Earhart’s courageous exploration into the unknown applies to the zeitgeist of today of the person who is the pioneer and explorer and who is daring and adventuresome. The idea that something has not been done before inspires us to break previous boundaries which has an effect on technology. Sending a Man to the Moon forced us to develop space worthy technology like hydrogen fuel cells. We used integrated circuit silicon chips for the first time in Saturn V. Von Bruan 1968. We have to be patient with the launch of Artemis 1 which will begin a new era of deep space exploration.
In any large and disparate population there will be outliers, those who vary quite noticeably from the norm and invite alternate categorization. As good or evil.
The anaerobe that ingested an aerobe and retained it without digesting it, acquired a mitochondrion. The first lungfish to clamber ashore were the unwitting ancestors of us Tetrapoda.
The recognition that the sparks from the collision of objects could ignite kindling enabled the control of fire, a behavioral characteristic that separated our hominin ancestors from the rest of life, and led them through the cooking of food and thereby the shrinkage of teeth to alterations of the vocal tract that permitted modulation of voice into speech, another important behavioral characteristic, the complexity of which separates our lineage from the rest of life.
Indeed, the radiation of the tree of life into so many branches and twigs marks the many outliers that started each branch.
Even the spread of humanity throughout the planet has its effects on our species with accelerated alteration of the genome. Race is not an adequate word to describe the adaptations. Long limbs and thin bodies that enable chasing prey animals till the prey collapses from exhaustion, are found only in certain parts of Africa and in endurance runners from that area dominating competitions everywhere. Loss of melanin in skin permitting sunshine more aslant (and therefore less intense) to penetrate the skin in the synthesis of vitamin D in northern climes has its exception amongst the Inuit who get their vitamin D from seafood. They also have short stocky builds with short stocky limbs that help keep them warm.
Homo sapiens will transition into something different; whether just one descendant species or many might not be known in our lifetimes.
Thanks Paul
It reminds my somewhat of the scene in 1492: Conquest of Paradise where Christopher Columbus is trying to convince the Queen to let him sail and the accountant Says its worth the risk.
While on the topic of exploration this was an interesting read I found today too.
Humanity has always been intrigued by its origins
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2022/press-release
Cheers Edwin
I was researching what books Earhart may have authored herself, as opposed to being written about her, when I discovered that she wrote poetry…
https://lithub.com/on-the-lost-lyric-poetry-of-amelia-earhart/
As for why we should expand into space, it is obvious to anyone who truly grasps and appreciates the ancient vastness we live in, but our permanent expansion into space will only happen once those with the clout and purse strings can make a profit “up there.” Science always has taken a back seat to the main reasons for going into the Final Frontier, even though ironically it is used as a front piece when given reasons to go out there.
I have said here in the past and will again that the first mission to another star system will likely happen due to a superwealthy person gathering together their acolytes, hollowing out a suitable planetoid, attaching a rocket engine, and sailing off into the void.
There is also this, cosmism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg-xXt3Tl68
And this…
https://centauri-dreams.org/2012/07/09/revealing-the-new-universe-and-a-shared-cosmology/
https://centauri-dreams.org/2011/07/01/cosmos-culture-a-review/
Monetary profit may well be one motivator, it certainly has for a very long time been pursued by those in cultures where wealth pushes one up the social hierarchy tree.
The fictional Star Trek universe pretends that wealth acquisition is no longer important in a post-scarcity universe. Social standing is created by other means, and apparently, social standing is less important than personal feelings of achievement. [I don’t believe the last, given our millions of years of social primate evolution, but who knows.]
A cult leader taking his acolytes to the stars, to lead a new life seems realistic, as this motivation has driven a number of [mostly failed] experiments. But we will keep trying.
Given the likely time frame for the technology to allow us to reach the stars, which may be possibly never, I would expect human unnatural selection by gene engineering to create various types of post-humans, some of which will be far better suited to such voyages. Those post-humans may range from pure biologicals to pure machines, with every degree of cyborg in between. Without some new physics or energy source allowing very fast travel, even FTL, the best way to go is via lower energy requiring slow ship with an attendant long voyage time. This suggests that unless one can tolerate a fairly authoritarian generation ship, the best voyagers are those who can hibernate easily, maybe even cryosleep. Given today’s technology, that would be machines, although I could well believe those machines could have biological components based on synthetic biology. The cult leader could even be a super AI – possibly the ship itself as depicted in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.
Alex Tolley wrote:
“A cult leader taking his acolytes to the stars, to lead a new life seems realistic, as this motivation has driven a number of [mostly failed] experiments. But we will keep trying.”
Oh it has happened. See here how “drug guru” Timothy Leary tried to get Carl Sagan and Frank Drake to help him build a starship to get he and his acolytes out of the Sol system…
https://boingboing.net/2014/03/10/carl-sagan-and-timothy-leary.html
https://www.patrickmccray.com/leaping-robot/2013/06/27/timothy-leary-smi%C2%B2les-at-carl-sagan
Very interesting related paper here:
http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2017/s_gilleran_033017.pdf
The rich guy behind Biosphere 2 built it to learn how to live on Mars permanently with his chosen ones, so there is another example.
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/7/21248439/spaceship-earth-review-interview-biosphere
A number of the early Russian space movies were very much influenced by Cosmism.
Like this one from 1957 titled The Road to the Stars:
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/before_2001_pavel_klushantsev_classic_road_stars
Gotta love this quote from the above piece:
However, Klushantsev faced considerable difficulties in making such an effects-heavy film, at one point being asked by one Communist Party bureaucrat why he didn’t make a film about factory manufacturing or beetroot production, but as Klushantsev explained:
“The Road to the Stars proved to me I did the right thing thing, one must envisage the future. People should be able to see life can be changed radically.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_the_Stars
You may watch the entire film here, with English subtitles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CX0oSjwLqI
Money, fame, ego. Yeah, that may be part of it for some. But I doubt that these explorers would achieve much were not for their dreams. And that is what some of us here resonate with and celebrate. This is, after all, Centauri Dreams, right ?
So we celebrate those who embrace the transcendent. We celebrate their heroics.
All heroes are tragic. Life is tragic. This is not exactly news. The Greeks wrote about tragic heroes over 2500 years ago. They understood human nature as it was then and as it continues to be today.
I’m a pilot or maybe better “an aviator”. I’m often asked why do you like to go flying? My serious answer is: “Because I can literally soar with the eagles, and feel like a god, at least for an hour or two.” Of course there are other reasons, nicely summarized by our tragic hero Lindbergh:
“ Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.“
Doesn’t sound like a guy just in it for the prize money.
Ad astra, everyone !
Greg, your comment about when people ask you why do you like to fly (are they serious?), inspired me to look up quotes from a relevant activity, mountain climbing:
https://routinelynomadic.com/quotes-about-climbing-mountains/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20best%20view%20comes%20after,the%20mystery%20why%20we%20climb.%E2%80%9D&text=%E2%80%9CYou%20have%20to%20climb%20the,fresh%20peak%20ascended%20teaches%20something.%E2%80%9D
Note these quotes from the above link:
“There are two kinds of climbers: those who climb because their heart sings when they’re in the mountains, and all the rest.”
– Alex Lowe
“Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.”
– Edmund Hillary
And these:
https://thenextsummit.org/mountain-climbing-quotes/
“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.”
– Rene Daumal
This text is striking as an effort to define sentience. It has become popular recently for people to say that humans are just another animal species following goals set by evolution. Yet grey squirrels, however thoroughly they might trounce us in a game of Concentration, have neither airplanes nor Inquisitions, and I am skeptical they write much poetry. Humans defy the limits of instinct, practicality, and survival. I suspect sentience defies far more than that, and represents a breakdown of causality itself.
Ooh, an excuse to trot out one my favorite quotes on what constitutes true intelligence!
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
? Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
https://jaydixit.com/files/PDFs/TheultimateHitchhikersGuide.pdf
Consciousness directed to an object is awareness of the object. Just as the eyes cannot see themselves, but one is aware of their presence in every seen thing, so too awareness is manifest in every instance of awareness “of” but cannot be directed at itself. The seeker does not remain a seeker if it becomes the sought: one cannot seek the seeker.
The Heart of Awareness
You had me right up until this sentence. Can you elaborate on what you mean?
My particular crank notion is that an animal neural network could have evolved the ability to detect some trace of its future signalling state, i.e. precognition. If we suppose that is possible, the resulting paradox means there is more than one possible mathematical solution for how events unfold. For example, you knew you’d see an accident, so you got out of the car and went for the walk that scared the deer that you then saw a car run into — or you didn’t. Such paradoxes would be better confined to a small temporal scale, less likely to hurt oneself or others, by a natural repression mechanism, but could still represent the basis of free will: the choice of reality of one universe above another, at the exact place where they are directly perceived. Culture of human brain organoids at increasing stages of development, and their practical use for economic predictions, might put this idea to an acid and catastrophic test.
Another strong motivator that gets lots of people moving:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-holy-cosmos-the-new-religion-of-space-exploration/255136/
Another good reason for humanity to expand into space: Preserving ourselves and our culture…
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11155
[Submitted on 22 Sep 2022]
A Lunar Backup Record of Humanity
Carson Ezell, Alexandre Lazarian, Abraham Loeb
The risk of a catastrophic or existential disaster for our civilization is increasing this century. A significant motivation for near-term space settlement is the opportunity to safeguard civilization in the event of a planetary-scale disaster.
While a catastrophic event could destroy significant cultural, scientific, and technological progress on earth, early space settlements can maintain a backup data storage system of human activity, including the events leading to the disaster.
The system would improve the ability of early space settlers to recover our civilization after collapse.
We show that advances in laser communications and data storage enable the development of a data storage system on the lunar surface with a sufficient uplink data rate and storage capacity to preserve valuable information about the achievements of our civilization and the chronology of the disaster.
Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures; submitted for publication
Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2209.11155 [physics.soc-ph]
(or arXiv:2209.11155v1 [physics.soc-ph] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.11155
Submission history
From: Carson Ezell [view email]
[v1] Thu, 22 Sep 2022 17:03:35 UTC (84 KB)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.11155.pdf
See also…
https://centauri-dreams.org/2013/01/18/the-last-pictures-contemporary-pessimism-and-hope-for-the-future/
“What is it by knowing which, everything becomes known?”
The seeking originates from the seeker – the lodestar. As long as seeking is directed to the sought, the lodestar is overlooked and the bearings are arbitrary.
We’re talking about two different things here.
One is the motivation for the individual who is enthusiastic about space exploration, what I like to call a ‘space groupie’; and I do not use the term pejoratively– I consider myself one.
The other is what motivates nations, societies or civilizations to engage in expensive and dangerous programs of exploration and conquest–like space travel. This collective activity may have some connection with individual psychology, but the overlap is probably not as profound or significant as we might like to think.
Space groupies are just fascinated with the idea, most, like myself, have probably been obsessed with it since childhood. Its a harmless perversion, it is great fun and nobody gets hurt. But I get very uncomfortable about all this sanctimonious philosophizing about human urges to explore, to expand the species, to (what’s the phrase?) “go where no man has gone before”. Perhaps our colonies will survive us after Earth is lost due to catastrophe, but that will only happen long after our diaspora is well underway, and only after our distant colonies are independent and self-sufficient. It sounds like our fantasies are just a lame attempt to justify why we spend so much time thinking about spaceships and alien civilizations. Personally, I don’t feel one bit guilty about it.
And why do nations and civilizations do it? Here, we have historical examples.
The Greek city-states started colonies all over the Mediterranean and the Black Sea because of simple overpopulation, there was just no room to grow in their crowded little towns, and farmland was scarce.
The Romans used conquest to gather real estate, slaves, and political prestige back home. It became a habit.
The Polynesian seafarers sailed for similar reasons, their islands were crowded and ruled by family groups unwilling to share power. And there were uninhabited islands ‘out there’ ready for settlement.
The Vikings were traders and pirates and slavers.
The Iberian expansion into the Indian Ocean and South America was strictly commercial. There was money to be made there, in slaves, gold spices, and dope (sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco). There was a lot of pious humbug about spreading the Gospel and converting the natives, but we all know what really went on. The main driver was just an attempt to get around the Arab monopoly on trade with the East. And who were the foot soldiers in this glorious crusade? Unemployed mercenaries (the Muslims had been kicked out of Spain) and impoverished noblemen and their second and third sons. The crusades hadn’t worked out, and it was rumored there was Inca gold and Aztec silver.
In North America it was a little different, here the noble explorers were religious fanatics, political dissidents, commoners forbidden to own land by European aristocrats, sundry misfits and malcontents and merchants seduced by the promise of free Indian land to be stolen and African slaves to work it. And then there were all those indentured servants working for their tickets to do the heavy lifting.
Let’s not romanticize the conquest of the Americas, or the colonization of Africa, or the imperialism of the Indies with glorious tales of noble human urges to see the unknown. It was an ugly, deadly, dreary business carried out by desperate people that lasted centuries and we are still paying the price for it.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of good reasons to explore and colonize space. It will be great fun and no one will get hurt, at least they will all be volunteers. Our scientific knowledge will expand immeasurably. It will require and develop marvelous technology, it will give humanity cultural diversity as our colonies evolve independently, separated by vast distances. And the philosophical growth that will result by contacting other civilizations (or perhaps never finding another one) will be profound.
But please spare me the starry-eyed navel-gazing, and the Sunday-supplement, supermarket checkout line tabloid pop anthropology. We don’t need any of that.to explain why we want to go, and it won’t help us a bit if we find out we can’t.
I agree with everything you said here. As an ex-Brit, the more I read about what Britain did to control the colonies and the aftermath, the more ashamed of my country’s history I become. It is all so different from the history books I had in school in the 1960s that made Britain out to be a successful, colonial power, improving the lot of the “natives”. This was largely a lie. Repressive measures were hidden and documentation was destroyed to hide the truth from the public. Our great war leader Churchill was complicit in some of this, and like many of his contemporaries of this period, racist. Britain banned slavery quite early, but institutions and businesses supported it for much longer, and many individuals profited from slavery through the ownership of shares. This is not unlike our individual support to stop fossil fuel use, but own pension funds and even school out children at institutions that still invest in fossil fuel energy companies.
I count myself as a Space Cadet/Groupie, although I find myself increasingly supportive of our robotic probes to explore space. I would certainly like to see people working and even industrializing the Moon, and Mars, but as we go farther out, it seems to me that [intelligent] machines are the best way to proceed. I am no longer even sure whether humans should settle on any living exoplanet, the stuff of so many SciFi stories. Artificial habitats might still be the most logical method to expand, even into the galaxy. Alastair Reynolds’ “glitter band” of habitats seems like a more desirable future should passenger interstellar flight prove possible. Horrors will still be perpetrated, but at least it will be on humans and not other species.
Thanks for an inspirational article on aspiring to discovery and the quest for knowledge on the back of elevated risk, endurance, and — let’s just be frank here -> glory, with a dab of Immortality.
When I consider these in the context of manned space missions, I see an approach to expeditions that have reduced flight redundancy, minimal comfort and intense psychological stress, high likelihood of irradiation and physical impairment, and very often minimal chance of rescue, re-directed return, or even recovery. What could facilitate such daring by the crew and of such minimized design by the mission Agency – not otherwise accepted by regulatory agencies, funded or able to avoid lambasting as ‘personal and general space flight program suicide’ at the journals, gatherings, and blogs of space-enthusiasts?
– the Crocco grand tour, a crewed spacecraft would get a flyby of Mars and Venus in under a year in space
– a Mars flyby excursion lander spacecraft as proposed by Titus, involving a short-stay lander-ascent vehicle that would separate and then rejoin its main transfer vehicle
– trying a Hohmann transfer orbit, roughly 9-month travel time to Mars, 500 days to wait for the transfer window, and a travel time of about 9 months to return, a 34-month trip
There is actually a book “Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000” containing dozens of proposed missions of crews from 3 to 70 of various craft… and who could forget space activist Bruce Mackenzie’s proposed one-way trip to Mars in 1998 or more recently, Dennis Tito’s: the Inspiration Mars Foundation with plans of a crewed mission to fly by Mars in 2018.
Cheers and here’s to Elon Musk’s “…I intend to die on Mars, just not on impact..”