Starship Capitalism

My father-in-law still has a ticket, given him some thirty years ago I think, to the moon. While the technology did not exist for private space travel when the ticket was sold, nonetheless it guarantees that whenever such technology becomes available the holder of the ticket will get a ride.

Well, Dad, it's almost time to claim your seat. Private space flight is real, and the galaxy's first spaceline, Virgin Galactic, is building ships and selling tickets. The company's founder is deadly serious.

Why does anyone want to go to outer space? I can think of three reasons.

First, everyone loves a good adventure. We all like to read about voyages to the end of the world, to the center of the earth, past the cave of the Cyclops, through the valley of Shangri La. Now a company with offices and brochures offers a guaranteed romantic trip for a preset price, and anyway if anything goes wrong you can sue them, so there we have it: adventure for the average man!

Second, it resonates with the evolutionary mythology of our day. At least since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, popular imagination has connected space travel with evolving on, becoming the superman, achieving wisdom. While science and popular science are equally steadfast in denying that nature acts for an end--that plants grow leaves for the purpose of imbibing the sun, that spiders spin webs for the purpose of catching flies--popular science at least has endowed the cosmos as a whole with a purposeful striving towards its destiny. The same purpose impossible in the parts is the point of the whole: the whole universe has been groaning in travail until now, awaiting the revealing of the Ubermensch--and beyond. While the scientific proponents of an evolutionary world view may honestly intend to exclude all purpose, by making it a world view they make it a popular mythology, and by making it a mythology they cast it in the role of giving purpose and direction to life. Space travel offers hope to modern man.

Third, generalizing a little from that last point, we all want to find the ultimate realities of life. Since modern man is trained to think of all things, including himself, as a machine, he finds no depth in the world immediately around him. No use probing further in, so all he can do is probe further out: he travels around the world, explores the forests, climbs the mountains; when that is old he goes around the world faster, makes satellite maps of the forests, computer generates the mountains; when that is old, he either retreats into the imaginary world of television or probes further out to the real domain of outer space. Not coincidentally, his imaginary world of television feeds him a regular diet of imaginary space travel.

But to be honest, I don't think the average man today would go to space if television signals didn't reach that far. To hope for space travel in the future may give hope to life, but actually to have been there might be a desolating experience. The earth seen through the pressurized windows would look like the photographs we have already seen; weightlessness would be neat for a while, but would hardly feel like evolving to the next level; in general, space is an environment reduced rather than enlarged, unfit for man not because it is beyond him but because it is beneath him, unable to support life because of its poverty rather than because of its greatness.

When the first manned space flight broke through the atmosphere in 1961, the Russian communist astronaut looked around briefly and radioed triumphantly to the home base that he had not seen God. Atheism demonstrated--and a telling symbol of what awaits the average man in outer space.

The most thrilling adventures are in the rich world around us. When we have traveled the world, mapped the world, computer generated the world, made a video game of the world, there remains yet the return to real natures. Grant that a cat is a cat, not a machine, and untold vistas of discovery await us.

"Further up and further in!"