The Fright of Infinite Spaces

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

—Pascal, Pensées, 206

It's well known that the Milky Way in the Star Trek universe is surrounded by a barrier, as shown in the original series episodes "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name". But I recently learned that there is also a barrier around the far-away Star Wars galaxy too. But why? Why a galactic barrier?

Is this simply a storytelling trope, the modern version of Aristotle's prescription that drama have unity of place? Perhaps that's part of it, but it still seems somewhat gratuitous. Why is it hard to believe that the true barrier between galaxies is not a hard limit, but simply vast distance?

I suspect the real answer lies deep in the heart of man.

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The significance of vast distances struck me at last year's Thomistic Institute Science and Christianity conference (March 4–5, 2022 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History). Some of the talks juxtaposed our modern scientific picture of the universe with passages from Scripture on creation, not just the act of creation, but also the relationship of creation to its Creator.

In particular, the beginning of Fr. Thomas Davenport's talk alluded to the way God's activity is much more immediate in the picture presented by Scripture, in contrast to the picture presented by science, in which God's activity is mediated by long chains of secondary causes (13.8 billion years, etc). This tremendous distance seems to present something of a difficulty for belief: God's Providence seems distant.

In such a universe, a gnosticism of a sort might seem reasonable. Recall that in the ancient Gnostic religions, the Creator of the universe is not the true Divinity, who lies behind the universe. Man, conceived as originally and purely spirit, is thrown or imprisoned in the material world, not a natural part of it. Nature/creation is sundered from the true God, and man must reject nature to align himself with the real God and true goodness. In the 20th century, Hans Jonas discovered the hidden parallel between ancient Gnosticism and modern Existentialism/Nihilism, which might be called neo-gnosticism. The so-called scientific picture has no place for man, such human concepts as teleology (purposes) supposedly playing no part in nature. As in Gnostic religion, humans are sundered from nature.

Akin to this gnostic alienation from the universe is the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, whose effect comes from the terror of the incomprehensible. But Lovecraft's universe is rather too malevolent (along with its denizens) to represent the apparent indifference lying in the vastness of the scientific universe. Perhaps that indifference was too horrible for even Lovecraft, though it might also be that the horror of the infinite empty quantity is simply so inarticulable that the closest neighbor is the quality of evil.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu")

At the very least, science by itself leaves us in a state of ambiguity: does nature bespeak God or not, and where do I belong in all this ambuguous vastness?¹ Pascal's Pensées elaborate:

205 When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis [Wisdom 5:15, Latin vulgate: remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day].

229 This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

Pascal stood on the cusp of modernity and the modern rethinking of the universe. It might be healthy to look back to the ancient world and take a lesson from the psalmist in reflecting on our smallness and the world's vastness:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet...

(Psalm 8:3–6)

The reality is that in complaining about the size of creation, we're complaining about the size of the dominion given to us humans. The deeper problem is that we don't appreciate the goodness of the universe. There is an infinite distance between nothing and any finite reality. Maybe it's because the need to survive has wired us to always be so occupied with the next problem that we rarely take time to contemplate the tremendous good we have, that we've been given. It's a crisis of gratitude: we don't appreciate what we've been given, so we have little sense of God's continued presence and providence.²

Science as practiced today doesn't help matters. One big limitation of science is that it projects human knowing onto an unimaginably vast world. We only know the "scientific universe" in terms of experiments in the lab. This approach originated with Galileo's insight, which Newton completed: the unification of the sublunar and translunar realms. We describe the motions of stars and planets in terms of the motions of mechanical bodies on Earth, especially those we study under the controlled conditions of the lab.

We project our own emptiness and chaos on the vast world and then recoil on beholding our reflection.

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Notes

1. Collective Soul's 1993 song "Shine" asks this question, "Where do I belong and where do I find love?", poignantly.

2. A great book on this subject of God's providence and presence that I rejoice in having found though only recently is Providence by Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

Absolute Time and Space

Currently we are being treated to a remake of Carl Sagan's classic series Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. (Interesting that with it's agnostic/atheist slant, it's on the Fox Network.) The latest installment explains Einstein's relativity. It's a good explanation insofar as it goes, but then we're informed that time and space are completely relative.

That's the usual scientific line, and there's something to it, but from a broader, fully human perspective, it's garbage.

Just from the point of view of established science, it's wrong. In fact Dr. Tyson's own narrative takes for granted that time is not relative: if time were completely relative, it would make no sense to quote an age of the universe. Or distances for that matter. Or even a speed for our galaxy or local group of galaxies.

The age of the universe is measured from the instant of the "Bang" (a misnomer since it wasn't an explosion in the conventional sense of a pressure wave expanding into anything). The absolute standard of rest is the frame in which the cosmic microwave background radiation is isotropic (not red- or blue-shifted in any direction). The proper velocity of our galaxy is relative to this frame of rest. These absolute measures are relative to the beginning of the universe, the creation.

Certainly in isolation the locomotion of matter has no absolute frame of reference, because there is nothing outside it. In concentrating on matter in isolation, physics as a methodological assumption neglects the absolute boundary or beginning: the horizon is the experimenter or observer.

The fundamental shortcoming of science that we always forget is that it flattens the universe beneath human power and takes matter out of its context, which is form—form imposed not only by human agency, but also given by nature and nature's God.

Getting U.S. Space Exploration Back on Track

President Obama has recently announced a new budget for NASA with radically shifted priorities. The space agency would get out of the business of manned space exploration (leaving this task to the private sector) and focus on developing new space technologies. You won't often find me praising Obama, but I have to give him credit on this.

As I've written before, NASA is terribly inefficient at manned space. Government agencies are necessarily politicized; they tend to approach ambitious endeavors as opportunities to spread tax booty and their priorities have less to do with achieving the goal than satisfying constituencies, often for politically correct reasons, with fatal results.

Here's a short, interesting evaluation of the proposal—an interview with MIT's David Mindell, professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, as well as professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and director of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

The Past and Future of Space Exploration

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the first manned Moon landing and Moon walk.¹ To commemorate, Google has introduced Google Moon, which includes markers for the six manned moon landings (but what about the unmanned? robots are people too! haha). Here's a zoomed-in map of the Apollo-11 moon landing site. (Hat-tip to GoogleMapsMania, where there are a few more moon-related links.)

Apparently the Apollo 11 astronauts are on the stump today for the manned mission to Mars. I'm rather doubtful of the advisability of working toward such a mission now.

First of all, manned missions are "astronomically" more expensive than unmanned missions for the simple reason that we rightly value human life and want to return our astronauts to Earth alive. Equipment requires testing so that some spring doesn't fly off and puncture a spacesuit, for example. Even more, all the equipment to maintain an Earth-like environment is dreadfully heavy. Since increasing payload weight increases the amount of fuel required, which itself increases the weight and thus the amount of fuel needed, the total fuel required to lift a payload into orbit increases with the square of the weight. So life-support alone makes manned missions much, much more costly.

Secondly as any space scientist can tell you (privately), the vast bulk of space science comes from unmanned missions, e.g., the successes of Voyager, Mars Rover, and Galileo. Scientists remain silent in public because they want to keep their NASA funding. Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, unmanned missions are scientifically orders of magnitude far more productive than manned missions.

Of course there's far more than scientific discovery at stake with a Mars mission: there's also national pride, firing the imagination of science students, etc. But can we really afford to spend billions of dollars simply to feel better about ourselves at this point? Can't we motivate our students in a more cost effective way, say, by promoting parental involvement? Besides, unmanned missions are exciting too: just look at the interest created by the pictures from the Voyager missions, or the Mars Rover.

Granted: our government has just given away close to $100 billion to unwise banks and failing businesses. The federal budget is over $2 trillion. A couple billion dollars a year seems a measly amount by comparison. Mark Thornton has a great response:

I have to admit that with all the hundreds of billions of dollars the federal government is wasting, it is hard to muster the energy to argue against a few additional billion. I reiterate that the real cost is not just a dollar amount, but all the things that could be produced if the proposal is rejected. This is an enormous amount of scientific and technical ability that could otherwise be used in the private sector to produce important discoveries and help keep the US economy number one in the world. In contrast to conventional wisdom which sees government budgets as a benefactor to science, the economic view shows that every dollar government spends on science actually hurts the progress of science and scientific discovery because scientific resources are diverted away from where they are needed most into nonperforming bureaucracies. We must also consider the fact that estimated or projected budgets are almost universally inaccurate and vastly underestimate the true cost of programs. For example, the International Space Station was more than 500% over budget and is still incomplete after twenty years. The actual cost of the Shuttle moving resources into space was underestimated by a factor of twenty. Based on current estimates of the total cost of going to Mars ($170 billion) the true cost could easily mount to $1 trillion.

As history has shown, government bureaucracies are horribly inept at space exploration. (This is for the simple reason that it gets its funding from its citizens at gunpoint, as it were—bullies are horribly lazy.) Privatizing space exploration would be far more efficient way to achieve goals in space and to benefit society.

People arguing for publicly funded manned missions point to the legacy such missions will leave for future generations. But I think it is more likely that future generations would blame us for opting to pleasure ourselves (as our consumeristic society already does too much these days) with an inefficient effort that saddles them with more public debt.

I'm sure that someday we'll land astronauts on Mars. In the meantime public funding would be better spent on exploring with robots and maybe developing more efficient propulsion systems. But really it would be best to turn over space exploration to the free market.

Notes

1. There is an obvious joke here, but that poor man's memory has been held in public view far too long already.

Specialness

Recall that Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe, and Enlightenment mythology says that he destroyed man's special status in creation (of course the mythology forgets that man is unique for being able to contemplate having a special status). A recent AIP news item seems to undermine the so-called Copernican hypothesis that supposedly underlies so much of the modern scientific worldview:

But according to a new study by Northwestern University astronomers looking at 300 planets orbiting other stars, we might really be special. "We now know that these other planetary systems don't look like [our] solar system at all," said Frederic Rasio, an astronomer at Northwestern, in Chicago. Computer simulations used by Rasio's team showed that the birth of a planetary system is a very violent affair, with the gas disk that gives birth to the planets pushing them toward the central star, where they often crowd together to be engulfed. Gravitational encounters between growing planets fling some across the planetary system, or into deep space. "Such a turbulent history would seem to leave little room for the sedate solar system, and our simulations show exactly that," said Rasio in a news release from Northwestern University. Our solar system "had to be born under just the right conditions to become the quiet place we see," he said. "The vast majority of other planetary systems didn't have these special properties at birth and became something very different."

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Phil Schewe, "Maybe We Are Special, The Solar System Says," Physics News Update Number 869 #2, August 15, 2008.

Greatness in Smallness

A quotation appropriate for this final day of the Octave of Christmas¹:

But, we think, in an age when we know how infinitely different things are, how unimportant the earth is in the vast universe and consequently how unimportant that little speck of dust, man, is in comparison with the dimensions of the cosmos—in an age like this it seems an absurd idea that this supreme being should concern himself with man, his pitiful little world, his cares, his sins and his non-sins. But although we may think that in this way we are speaking truly appropriately about God, in reality we are in fact thinking of him in a very petty and only too human way, as if his retention of a general view involved making a choice. We thereby imagine him as a consciousness like ours, which has limits, must somewhere or other call a halt, and can never embrace the whole.

In contrast to such limited notions the aphorism with which Hölderlin prefaced his "Hyperion" will serve to recall the Christian image of the true greatness of God: "Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est" ("Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest—that is divine"). The boundless spirit who bears in himself the totality of Being reaches beyond the "greatest", so that to him it is small, and he reaches into the smallest, because to him nothing is too small. Precisely this overstepping of the greatest and teaching down into the smallest is the true nature of absolute spirit. At the same time we see here a reversal in value of maximum and minimum, greatest and smallest, that is typical of the Christian understanding of reality. To him who as spirit bears up and encompasses the universe, a spirit, a man's heart with it ability to love, is greater than all the milky ways of the universe. Quantitative criteria become irrelevant; other scales become visible, reckoned by which the infinitely small is the truly embracing and truly great.

The Immortal became mortal, the Almighty became powerless, the Boundless bounded himself.

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Notes

1. Of course the twelve days of Christmas don't end until the 6th.

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Joseph Ratzinger, trans. J.R. Foster, Introduction to Christianity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 101-2.

The Religion of Star Trek

As I did last year, I am commemorating today the anniversary of one of the most awesome human achievements, the first manned lunar landing. In that post, we saw the exploration of space is too often used as an anodyne for the infinite longings in the human heart. As far as cultural influence is concerned, Star Trek rivals the actual space program in cultural influence. What ideas lie behind the Trek universe and propagate through its popularity?

Salvation from Above

First let's examine the fictional origins of the Trek universe. In Star Trek: First Contact, the "next generation" crew of Enterprise is thrown back in time to the mid-21st century to witness an historic moment in the Star Trek mythology. In the (supposedly) semi-barbaric aftermath of "World War III," Zefram Cochrane¹ invents the warp engine that will propel mankind to the stars. This first run coincides with a routine Vulcan mapping mission close enough to detect the "warp signature," thereby initiating humanity's first contact with extra-terrestrials.

As one fan site puts it

On that evening [sic] an alien ship from the planet Vulcan made first contact with humanity. This event over the course of the next fifty years saw an end to war, hunger, poverty and all the social ills that plagued society.

From this "first contact" mankind is able to found the United Federation of Planets. In some unexplained way, man's contact with supernal forces recreates his nature so that he no longer suffers the many moral limitations that presently plague us. (Exactly what primal hunger in man this visitation satisfies we are left to puzzle for ourselves; we return to this question shortly.) The Federation is a socialist utopia. As Jay Johansen puts it,

There is no money, for everyone simply works out of a desire to contribute to society and help his fellow man, and takes back only what he needs. Private enterprise is the enemy, at best an amusing throwback to less enlightened times, at worst a dangerous villain to be fought and defeated. There is no need for a multitude of competing organizations within society. Instead the people voluntarily cede all authority to a single organization controlling all aspects of life, for this promotes co-operation and efficiency.

The Anti-Religion

Again, Jay Johansen notes:

In the first episode [sic?] of Next Generation, "Q" puts humanity on trial. One of his accusations is that humans kill each other in "disputes over your tribal gods". Note Picard's reply. He doesn't say that some people have used religion for their own personal ends, or that religious freedom is something worth fighting for. No, he replies that humanity has "outgrown" that - in other words, he apologizes for the existence of religion in human history.

This approach reeks of John Lennon's unimaginative manifesto Imagine, about which I've written before. The underlying belief is that all our unhappiness and strife originates in the "superstitious prohibitions" of religion.² Essentially, Lennon idolizes his own desires.

The Creator's Beliefs

Now we turn to the actual origin of the Trek universe. Its anti-religious philosophy originates in the personal beliefs of the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry. An extensive 1991 interview with Roddenberry in The Humanist reveals much about the personal credo out of which Star Trek sprang. The article notes Roddenberry's reception of the Humanist Arts Award from the American Humanist Association on May 10, 1991, and opens with some background on its subject:

Gene Roddenberry is one of the most influential yet unheralded humanists of the twentieth century. His two most famous creations, Star Trek and its successor Star Trek: The Next Generation, are solidly based upon humanistic principles and ideas. His creations have moved, inspired and sparked the imaginations of millions of people around the world. The basic massage of both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation is that human beings are capable of solving their own problems rationally and that, through critical thinking and cooperative effort, humanity will progress and evolve.³

Roddenberry clearly understands the profound cultural effect of his beliefs:

...Star Trek is my statement to the world. Understand that Star Trek is more than just my political philosophy. It is my social philosophy, my racial philosophy, my overview on life and the human condition. I have been able to comment on so many different facets of humanity because both Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation have been so wide-ranging in the subjects they’ve covered.

The interview voices many typical humanist anti-religious prejudices as well as the cow-eyed utopianism so characteristic of the mid-20th century, but one statement of Roddenberry's in particular is worth discussion:

Censorship traveled a wide path. There was censorship about areas of skin that were left open. If a girl was in a light blouse and her nipples raised and showed through the blouse, you had to have band-aids over the nipples. You could not have visible nipples. How much skin was permitted to show used to be almost a matter of geometry and measurement. I remember doing shows that showed the inside of a woman’s leg. Those shows were turned down because, for some reason, the inside of the leg was considered vulgar.

Let's overlook the verbal imprecision: it is not so much the body-part that is considered vulgar, as showing the body-part. What is interesting here is how he sees something as potent in meaning as a woman's body to lack any special significance. To him the sacredness of sexuality—a proxy for the sacredness of the human person in whom sexuality resides and from whom every person issues—is just another thing in the world among so many equivalent things. (It is also interesting that he says "girl" instead of "woman"—like the show, he was an interesting mixture of the "progressive" and the "unenlightened" throw-back.)

All Being Equal

"All other things being equal" (Latin: ceteris paribus) is a common assumption of modern reductionist science. Understood as a methodology valid in a limited domain, there is nothing wrong with the assumption. The problem comes in extending the assumption beyond its domain of validity.

Such an extension of "all things being equal" allows me to look at my desire for sex, for example, as just another desire like filling my belly or emptying my bowels. But if the world has a structure outside my desires, then perhaps I cannot treat the object of my sexual desire as just another thing in the world, worthy of no more consideration or respect than a shrub or a grub or a goat. To Roddenberry and company, the enemy of desire is traditional religion, which "creates" the moral law. In reality, the moral law resides in the natures of created things themselves (including human nature). Because man has an unfortunate natural tendency to contract into himself and arrogate mastery to himself, traditional religious belief is necessarily to protect the moral law by opening its adherents to an Authority beyond themselves, an Authority that is the ultimate Source of the natures of things.

Another striking point is the presumption that basic moral norms will persist after the overthrow of traditional morality. Somehow in the Trek future, man has enough repect for "the given" to refrain from tampering with Jean-Luc Picard's male pattern baldness, for example, and to cast gratuitous melding of man with machine (viz., Borg) as evil. No pregnant men, children gestated in vitro, etc. (Or perhaps Roddenberry was keeping his true beliefs under wraps for fear of losing his audience, a fear he voices in the mentioned interview.) We will return to this point in a moment.

Blindness as religion

Now that we have explored the "all things being equal" reflex, we can understand the need fulfilled by a human encounter with intelligent extraterrestrial life: to strip man of his privileged place in creation. In a previous post I quoted Walker Percy's observation that, as a symbol-mongering animal, man is radically different from the other animals that only use signs. In lower animals, sensory information is either useful or ignored; the information begins in the world and the line of causality terminates in the world. Humans, on the other hand, transact with each other using symbols, sounds that aren't useful in any immediate way, but allow them to formulate a complete picture of the world. The justification for this picture of the world is not utility, e.g., whether the sun or the earth is stationary has practical usefulness to very few people's lives. The line of causality from space-time events that communicate symbols flows into the human person, and where it terminates is not in space-time events, understood in the usual way. E.g., how does the knowledge that the Earth revolves around the Sun affect your life? Directly speaking it doesn't, but indirectly it changes everything.

Man is not formless matter to be shaped at will by a cadre of self-annointed conditioners. Human life has a definite structure that will not suffer tampering, and the most distinctive aspect of that structure is man's awareness of the world and of his place in it.

Of course, humanists like Roddenberry and Sagan are mistaken in believing that man's privileged place in creation requires uniqueness. It's almost as if they believe they can shorten the tallest kid in school by observing that other people out in the world are just as tall.⁴ The discovery of other symbol-mongers will not make man any less of a symbol-monger.

The adherent of such beliefs tries to treat himself as a mere thing in a universe of mere things. There is evident in Roddenberry's beliefs a residual respect for the givenness of the world, and the "dignity" of the individual, but this respect is merely a cultural residuum of Christianity and has no real basis in Roddenberry's underlying philosophy⁵. Generations raised on such philosophy lack a moral cultural formation to fall back on; they, along with Bertrand Russell, will be unable to say that their belief that cruel torture is wrong has any higher moral standing than a preference for oysters. Like the students in Hitchcock's Rope, Roddenberry's disciples will take him at his word, with disasterous consequences.⁶

The exception implicit to "all things being equal" is the person advocating this idea: he thinks everything should be equal, reduced to a mere thing, except for himself. Unfortunatly such egoistic priviledge doesn't transport well to other people, especially when those people are egoists. In the end, such ideology demotes everyone to the status of thing. But by encouraging moral blindness, it primarily dehumanizes its devotees.

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see....
Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them. (Ps 115:4-5,8; cf. Ps 135)

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A Reposte to the Federation

For a refreshingly anti-utopian vision of the future, see Serenity. It is an entertaining film about a motley crew of rebels that strives to undermine a very Trek-like galactic federation by publishing the truth of its abuses of its citizenry. (Expect an interesting premise, a well-paced plot and good effects, but don't expect high drama or profound character studies.)

In this context, it would be a crime to neglect the masterful Trek parody Galaxy Quest.

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Notes

1. Yeah, it wouldn't be sci-fi without a "Z" or "X" name somewhere.

2. Happiness here defined as momentary personal satisfaction, instead of the fulfillment of one's life as a whole.

3. The implication is that religious people are irrational and disbelieve in the efficacy of "critical thinking and cooperative effort" for worldly progress. It would be more accurate to say that religious people believe in the necessity of these things, but not their sufficiency. Only someone as credulous as a hard-core secularist could, ignoring the history of the 20th century, believe that these are all that are necessary.

4. The metaphor is imprefect, since, unlike height, which is a difference in degree, symbol-mongering is different in kind from sign-mongering.

5. See Percy quotation in Appendix.

6. The film was modelled after the real-life murder-conspiracy by Leopold and Loeb.

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Jay Johansen, "The World View of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5" (24 Jun 1998), accessed November 27, 2005.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

David Alexander, " Interview of Gene Roddenberry: Writer, Producer, Philosopher, Humanist," The Humanist (March/April 1991)

John Lennon, "Imagine," Imagine (1971).

Opentopia entry for Gene Roddenberry.

Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Noonday Press/Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1997).

Bertrand Russell, "Science and Ethics" Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1961).

Also interesting: Economics of Star Trek, Roddenberry Obituary

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Appendix

If asked to define the conventional wisom of the twnetieth century, that is to say, a kind of low common denominator of belief held more or less unconsciously by most denizens of the century, I would think it not unreasonable to state it in two propositions which represent its two major components, the one deriving from the profound impact of the scientific revolution, the other representing a kind of attenuated legacy of Christianity.

(1) Man can be understood as an organism in an environment, a sociological unit, an encultured creature, a psychological dynamism endowed genetically like other organisms with needs and drives, who through evolution has developed strategies for learning and surviving by means of certain adaptive transactions with the environment.

(2) Man is also understood to be somehow endowed with certain other unique properties which he does not share with other organisms—with certain inalienable rights, reason, freedom, and an intrinsic dignity—and as a consequence the highest value to which a democratic society can be committed is the respect of the sacredness and worth of the individual.

I make the assumption that most educated denizens of the Western world would subscribe in some sense or other to both propositions.

I make the second assumption that the conventional wisdom expressed by these two propositions, taken together, is radically incoherent and cannot be seriously professed without even more serious consequences.

(Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, 20)

Have We Learned Anything?

Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. Jay Barbree's unavoidably pretentious piece on MSNBC has some significant observations:

No one had ever seen a more “politically correct” crew. It was a public relations dream, made to order for worldwide acclaim. You simply could not ask for more: two white women, an African-American man, an Asian-American man and three white men.

Second only to the politically correct stature of the flight team was the selection of a social science teacher from one of the bastions of America itself: New Hampshire. Sharon Christa McAuliffe was smart, experienced, courageous, had a smile big enough to adorn any magazine cover and was a brilliant selection by NASA for the coveted role of the planet’s “first citizen in space.”

H/T: Slashdot Science

The first word in "politically correct" reflects NASA's priority: politics. Politics above an authentic exploration of space; politics above human safety. Fundamental problem: the shuttle is not oriented toward a goal, but toward spreading government largesse (as Robert Zurbin observed). Squandered resources are the implicit goal, and tragically, it seems that human life is not exempt.

But is there any way for NASA to avoid upside-down priorities? As Robert Garmong wrote last year, "this politicizing is an unavoidable consequence of governmental control over scientific research and development." Space should be privatized.

There is no justification for the shuttle program, either scientific or explorational. As I've said before, the space shuttle is a high-tech way to kill astronauts.

Ms. McAuliffe and her crewmates (not to mention the doomed Columbia crew) were victims offered up as a holocaust to big-government politicization of space.

Haven't we learned anything from this tragedy?

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Jay Barbree, "A chill at the Cape," (chapter 1 of 8).

Robert Zubrin, "Getting Space Exploration Right" The New Atlantis 8 (Spring 2005), 15-48.

Robert Garmong, "Privatize Space," The American Daily (July 21, 2005).

Previous Posts on Space

• Vindicated in Pessimism (Aug. 2, 2005)
• Scuttle the Shuttle (Aug. 1, 2005)
• Abyss Calls to Abyss (July 20, 2005)

Documents on Space Shuttle Disasters.

Vindicated in Pessimism

Yes, NASA finally admits that it has to do something about those thingies hanging off the underbelly of the Discovery:

NASA Sets Spacewalk to Repair Discovery's Heat Shield

“In the end it came down to be a really simple decision,” said Wayne Hale, NASA’s deputy shuttle program manager, during a briefing here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC). “We came to the conclusion that we don’t know enough to really feel good about this, so therefore the remedy is easy and we ought to go exercise the remedy.”

One has to wonder if the delay in this official word of this "simple decision" originates in NASA management's ignorance or obstinance. That is to say, is the cause management's famous lack of technical training or its simple unwillingness to admit the embarrassing truth?

CBS news article says

NASA says the gap filler is not related to the debris that flew off Discovery during liftoff. The problem may not be as serious as the heat shield hole that doomed Columbia shuttle, but for NASA, this is no time to take risks.

So we have multiple problems here. I hope the repair isn't simply "doing something" for CYA.

UPDATE: Duncan Maxwell Anderson writes that removing freon from the adhesive to protect the environment has created the "popcorn effect" of loose tiles: The Shuttle's Achilles Heel: Ideology. Additional interesting commentary:

It is impossible to integrate the contradictory. To whatever extent an engineer is forced to base his decisions, not on the realities of science but on the arbitrary, unpredictable, and often impossible demands of a politicized system, he is stymied. Yet this politicizing is an unavoidable consequence of governmental control over scientific research and development.

Scuttle the Shuttle

I've got a lot of personal things on my mind these days, but the latest on space shuttle Discovery (STS-114) galls me enough to take the time to comment.

NASA's official word:

Discovery remains in good shape. In a press conference Sunday afternoon, mission manager Wayne Hale said, “There are no new anomalies to speak of.”

Inspections of the reinforced carbon-carbon panels that protect the wing leading edges and nose cap appear to show no serious threat to a safe return to Earth. Engineers and mission managers continue to look at two gap fillers, extending from the Shuttle’s underside. The ceramic coated-fabric gap fillers are used to protect against hot gas from seeping into gaps between the Shuttle’s protective tiles. (viewed July 31, 11:00pm)

Meanwhile journalists are too lazy or thick to do more than repeat the official line:

Managers at Nasa have decided that Colonel Eileen Collins and her team of six astronauts will remain in orbit for one day longer than planned, to assist their two colleagues aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with some chores.

A likely story: nothing wrong with the shuttle, but we need you highly trained specialists up there to change light bulbs....

Roight.

In actuality "no new anomalies" is just officialese for "situation normal: all f***d up."

In grounding the shuttle, NASA is edging toward what it should have done a long time ago: the shuttle should be permanently retired. What's the point of the space shuttle? To ferry building materials and supplies for the International Space Station (ISS). What's the point of the ISS? To give a plausible reason for keeping the shuttle around.¹ A nice, clean exercise in circular reasoning.

In grad school an eminent astrophysicist (long since departed to another institution) let me in on a trade secret: NASA will cut the funding of any scientist who publicly mentions that there is no scientific justification for the shuttle.

The reusuability of the vehicle's parts give us the idea that it's not as costly as disposable spacecraft. What the shuttle does right, such as launching satellites like Hubble and Chandra, could be done much more cost-effectively with an unmanned launch vehicle. Each shuttle launch costs over a quarter billion dollars. Sending humans into space is a costly enterprise. (Think about it: a human-friendly environment is very heavy. It also requires running safety checks on every piece of equipment sent along, so, for example, a spring doesn't pop off and kill someone.) Compare the shuttle's astronomical price-tag to something on order $10 million for an unmanned launch. And then NASA has the audacity to claim that doing science on the thing saves money! (Sure, over not doing science on the thing.)

As I discussed in a previous post, the motivation behind the space shuttle is to spread public largesse to influential tech companies. (Nothing's so easy as spending someone else's money, is it?)

With the Apollo program, we went to the Moon! With the space shuttle, we simply go around in circles... until we run out of orbiters... or astronauts.

Nothing useful comes out of the shuttle program that couldn't be done more effectively in other ways.

Bottom line: the space shuttle program is a highly-tech way to kill astronauts.

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Note

1. Supposedly we need the ISS as a stop-over on our way back to the Moon en route to Mars. We're suppoed to believe that since the Apollo program our level of technology has regressed so we can't go directly to the Moon.

Abyss Calls to Abyss

Thirty-six years ago today at 10:56 pm EDT, Neal Armstrong descended from the Apollo 11 lunar module and stepped onto the lunar surface. By merely walking on an extra-terrestrial body, the ancient scruples that had deified the heavens were definitively cast down. Armstrong's was the small, even mundane step crowning one of the most awesome human undertakings.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. (President Kennedy, May 25, 1961)

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. (President Kennedy, September 12, 1962)

Is there any contrast so striking as the achievement of the lunar landing compared to NASA's present morass of clueless impotence?

Why is NASA so helpless? Further, why bother about space anyway?

These are good questions that only NASA administrators lack the presence of mind to avoid. In the latest New Atlantis, Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society, scrutinizes NASA and President Bush's Mars initiative. Zubrin makes a great pitch for manned missions to Mars. So great that he very nearly rekindles the excitement in a space skeptic like me.

Critique of NASA and The Plan

Zubrin takes to task the Aldridge Commission's endorsement of NASA's present listless state. He observes that historically NASA has operated in either of two "modes":

1. the destination-driven Apollo Mode, and
2. the production-driven Shuttle Mode.

In Apollo Mode, technology is devised to serve the mission, while in Shuttle Mode, the mission is devised to farm out money to constituencies, such as NASA labs and technology companies. Almost needless to say, Shuttle Mode is incredibly wasteful and directionless, blowing with the political breeze. The Apollo Mode was not only more successful in achievement, but also in developing technology.

Furthermore, Zubrin faults NASA's lack of technical expertise on top (causing the often-observed stark division and subsequent miscommunication between managers and engineers that results in disasters like Columbia) and he observes that the great success of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory comes from its directors as well as its managers being superb scientists or engineers.

Insofar as it gives NASA a definite direction, Zubrin has nothing for praise for President Bush's new space initiative to return us to the Moon and then to Mars. But he doesn't shy from levelling seering criticism at the initiative's wastefully slothful time-table and even more the knuckle-headed implementation plan cooked up by NASA's new Exploration Systems Missions Directorate (ESMD).

The time-table proposed by the President is so slow that current technology that could be adapted to the new mission will have fallen into years of disuse by the time it is needed. The schedule is so slow that it will vastly balloon the total cost of getting us to Mars. (A good thing if the goal is to buy votes, but a bad thing if your goal is Mars and the national interest.)

In a word, the problem with ESMD's plan is its extraordinary redundancy and reduplication of effort. Indicative is the third flaw that Zubrin notes:

[I]t fails to respond to the presidential directive. As currently constituted, the hardware used in Spirals 2 and 3 is used to support lunar missions only, with no regard for Mars requirements. But the president's policy directive clearly specified that a central purpose of the lunar program is to enable sustained human exploration of Mars. These orders were effectively ignored by the designers of the plan."

The Meaning of It All

All of these remarks on the implementation of the President's plan ignore the issue of why we should try to send men to Mars. Zubrin turns to this question in his final section.

[I]n the long run civilizations are built by ideas, not swords. The central idea at the core of Western civilization is that there is an inherent facility in the individual human mind to recognize right from wrong and truth from untruth. This idea is the source of our notions of conscience and science, terms which, not coincidentally, share a common root.

Both our radical fundamentalist and our totalitarian enemies deny these concepts. They deny the validity of the individual conscience, and they deny the necessity of human liberty, and indeed, consider it intolerable. For them, conscience, reason, and free will must be crushed so that humans will submit to arbitrary and cruel authority.

Yes! The West will prevail through ideas. Despite the abject terror of European power-elites at admitting it, our civilization is founded on the Christian Faith.¹ Medieval Christians preserved what was good of ancient learning after the greed and decadence of pagan wealth hollowed out and imploded the old Empire. And they built a new civilization based on logos, reason, and the Logos. The Renaissance didn't materialize out of thin air, but stood on the shoulders of the steady efforts of the medievals. Without medieval Christians, there would have been no scientific revolution.²

Yes, that's right, Bob, keep going...!

Against this foe, science is our strongest weapon, not simply because it produces useful devices and medical cures, but because it demonstrates the value of a civilization based upon the use of reason. There was a time when we celebrated the divine nature of the human spirit by building Gothic cathedrals. Today we build space telescopes. Science is our society’s sacred enterprise [???]; through it we assert the fundamental dignity of man. And because it ventures into the cosmic realm of ultimate truth [???], space exploration is the very banner of science.

Reading the words I've emphasized was like driving a formula-1 racecar full-throttle over "severe tire damage" spikes. It is possible that "space exploration as religion" is just a rhetorical tool that Zubrin uses to reach a presumably secular audience. But I am not so sure.

Space Is Empty

Not long ago, I attended an informal meeting of space enthusiasts to brainstorm ways to make space flight possible. Throwing a human being and his miniature life-sustaining world beyond the planet's atmosphere is an expensive proposition whose societal benefits are not all that obvious. What most struck me about the gathering was that the most enthusiastic about space were simply casting about for a credible excuse for the rest of us to pay for their joy-ride. It's a "solution" in search of a problem.³

Unanswered is the question: what in particular about space is supposed to make us happy?

In a sense, space is a big (very big!) Rorschach test, a massive ink-blot that tells us more about ourselves than about anything else. Perhaps we look to space to avoid the here and now.

One of the cornerstones of the modern psyche, as exemplified by Star Trek⁴ is that humanity will somehow find fulfillment in the vast "other" of the universe. If it is not Almighty Space will bring meaning to everything, then it is the personal "others" that inhabit it.

But are we searching the outer universe to avoid gazing on the emptiness within?⁵

"Deep calleth unto deep with the voice of thy water-spouts." It was God whom [the psalmist] addressed, who "remembered him from the land of Jordan and Hermon." It was in wonder and admiration he spake this: "Abyss calleth unto abyss with the voice of Thy water-spouts." What abyss is this that calls, and to what other abyss? Justly, because the "understanding" spoken of is an "abyss." For an "abyss" is a depth that cannot be reached or comprehended; and it is principally applied to a great body of water. For there is a "depth," a "profound," the bottom of which cannot be reached by sounding.... If by "abyss" we understand a great depth, is not man's heart, do you not suppose, "an abyss"? For what is there more profound than that "abyss"?

Can the abyss of space fill the abyss of the human heart? But space is just "more of the same." Scientists would have us believe that no place in the universe is unique. How can we be satisfied with more of the stuff that already fails to satisfy?

If space is not the Final Frontier, what is? Perhaps we need to re-examine the dimension most intimate to our existence: time.

Modern life fosters the myth of human mastery over time. It is a scientific-technological illusion. Modern comforts surround us in a cocoon of self-satisfaction, untouched by the rigors of the world beyond our wills. “The world of our making becomes ever more mirror-like,” as Daniel Boorstin wrote. The apparent permanence of institutions, things, and even people in a stable society leads us to take for permanent what is evanescent. Recording and replaying devices give us the idea that we can bottle experience and relive it at will. The empirical method of science itself contributes to the illusion: the repeatability of experiments assumes the non-uniqueness of the present moment or at least that the experimenter possesses a space-like mastery over time. In truth a replayed experience can be at best only very similar to the original; no moment is ever truly the same as any other and humans will never master time as we have space. No matter how hard we try, we cannot go home again. Present realities inexorably drain into the past. The entirety of our life is an inexorable journey toward death. No matter how much of the world we conquer, we cannot avoid that final mystery that masters us all.

As finite beings, we do not have arbitrary control over the span of our lives, but we can control how we spend the here-and-nows that, put together, make our lives.

We need to consider the possibility that the otherness of space and the otherness of extraterrestrials won't ultimately fill our hearts, and that perhaps we need to look much closer to home: to the other person right in front of us, and the Infinite Other in whose image that person was created.

In Sum

So what should we do about NASA? Should we go to Mars? My answer is that NASA is worthwhile if we can re-inject it with purpose (the very thing that modern scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, would have us believe doesn't exist). The Mars mission is a worthy endeavor, a meaningful achievement. It could even help reinvigorate the West's faith in human reason and the mind's ability to grasp the world's meaning...

 

...but not if we insist on investing space with "ultimate" meaning.

 

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. (Ps 42:11)

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Some cool Apollo 11 links:

• VR Panorama of Landing Site
• Scientific Lunar Exploration
  Text and photos

  Apollo 11 Audio & Video

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Notes

1. See, for example, Thomas E. Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Civilization.

2. Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos

3. The "weightlessness" of space, for example, is not unique. The experience of anyone free-falling is identical, as Einstein's general theory of relativity has made evident.

4. Cf. Star Trek: First Contact (1996). (More on the Trek religion in future.)
Trek Trivia: In the "Tomorrow is Yesterday" episode, the Enterprise crew intercepts a radio report that the first manned moon shot will take place on Wednesday. Apollo 11 was launched nearly two years after the filming on 16 July 1969, a Wednesday.

5. "Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." (Lk 17:21) Cf. the final words of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz who can no longer avoid looking within: "There is nothing" (Heart of Darkness).

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Robert Zubrin, "Getting Space Exploration Right" The New Atlantis 8 (Spring 2005), 15-48.

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 257.

John F. Kennedy, "Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs" (Delivered in person before a joint session of Congress, May 25, 1961).

John F. Kennedy, "Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort" (Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962).

Aurelius Augustinus, Expositions on the Psalms 42, n. 12.