ISY, SETI and the New Search for El Dorado
By Jeremiah Creedon
Among the events marking 1992 as the International Space Year, the one scheduled to begin this autumn at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is surely the most significant. Arecibo is the site of the world’s largest radio telescope, a 20-acre dish opening skywards from its seat amid green tropical hills. On 12 October scientists from NASA will start using the facility to scan the near reaches of the Milky Way for evidence of distant cultures. Targeting 1,000 likely stars, most chosen for their resemblance to the Sun, the observers see their study as the best hope yet for proving that humans are not the only species with the hardware to communicate over cosmic distances. What they call SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – could be over by the year 2000.
The date on which this survey will begin – Columbus Day – is no accident, of course. That Arecibo lies so close to the place where Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean 500 years before, almost to the day, would seem to heighten the event’s symbolic resonance. Many would say there could be no better place to celebrate the spirit and the values on which space exploration is founded. They are right, though for reasons far more ironic than they are apt to acknowledge.
To appreciate this irony it helps to compare the SETI project with another recent event at Arecibo, a discovery that radar astronomers reported in 1991. Orbiting somewhere between Earth and Jupiter was an asteroid they had earlier named 1986 DA. As widely noted in the US press, this was not just another itinerant rock, but an orbiting mother lode veined with gold and platinum. According to a NASA press release, the asteroid might someday be ‘a valuable mineral resource for eventual space colonists’. Skipping over the minor problem of getting there, the Washington Post put the ‘commodity value’ of this ‘astronomical El Dorado’ at well over a trillion dollars – the going price for a chunk of metal described as a bit more than a mile wide and ‘shaped roughly like a canned ham’.
Ham, gold and SETI: of all the tributes to Columbus, planned or otherwise, the various efforts at Arecibo may be the most telling, given their contradictions. After five centuries, a society that has lionized Columbus has chosen a spot very near his landfall to resume his voyage. But where the new explorers may be heading, or whether they agree on what they hope to find, seems quite unclear.
For those driven like Columbus by the promise of gold, Arecibo is but another port city to the newest New World, a gateway to the economic exploitation of space. Envisaging space as the next land of milk and honey is quite common today, especially among those on capitalism’s radical fringe. These would-be pioneers have their own rhetoric, much of it harking back to the war cries of Progress and Manifest Destiny that rallied the European advance across the North American continent. They also have their heroes, their ideal types, and the mythic figure of Columbus is certainly one of them.
But that is only half the picture. Arecibo is also a temple of Science and Reason, a modern religion whose most brilliant believers – say, the minds behind SETI – are on the edge of transcending the ethos that has formed them. Science and the ideology of the West personified by Columbus are, of course, fellow travellers. Both began their journeys from the same point; both are products of the same nature-fearing, human-centered, bullion-driven vision of the universe. But Arecibo could mark a place where their paths diverge, where the scientific mind refuses any longer to be a tool, or a weapon, for realizing the Columbian will. Indeed, the potential for space science to undermine the long cultural project it epitomizes could be the last great irony of the Columbian age.
It is common these days to hear talk of modern scientists rediscovering the lost wisdom of the ancients. Probing ever deeper into the riddles of the cosmos, these physicists and astronomers are said suddenly to realize that the Western model of the universe is far from perfect. Transported from the planet on the only vehicle that can travel faster than the speed of light – the human imagination – they reach a distant point where the long conflict between nature and the Western mind is at last reconciled. After bending metal and fire for a millennium, they have finally learned certain truths that others have known by simply observing the world around them.
These new insights have found their way into Western popular culture, thanks in part to some unlikely bodhisattvas – the US astronauts who went to the Moon. Many astronauts have said the voyage deeply affected them, altering the way they viewed the home planet and its place in the universe. Most were pilots with military training – highly disciplined people not prone by nature to romantic reverie. That they, of all people, would interpret their journey as a near-mystical experience suggests how profoundly jarring it must have been to look back from another world at the frail, lonely beauty of the biosphere.
The earthbound masses shared the experience through a series of remarkable photographs, including the famous Whole Earth shot taken by the crew onboard Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, in 1972. It may be the most influential photograph ever taken, and many have noted its impact on popular consciousness. The author Frank White called it ‘the overview effect’, a perceptual shift that may well rival the Copernican revolution in reshaping general attitudes.
Some would say that an image celebrating the greatest feat of Western technology has become the symbol of a movement that hopes to dismantle it. But the photograph’s true meaning may be more complicated. Like the astronauts who took such pictures, the public has been enlightened by what amounts to a technological accident – one that rivals Chernobyl in its profound effect on world opinion. In other words, even the awareness that the world must be saved from the rampant effects of technology – from nuclear meltdown, global warming, threadbare forests, depleted seas – is yet another technological by-product. How does one deal with this paradox? Can technology provide its own homeopathic cure?
Twenty years after the last lunar mission, with the Earth growing ever more ill, the most ardent ecologist may have to consider the ironic possibility that going back to the Moon, or to Mars, may be the only hope. Perhaps another generation must be forced to reflect on the biosphere’s fragility – a fact that becomes so obvious from the cosmic vantage. And if the Apollo experience is any indicator, nothing contradicts the bombastic rhetoric about space exploration better than the act itself. Like everything else thrown up there, comparisons with the voyages of Columbus or wagon treks across the American West suddenly become quite weightless.
It may be here, in fact, that one encounters the real ‘threshold’ to further space exploration, in the realm of values and philosophy, not in the choice of hardware options. Venturing beyond this point may well demand a new paradigm, one that is no longer a tribute to human aggression, but to the equally compelling force of human curiosity. Given the remarkable changes in world opinion, including a wide distrust of technology and its proponents, the reigning Columbian model is both an insult to the modern mind and a very real threat to the natural world. What is more, there is no longer enough imaginative thrust left in the idea to bear anything aloft.
Those desperately (and often cynically) looking for a way to reawaken public interest in space will be the last to admit this, of course. And no wonder: if a new incentive to explore space were to take hold, one based on what space has already taught the world rather than ideological hot air, those cheer-leading the loudest these days would stand to lose the most. The Columbus analogy remains very popular with the aerospace industry crowd and their political allies. This trend is not new. The Apollo command module that orbited the Moon while the first two men descended to its surface was called Columbia; so is one of the space shuttles flying today. In 1991 proponents of a new space station tried to shame a sceptical US Congress into turning over the $40 billion needed to build it. The example of Columbus and the country’s need for a new frontier were often cited in the debate, which station supporters eventually won. The big losers were advocates of public housing and the majority of space scientists, who argued by the dozen that the station will do nothing to advance their research.
Most observers agree that space exploration has come to a standstill. Those who consider it a waste of money should take no comfort from this fact; the billions are spent anyway, siphoned off by the giant aerospace corporations and other contractors, whether anything flies or not. The USA and the former USSR have spent the most, but France, Germany, the UK, Japan and China have also become ‘spacefaring’ nations. And all are caught at the same impasse – even if the reasons they offer as to why tend to vary with their different political beliefs.
Meanwhile the corporations that build space hardware cannot get beyond viewing the situation as simply an image problem, something to be cured by the spin doctors. The recent attempts to link space exploration to environmentalism – that is, in perception only – is a good example. As one company flack announced to a large crowd at a space conference last year, ‘The environment is hot, the environment is sexy.’ The point was, in effect, that space enthusiasts should adhere their cause to all things green the way certain parasitical eels attach themselves to healthy fish. The result is the sort of advertising strategy that portrayed the massive EOS platform plan as the greatest thing for the planet since spring rain. The EOS plan has since been shelved; one can only wish the same would happen to the cynical and ultimately self-defeating concept of ‘issue linkage’.
Diehard US capitalists blame the delay in opening space on the government – on NASA – and say that turning the whole project over to the private sector is the only way to go. Free enterprise and greed are often cited as the best fuel for extraterrestrial travel. Without the potential for individual gain, the new cosmic pioneers will never summon the moxie needed to carry on the Columbian adventure. Or so they say. ‘Isn’t it odd that the government should open up the frontier,’ remarked one would-be space settler, ‘when all other frontiers have been opened by the private sector?’ Such thinking suggests a profound nostalgia for the past, a past that in many ways never existed.
The various plans for settling space on this model strike the sceptic as a triumph of ideology over common sense. One idea is to refit the space shuttle’s large external fuel tank into an orbiting dormitory, flushed of excess fuel and refilled with eager space settlers. Once aloft, they would find ways to make their fortunes, perhaps by fixing satellites, inventing new drugs in microgravity or spotting schools of fish for the boats below. As another proponent claimed, ‘Progress that would require decades of NASA study contracts and pilot projects will be collapsed into a few years of Darwinian struggle.’
Pleasant thought. The allusion to Darwin is revealing, if not scientifically accurate. In such ideas one finds the social Darwinism of the 19th century – a great apology for capitalism at its most brutish – projected onto the 21st. The subtleties of real Darwinian theory, where the equations for survival tend to include more variables (say, altruistic behaviors and the interdependence of various life forms) have been jettisoned. Merely as an aside, it bears noting that evolutionary forces kept life out of space for several billion years. Skip those decades of study and the so-called ‘Darwinian struggle’ among space settlers would actually be shortened further, to a few seconds.
Another argument against this cosmic projection of capitalism is the success and efficiency of the former Soviet space program. Historically, a program built upon the values of a highly centralized Communist society managed to hold its own in comparison with its US rival. The point is not to praise a centralized system overseen by the government, and certainly not to suggest that space exploration favors one system over the other; it is to reiterate that the real problem facing space exploration lies below the level of economic ideology. The USA, the former USSR and all other technologically ambitious societies are confronting a common philosophical dilemma. The shared assumptions that have borne these nations to the current impasse have been tested by the realities of space flight itself, and found wanting. The issue can be simply stated: Can Columbus and Gaia coexist? Obviously they cannot. Without a new vision incorporating the very knowledge that space flight has given the world, further exploration may not be possible.
Before going on to a new vision one must recognize the old vision, in its many national guises, past and present. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian cosmonautics, believed that space was the next step in human evolution. After the Russian Revolution in 1917 the Bolsheviks turned the obscure theorist into a cultural hero, seeing that his own vision was a fantastic extension of their own. The British author H.G. Wells wrote that ‘Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.’ More recently, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has speculated that the evolutionary goal of our species is ‘to escape this planet before the sun explodes’. The science author Ray Bradbury agrees, but give the idea a familiar American spin: ‘We cannot stay at home now,’ he wrote, ‘even as we did not sit on the front porches of 1492 Spain. . . .’
This is the old rationale for space exploration, told in several versions, each from a different point of view. The new paradigm begins with the realization that, for all practical purposes, ‘we’ are going nowhere. Our minds can visit distant stars and ponder the riddles of time and space. We may find that other beings are sharing in this meditation with us, from a great distance. But we will never touch them. Our bodies must remain here, surrounded by beauty or filth, whichever we prefer.
The SETI project at Arecibo is only one of many space-related tributes to Columbus in 1992, the International Space Year. Space enthusiasts in the US Congress saw a chance to link the Columbus jubilee with the 35th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year. This initiative was endorsed by all manner of government, commercial, scientific and space interest personnel: celebrating space exploration’s tie to both environmental science and Columbus seemed like a great idea – innocuous enough for almost everyone to support.
Which makes this the perfect chance to expose these visions as incompatible. The time is right to make a choice, to leave the Columbus paradigm behind, and to face up to what space has really taught us. The overcrowded, anxious, dirty industrial world must realize that if Eden is anywhere, it lies beneath our feet.
From Space Policy (August 1992). Copyright © 2020 by Jeremiah Creedon.
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