Space

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a childhood hero of mine, on the tenth anniversary of his death. Today, I’m writing about another one, and it’s a happier occasion: it’s Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 90th birthday!

Clarke has always been my favourite of the ‘big three’ post-war science fiction writers: he evokes a sense of wonder at the universe that was mostly missing in Asimov and Heinlein, as much as I loved their stories.¹ From the decaying billion-year-old city of Diaspar in Against the Fall of Night (1953), to the giant interstellar interloper in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), to the last visitors from home in Songs of Distant Earth (1986), Clarke’s universe is indifferent to humanity’s presence, but it’s precisely our human qualities which make its immensities explicable and bearable. It’s terrific stuff, at its best Wellsian and Stapledonian, and just talking about it makes me want to go re-read it all again …

I was casting around for some way to connect Clarke to the themes of this blog. I could have speculated on the parallels between the British Interplanetary Society, in which he was heavily involved from the 1930s to the 1950s, and aviation advocacy groups like the Royal Aeronautical Society or the Air League of the British Empire. Or there’s his wartime work for the RAF on ground control approach radar. Or the way his experience of being billeted in the bombed-out East End in 1941 apparently inspired him to write a chapter on space warfare which he later used in Earthlight.² Or the fact that the first publication of his famous idea for communication satellites in geosynchronous (or ‘Clarke’) orbits was in a letter on potential scientific applications of V2 rockets, which appeared in the February 1945 issue of Wireless World — at a time when V2s were still falling on London!³

But then I found that in March 1946, RAF Quarterly published a prize-winning essay by Clarke on “The rocket and the future of warfare”, which was outside Clarke’s usual range of topics, but well within mine — just too perfect a fit to ignore! But it’s not available online like his satellite stuff, and nobody around here has the RAF Quarterly. Luckily it was reprinted in Ascent to Wonder, a compilation of his more technical papers, so I made an impromptu trip to the State Library this afternoon to check its copy.⁴
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1. Asimov’s non-fiction more than made up for this lack, of course.
2. Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorised Biography of Arthur C. Clarke (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992), 47.
3. Arthur C. Clarke, “V2 for ionosphere research?”, Wireless World, February 1945, 58. His better known paper devoted to geosynchronous communication satellites was published in the same journal the following October. See here for more on both articles.
4. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started — but never finished! — was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can’t have been older than 12 so it’s not exactly sophisticated …)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I’d even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn’t quite worked out the way I’d envisaged it — yet — but of course, I’m in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There’s a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun’s proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry — including leading the V2’s development team — von Braun’s obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders — a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn’t the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier’s Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven’t for a long time so I’ll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change … sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a ‘Race for Space’ between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward — if impressive — technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn’t have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it’s hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it’s good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I’ll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun’s ultimate weapon”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it’s more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn’t aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.

Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl show me the Universe and its history. From Empedocles and the water-thief, to the discovery of volcanoes on Io; from Lowell’s dreams of Martian cities dying beside canals choked with dust, to Wolf Vishniac’s death in Antarctica while paving the way for the search for life on Mars; the Big Bang, the Tunguska Event and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I can’t have been much into double digits when I first watched Cosmos, if that; heady stuff indeed for a young boy. His own joy in the search for knowledge was palpable, infectious, inspirational — to the extent that I cannot understand how anyone could ever feel any differently. Here’s a short clip from one episode of Cosmos, “The edge of forever”: more metaphysics than physics, but if you’ve never seen it before, it will give you an idea of his style; and if you have seen it before, it will transport you again. It still sends shivers down my spine.

Not only did I adore Cosmos the series, and Cosmos the book, I also inhaled his other books: The Cosmic Connection, Broca’s Brain, The Dragons of Eden; and later, Contact, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon-haunted World. Carl hugely influenced my basic worldview: rationality is our best tool for understanding the world, secular humanism our best antidote for the fact that we can never be perfectly rational. We are not at the centre of the Universe, which is anyway indifferent to our presence; but we are sentient, and that is a precious thing, or ought to be, to ourselves and perhaps to others.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.¹

Carl’s love for astronomy also helped steer me into pursuing astronomy as a career. From about the time I saw Cosmos on, I had a burning desire to become an astronomer and explore the Universe too. I nearly did too; I started a PhD and was nearly a year into it when I realised that (a) I wasn’t very good at it and (b) I wasn’t enjoying it very much. That’s not Carl’s fault, of course, but astronomy was such a hard thing for me to let go of, having made it a part of me for so long, and that’s partly a testament to his eloquence and his passion. To cut a long story short, I switched to an MSc as a sort of consolation prize, while pondering what to do next. And it was during this time that I learned of Carl’s illness. He continued to work and to write. A friend, a fellow astro postgrad, saw him speak at a conference in Hawaii and reported that he looked distressingly ill.

Ten years ago today, I sobbed like a child into my girlfriend’s arms, and I must confess that I am tearing up even now. (Having Vangelis’s “Heaven & Hell Part 1″ playing in the background probably doesn’t help.) Carl Sagan is gone, and he is sorely missed, but his influence will remain — at least for as long as I live, and I suspect for much longer than that.

Other memories of Carl which have crossed my personal blog horizon: Bad Astronomy Blog, Centauri Dreams, Respectful Insolence, Cocktail Party Physics, Butterflies and Wheels, a great one from Larvatus Prodeo, and most poignantly of all, from his wife and collaborator Ann Druyan. These are all part of a larger blog commemoration effort (the results of which can be seen here), and the blogless can join in too.

Image source: Wikipedia.

1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 4.

Anthony Eden at a United Nations Association rally at the Albert Hall, 1 March 1947:

Mr. EDEN and M. JAN MASARYK, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, were the other principal speakers. Of international affairs, Mr. EDEN said: “Our planet has become very small. We are nearer to San Francisco to-day than we were to Paris 100 years ago. We are all so closely interdependent; we have to rub shoulders whether we would or no.

“Can we learn this lesson of interdependence? If we can there is no limit to the standard of material prosperity and, I believe, of human happiness to which mankind can attain. If we cannot learn it, then a future conflict, with the added horror of modern weapons, may seal the doom of the human race. The choice is as simple as that. Suspicions, jealousies, even hostility, are as easy to engender between nations as between neighbours. Sometimes I think the people of this distracted planet will never really get together until they find someone in [sic] Mars to get mad against.”

Governments, Mr. Eden added, were not much wiser than the peoples they led. If the peoples would reach understanding the Governments would reach it, too.¹

I can’t resist pointing out that nearly a decade later, Eden went on to prove that his own government, at least, was not very wise! The ‘added horror of modern weapons’ refers, of course, the atom bomb (Masaryk’s message was that ‘unless we were very careful we could slip back from the Atomic to the Stone Age in a matter of a few weeks’); and the reason why the world was so small was, in part, the aeroplane.

Eden’s suggestion that the people of Earth needed a Martian threat to set aside their differences brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s much later musings along the same lines (source):

I doubt Eden inspired Reagan, but he did apparently inspire the author of the first book to use the term “flying saucer” in the title: Bernard Newman, whose The Flying Saucer was published by Victor Gollancz in 1948. I haven’t read it, but judging from a summary in a Magonia article by Philip Taylor, it’s about a group of scientists who fake flying saucer crashes in order to fool governments into believing that there is indeed an extraterrestrial threat:

An international league of scientists springs into action and with remarkable speed the differences between the world’s governments dissolve under the ‘Martian’ threat. The final chapter sees every international political problem speedily resolved, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland. This 1948 fantasy is very much of its time: it was published in the very month of the Russian blockade of Berlin. Newman’s heroes find a way around the frustrating limitations of the new United Nations, with, in the background, the emergence of the super-power blocs and the omniscience of the atomic scientists all playing their part.

As it happens, I own another book by Newman (who wrote many), Armoured Doves: A Peace Novel (London: Jarrolds, 1937 [1931]), as it’s relevant to my thesis research. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to share at least one theme with The Flying Saucer, namely that of a group of pacifist scientists imposing peace upon the world, though in this case by use of a death ray rather than a disinformation campaign.

Incidentally, the Magonia article is also worth reading for the account of Gerald Heard’s theory for the origins of flying saucers — that they were spacecraft piloted by giant bees from Mars! Yes, I said giant bees. Heard was an unconventional thinker (obviously) and a pacifist, who hung out with Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood in California. But in the early 1930s, he was well-known as the BBC’s first science commentator. And, inevitably it seems, he’s also a person of interest to me, contributing an essay entitled “And suppose we fail? After the next war” to Challenge to Death (London: Constable & Co., 1934), about the depths British society would sink into after a knock-out blow. It’s all one seamless tapestry, isn’t it.

1. The Times, 3 March 1947, p. 6.

There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting respectable (not unlike how the Iraq invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War made CNN’s fortune). Before that it seems that in America, radio news was not taken very seriously; but CBS’s virtually round-the-clock live reporting of the events in Europe was listened to by millions, and for the first time radio became the preferred news source for most people.

Then in a throwaway line, almost, Culbert links this to the famous Orson Welles broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which took place at the end of the following month. This was done as a mock live newscast, reporting the news of the Martian invasion of New Jersey, and “Some listeners, presumably those who tuned in late, apparently ran from their homes in complete terror. It was felt by many that such fears were related to residual concerns about radio’s round the clock coverage of the Munich story”. (It should be noted that many accounts exaggerate the degree of panic that occurred — it’s not like millions or even thousands of people headed for the hills. That some people did panic, however, is undeniable.)

This suddenly made the usual explanations for the panic that I’ve read a lot more sensible. It has often been suggested, for example, that the people scared by the broadcast didn’t actually think that the Martians were invading, but rather that the Germans were, and the Mars thing was a mistake or a subterfuge. As one of the listeners reported:

The announcer said a meteor had fallen from Mars and I was sure he thought that, but in the back of my head I had the idea that the meteor was just a camouflage. It was really an airplane like a Zeppelin that looked like a meteor and the Germans were attacking us with gas bombs.¹

But I could never understand quite why Americans would have such an intense fear of Germany — it’s not like the situation in Edwardian Britain, where the German threat was an order of magnitude more plausible at least (though still exaggerated), and was intensively rehearsed in the media for a decade.² From my admittedly limited knowledge of US history, there was no comparable perceived threat to the American homeland in the late 1930s. That the Munich crisis took place only a month before the Welles broadcast does help make sense of this, to a degree. That there was massive interest in the US in following the course of the Munich crisis helps more. That radio news broadcasts were the favoured means of doing this helps even more. And that the popularity of radio news was very recent, so that more people than ever before were listening to it, trusting it as a reliable source of information, and yet were perhaps not completely familar with its conventions (indeed, those conventions were still evolving) — that helps the most to explain how it was that the War of the Worlds broadcast caused a limited, localised but briefly intense panic about a German/Martian airborne/spaceborne assault upon New Jersey.

1. Quoted in Robert E. Bartholomew and Hilary Evans, Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), 54-5. Italics in original.
2. And leading to the phantom airship scares, a phenomenon somewhat comparable to the War of the Worlds panic.