Monday, January 26, 2009
2019 - or 1969?
Happy New Year - year of the Ox, though 2009 still feels pretty new to me. Also International Year of Astronomy, 150 years of Darwin's On The Origin Of Species, a century since Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus and forty years since the first human being set foot on the Moon.
I'm a bit of a Space Age fan, mortified that it's over 30 years since anyone last walked on the Moon, and frankly quite narked that we still don't have space hotels for all. But I'm starting to wonder whether what I thought was a healthy appetite for the future is just nostalgia.
I mean, from here the Apollo missions and the Russian cosmonauts look beautifully heroic, simple, optimistic. The Space Age transcended Cold War rivalries to take Mankind beyond the cradle, as Tsiolkowsky put it.
But I'm not sure that's true, any more than the brief period of American history that saw cowboys driving herds of cattle across the range was truly a simpler, purer time. The Wild West of the cattle trails was a brief interlude between a vicious civil war and the extension of the railroad. Unemployed men rounding up cattle that went wild during the war, and driving them North to feed the industrial cities. The myth of the Western is a long way from the reality.
So the nagging doubt that's growing in me is - are we doing the same with the Space Age? Are we idealising a brief period in the past so we can cling to a heroic myth instead of looking forwards? Is the Space Age the new Western?
I’m currently reading Eternity by Michael Hanlon, a science writer taking an informed look into the future. So far, two things strike me. The first is that he is optimistic about our future – but he has to keep saying how optimistic he is, and that unlike everyone else, he doesn’t think we’re all doomed. The second is that his optimistic visions of the future look more like the past to me – a low-tech, low-population world dominated by Nature.
So the question is – have we completely lost the ability to look into the future, except to announce the apocalypse?
I recently read Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful Profiles of the Future, which dates back to 1962. Of course he was, in many ways, wide of the mark. There’s a refreshing overall air of optimism that clearly marks him out as a 1960s writer (though he does worry about environmental collapse that will overtake us before 1980, including a population explosion that has presumably happened, since the world now contains twice as many humans as when Clarke first wrote his book).
But the most striking thing about Clarke’s book is his capacity to think beyond what the world is like right now. He’s stronger on science and technology than on the potential of human beings, but he can imagine a future as different from the present as the present is to the past.
If you look back 100 years, the world was very different indeed. Racism and sexism were widely accepted as reflecting real, inherent differences between people. The car and the aeroplane were new, insanely dangerous, and completely beyond the reach of most of us. Even in developed countries, infectious diseases killed children at a rate that dwarfs today’s road accident figures. In the UK, women couldn’t vote and homosexual acts between men were punished by jail. And so on…
There’s been a lot of celebration this week, as the USA inaugurated its first black (politically black, in spite of his white mother) president. That’s something that would have been hard to imagine even fifty years ago, let alone a hundred. In 1909 nobody could have predicted today’s world of mobile phones, the internet, mass air travel - and nostalgia for a 40-year-old interlude of human space exploration.
That’s how different our world could be in 2109. So why is it so hard to imagine?
I'm a bit of a Space Age fan, mortified that it's over 30 years since anyone last walked on the Moon, and frankly quite narked that we still don't have space hotels for all. But I'm starting to wonder whether what I thought was a healthy appetite for the future is just nostalgia.
I mean, from here the Apollo missions and the Russian cosmonauts look beautifully heroic, simple, optimistic. The Space Age transcended Cold War rivalries to take Mankind beyond the cradle, as Tsiolkowsky put it.
But I'm not sure that's true, any more than the brief period of American history that saw cowboys driving herds of cattle across the range was truly a simpler, purer time. The Wild West of the cattle trails was a brief interlude between a vicious civil war and the extension of the railroad. Unemployed men rounding up cattle that went wild during the war, and driving them North to feed the industrial cities. The myth of the Western is a long way from the reality.
So the nagging doubt that's growing in me is - are we doing the same with the Space Age? Are we idealising a brief period in the past so we can cling to a heroic myth instead of looking forwards? Is the Space Age the new Western?
I’m currently reading Eternity by Michael Hanlon, a science writer taking an informed look into the future. So far, two things strike me. The first is that he is optimistic about our future – but he has to keep saying how optimistic he is, and that unlike everyone else, he doesn’t think we’re all doomed. The second is that his optimistic visions of the future look more like the past to me – a low-tech, low-population world dominated by Nature.
So the question is – have we completely lost the ability to look into the future, except to announce the apocalypse?
I recently read Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful Profiles of the Future, which dates back to 1962. Of course he was, in many ways, wide of the mark. There’s a refreshing overall air of optimism that clearly marks him out as a 1960s writer (though he does worry about environmental collapse that will overtake us before 1980, including a population explosion that has presumably happened, since the world now contains twice as many humans as when Clarke first wrote his book).
But the most striking thing about Clarke’s book is his capacity to think beyond what the world is like right now. He’s stronger on science and technology than on the potential of human beings, but he can imagine a future as different from the present as the present is to the past.
If you look back 100 years, the world was very different indeed. Racism and sexism were widely accepted as reflecting real, inherent differences between people. The car and the aeroplane were new, insanely dangerous, and completely beyond the reach of most of us. Even in developed countries, infectious diseases killed children at a rate that dwarfs today’s road accident figures. In the UK, women couldn’t vote and homosexual acts between men were punished by jail. And so on…
There’s been a lot of celebration this week, as the USA inaugurated its first black (politically black, in spite of his white mother) president. That’s something that would have been hard to imagine even fifty years ago, let alone a hundred. In 1909 nobody could have predicted today’s world of mobile phones, the internet, mass air travel - and nostalgia for a 40-year-old interlude of human space exploration.
That’s how different our world could be in 2109. So why is it so hard to imagine?
