I tried to get through this seemingly Malthusian rant from the dawn of the space age, but it’s a tough slog.
I would note that, like Sagan years later, he extrapolates existing launch technology to come up with an absurdly costly estimate for space settlement.
It’s funny. Before the USSR showed the world how to throw away the vehicle after every flight, the general assumption was that you’d have a vehicle that could fly to orbit and back in one piece, refuel and fly again within hours. Now, after Apollo, people even have trouble imagining a reusable vehicle that flies between the Earth and the Moon. Very large vehicles that take the most efficient path on that journey, thus spending a lot of time in the radiation belts and requiring lots of shielding, are confusing to people as they’re imagining throwing it away at some point.
it’s a tough slog.
Yeesh, is it ever! Mid-20th Century British left-wing intellectuals to the world: “Hey, you damn kids! Get off of my lawn!” Brave New World was a major buzzkill too.
Chapter Three tells you everything you need to know about the man. It’s a shame Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) wasn’t so forthright with his appetites.
Huxley’s maddeningly inconsistent. His dystopian future of Brave New World looks more and more plausible every day, but he could never quite make himself go against the habits and ideas of the midcentury British intellectual class. Like his more tough-minded colleague Orwell, he opposes tyranny but can’t get over his contempt for ordinary people.
Huxley predicted the 80s better than Orwell did. One thing he got wrong: the real-life frivolization of human existence was a grass roots effort, not top-down central planning.
Huxley wrote this essay in 1963, nine years after The Doors of Perception and seven years after Heaven and Hell. The last three paragraphs of the essay clearly continue the theme of trascendence of those earlier works.
Reread those three paragraphs with this in mind, and you might realize “Malthusian” is wildly off the mark. Huxley is arguing that the conquest of space will bring a sense of futility to the reductionist, but will bring the trascendence of the best kind of acid trip to those with a “Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist” point of view.
By the way, 2001: A Space Odyssey had much the same theme.
I just “skimmed” what the Slashdot folks called “TFA” (are we allowed to say that here?).
There is a tiny little dog that has this terrible case of separation anxiety that when it is let outside, it starts barking. Not a deep “woof-woof-woof” but a combination of a bark, a yip, and a piercing howl. This dog is let outside twice a day right outside my bedroom window, generally when the last one to retire among its owners goes to bed around 10:30 PM and the first one to rise gets up around 5:30 AM. The dog’s yodel isn’t all that loud from inside my house, but it has the right pitch to get your attention. And the dog has mastered “timing” as an art. It knows just how to vary the intervals between calls so just when you think it is done for the night (or early dawn), and you go “ah, peace, finally”, it emits another yelp.
There is a lot of commentary offered on the Internet that is just like that dog.
Now take rancher Cliven Bundy (please!). I don’t know this guy from Adam, but beef is my favorite meat, which I am eating only about every other week these days owing to its high price, ranchers raise beef, and it appears that the Feral Gummint was trying to shut this one rancher down, making beef yet more expensive . . . with a SWAT team.
Making this story even more interesting, in addition to the nutcase rancher, a nutcase Sheriff appeared to be taking his side (essentially the governmental arms-bearing element in that county), and our President appeared to be pulling strings to ratchet this down before this thing went full Janet Reno (or maybe even Fort Sumter on him).
But all of the yippy dogs are let outside to vocalize, ranging from a United States Senate leader, the entire cast of a corporation operating broadcast and cable TV networks, and half the blogosphere. “Cliven Bundy is no different from a welfare cheat” yip . . . yow . . . . yip “Bundy is a deadbeat” . . . yelp . . . .yow . . . yip. . . “ranching is destroying tortoises” yip. . . yip. . . (and most recently) “Bundy is the worst kind of racist” yow . . . yow . . . yelp. . . yip “Do you think this will hurt the Republican party?” yip . . . yip . . . yoww “I am certain this will hurt the Republican party” yelp . . . yip. (When are they ever going to take this dog back inside?)
This Huxley piece is just like the Bundy discussion, yipping, yapping, and yelping about the distinction between “man” in the form of the couple of white guys riding the rocket, the somewhat larger number of white guys operating the rocket from the ground, and the great diversity of humanity, male and female, of the many races of different colors.
In the Bundy discussion, I was wondering, “what is with all of the hate directed at this guy” (OK, OK, Mr. Bundy’s naive understanding of the horrors of slavery merit the punishment Mr. Piers Morgan had suggested), but I also wonder why that dog (and by extension its neighbors) bear so much hate. It is not hate, it is simply separation anxiety, the dog needs to be let out for “business reasons” and the dog needs to express itself that it has been put outside on a tether for 10 minutes and the humans have gone inside for the duration.
Lots of words with little content. The summary seems to be that he thinks it does not make any difference if some people went to space or not. That is awfully reductionist of him.
It was long ago in another country and, besides, the bastard’s dead.