Stars, I have seen them fall, But when they drop and die This is real. No star is lost at all —Elon Musk From all the star-sown sky. —A.E. Housman
In mid-January, the SpaceX Starship embarked on its seventh test flight. The launch was routine. As the spaceship climbed higher and higher into the sky, it shed the auxiliary booster. The booster, instead of careening down to Earth, engaged thrusters that guided it to a tower in South Texas where a metal claw caught the booster—a miracle of engineering. Everything was going according to plan.
After eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds of flight, SpaceX command lost contact with the Starship. An explosion high up in the stratosphere could be seen by pedestrians standing in their backyards. Then, like a scene straight out of Michael Bay’s Transformers, the fragments of the Starship plummeted through the pale blue sky and into the Atlantic Ocean.
Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, posted a video of the million-dollar fragments shooting through the sky and captioned it: “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed.”
Much to the delight of Elon Musk, the mission to Mars took another step forward. In his Inaugural Address, Trump declared his intent to plant the American flag on Mars. To this end, SpaceX has been conducting routine test launches and flights for months now, and Musk has repeatedly asserted that space travel to Mars is not only possible in our lifetime but probable.
Musk’s rhetoric invokes the great explorers of the past: Magellan circumnavigating the globe, and Lewis and Clark trekking boldly into the untamed wilderness west of the Mississippi. For Musk, a mission to Mars merits itself. He harps on these explorers because they stand for the undaunted spirit of human exploration, and exploration is a good in and of itself. Musk celebrates humanity’s innate ingenuity believing that it requires them to always move forward, and history seems to corroborate Musk. Humans have come a long way: farming, iron working, flight, the World Wide Web. Technological progress seems inextricably tied to humanity’s existence on Earth. Seemingly, there are no bounds. Young college graduates start work for a tech start-up and are told that pushing the boundaries is their job. Past those boundaries lies innovation and discovery. The Canadian scholar Dr. Michael Millerman, who has writes about politics, philosophy, and their intersection with the rising tech powers, recently said, “Space travel is an amazing thing, because not only is it a sign of human ingenuity which after all it is, it’s also us wanting to explore the big, beautiful, majestic, Divine cosmos. And somehow both of those things give glory to God.”
Yet are ingenuity and exploration necessarily God-given mandates? Must we always be pushing the bounds? In Genesis Adam, the first man, names the animals as his first action. Psalm 19:1 reads, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” And Albert Einstein once stated, “The more I study science, the more I believe in God.” At the heart of scientific exploration is a desire to understand the world we live in—a desire to know our Creator. However, like many things, temptation often leads one astray. The desire to understand something can quickly turn into the desire to dominate something. Just a few chapters after Adam names the animals, we find humans attempting to supplant God with the Tower of Babel.
The Catholic priest Romano Guardini wrote in his short book Letters from Lake Como: It grieves me when I see built into one of these vessels, these noble creations, a gasoline engine, so that with upright mast but no sails the vessel clatters through the waves like a ghost of itself. Go even further and the sailing vessel becomes a steamer, a great ocean liner—culture indeed, a brilliant technological achievement! And yet a colossus of this type presses on through the sea regardless of wind and waves.
Guardini juxtaposes a sailboat with a steamboat. When man invented the sailboat, he did so along with Nature. He understood that the waves and wind were inevitable phenomena, and so he created a machine to harness those powers, not subvert them. The sails and rudder worked with the natural world in order to allow man to traverse large bodies of water. When man invented the steam engine, he discovered how to navigate the waters when there was no wind or in the middle of a gale. He traded in a symbiotic relationship with Nature for one of domination. Guardini advocates for a relationship where man is not the dominant force in the world and instead works with nature. He muses, “What an infinite intoxication of kinship with nature must come over such people, as though they were water creatures or part of the waves!” Kinship unites man with Nature, as if it were a return to Eden and man can move through Nature in harmony. Guardini admits this sounds idealistic and unrealistic. The Fall prevents us from perfect harmony with the natural world. He proposes the sailboat analogy as a way of making do. His point remains: mankind is better off working with Nature. The steam engine allows man to work in spite of Nature. Space travel falls into this latter category.
What Guardini recognized was the shift from a Nature Culture to Technology Culture. Most of our latest innovations originate in a desire to subvert nature; to make things that are naturally difficult much easier. Mobile phones allow us to shrink space through communication, and virtual reality headsets give us unfettered access to the world from the comfortable setting of our couch. It’s not simply technological advancement; it’s a fundamental reordering of culture. Adrian Daub, author of What Tech Calls Thinking, suggests, “Silicon Valley is good at ‘reframing’ questions, problems, and solutions, as the jargon of ‘design thinking’ puts it.” The most basic questions and terms of existence have been changed. Take travel for example. It used to be undertaken only when necessary, but now traveling across the globe for pleasure is not uncommon. The problem of “travel” changed and so did our solution to it. When the definition changes, what qualifies as success changes too.
But why must the definitions change? Is the definition really in need of changing, or do innovation and discovery necessitate that we change them? Elon Musk’s discourse on space travel strikes me as the latter. Space travel is something humans should undertake because our sense of discovery propels us towards it, as if it were inevitable. Perhaps one might argue that there’s a strategic advantage to space travel, but if there were, then what is it? And wouldn’t that strategic advantage just be that space travel allows for more advancement? It necessitates itself. Technological advancement means changing the terms for the sake of changing the terms. Yet space travel remains possible only by technologies that dominate, rather than work with, Nature. Space travel entails man going somewhere entirely hostile to him, and in order for him to exist there, he must subvert all of the rules set by the environment.
If space travel is not for mankind, then what is man’s relationship to space supposed to look like? In William Wordsworth’s describes a universe intimately intertwined with its God: “The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand, / And, haply, there the spirits of the blest / Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest.” Wordsworth wrote sonnets in praise of the natural world. He marveled at the world, especially the marvelous aspects. Suppose space is not for man to explore; suppose space is set out there for us to marvel, to remind us to look up. Guardini is not anti-progress. He views the sailboat as beneficial to humanity. Guardini fears a basic misordering of human existence. Marc Andreessen, a fellow traveler with Musk, argues that man, the “Apex predator” in nature, must overcome it in order to transcend time and create the future. Certainly, humanity bears a responsibility to shape creation with wisdom and courage. But viewing nature as prey that we, the predator, must overcome and, by implication, destroy should give us pause. Are we to overcome the natural world? Guardini certainly did not think so. Musk, Andreessen, and co. want to transcend it, but in doing so, will they fly too close to the sun—literally.
Image Via: PICRYL
