THE FINAL FRONTIER?

Date: March 30, 1986
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer


"Nor could the future even be seen until one could answer the obsessive question: Was our venture into space noble or insane, was it part of a search for the good, or the agent of diabolisms yet unglimpsed?"

--Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

"Back off mister--I'm a scientist."

--Bill Murray, Ghostbusters

A few miles north of the Rose Bowl, where the flat valley floor of the Los Angeles basin suddenly banks upward into sagebrush mountains, there is a thick forest of buildings clinging to the hillside, architecturally without distinction. Some of the structures have no windows. Every entrance has the appearance of a back door. Acres of corrugated metal rise four or five stories, squaring off abruptly without overhangs or cornices. They look like giant air conditioners. That this place is special is revealed by the dish antennae on the roofs, by the guards at the gate, and by the pale men and women who fill the fluorescent interiors and speak the precision tongue of the scientist.

This is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a monument to the power of machines, and we had come here to ask some Sixties-vintage questions that might have been embarrassingly fanciful had not the space shuttle just blown up over the coast of Florida. We wanted to know:

Is our destiny in space?

Will human beings ever reach the stars?

Why send people into space at all, if machines can do the job better?

Despite the disaster of Jan. 28, these are not such bad days for the space program. The president is bullish on space. Star Wars is beaming lots of money into aerospace R & D. Most importantly, a presidential commission on the future of space flight is expected to come out with a proposal this spring for a manned landing on Mars, and the construction of manned space stations in Earth, Moon and Martian orbit. Whether Americans would support such an ambitious agenda is a matter of guesswork. NASA's public flogging probably will last for a while. But no one could have missed the common thread in the country's reaction to the shuttle disaster--a reflexive reaffirmation of our desire to see the space program go on.

Here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the scientists have always been able to gauge the gap between the romance and the reality of space travel. The romance is Star Trek. The reality is Challenger. The romance holds that space is quite literally a frontier, a New World thick with stars, awaiting our modern conquistadors. The reality is that for most human purposes the solar system is too hot, too cold, too harsh, too dead; it is filled with desert worlds, worlds that have no surface, worlds where toxic gas rains from the sky, worlds so airless that the bitterness of outer space reaches down to the soil.

So why the great national infatuation with space travel?

There are a lot of places to find the answers to our questions--NASA alone has major centers in Houston, Huntsville, Cleveland, Baltimore, Cape Canaveral, Silicon Valley--but Pasadena is the locus for advanced space flight, for mind-boggling visions of man's future exploration. Space travel at interstellar distances is largely a simple arithmetical function of speed, of thrust, of getting there, of propulsion. Propulsion, as one would suspect, is a subject on which the people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory can speak at length.

So we went to the wise men. Eventually we found the man with all the answers, sitting on a mountain, staring at the Pacific.

The search begins in Building 233, which like all buildings at the Lab has only a number, no name. There is a man here named Jim French, surrounded by charts of gravitational tides on Mars, in an office that is maybe one body length square. It has no windows. The wall is dominated by a map of the Moon, and on top of the filing cabinet is a model of a sister ship to the Starship Enterprise. And a pair of enemy attack ships. Klingon. Romulan.

"The solar system isn't as much fun as it was in the science fiction stories, there being no Martians, and Venus turning out to be boiling hot," French starts out.

He is a big, rangy guy, 49, with a permanent look of mischief on his face. He wears cowboy boots and a large brass belt buckle that says "Mission to Mars." You could scuff your boots clean on his hair, it's as short and spiky as Astroturf. He looks like he should be named Buzz or Deke.

"I wanted to be the first guy to land on the moon. I was glad that it was done, but I'd have rather it been me than Neil Armstrong. I'm sure there are a lot of people in this profession who feel the same way but won't admit it."

French fits into a special category: He is what might be known as a Visionary. When a stodgy scientist refers to a colleague as a "Visionary" there is often a slight tonal modulation in the word, to indicate a degree of contempt. You can tell the Visionaries by sight--they're the ones who look like they're set to be suited up for the next launch. French, unlike many of his more Earthbound colleagues, thinks the sheer adventure is reason enough to go into space. Merely sending machines doesn't satisfy his deeper urges.

"If your sole justification is science, then probably the unmanned exploration is justified. But I feel the reasons for manned exploration are considerably beyond just the scientific knowledge. I think a certain selected subset of the human race really has an itch to go out and plant their own feet, to start a colony, just as the Europeans started colonies in the new world. Some people will say we already have enough problems right here on Earth, and we should just sit on it and not go anywhere. To be crude, that's a lot of crap. You can't quit trying to expand. History is littered with the bones of civilizations that have refused to explore and expand."

But then his voice gets a pained edge to it. For stargazers, cosmic enlightenment has had its disappointments. Mars was supposed to be alive. Space travel was supposed to become more commonplace. The Jim Frenches who came of age in the 1960s thought star trekking would be easy and inevitable.

"It's not as easy as Flash Gordon made it look," French says.

As the interview ends, he scrunches up one eye.

"Have you talked to Bob Forward?"

Bob Forward. We'd heard of him. We'd hear of him again.

On to Building 183. Photographs of the moons of Uranus are tacked to corkboard along a hallway on the seventh floor. Rich Terrile, an intense young astronomer, is talking with Fisher Dilke, a tweedy science correspondent for the British Broadcasting Company. Dilke has the skeptical look of a journalist; Terrile the manic eyes of a Visionary.

"We sacrificed seven lives and two billion dollars worth of spacecraft to launch a communications satellite," Terrile says of the Challenger disaster. He is arguing the case for unmanned space travel: Looking through the eyes of Voyager, he says, "I've flown the dark side of Uranus, out of communication with Earth, I've seen the rings of Saturn, backlit by the Sun, I've seen erupting volcanoes on Io. I've been to so many places where I would have died from radiation poisoning."

Fisher Dilke, the BBC man, says, "We all suffer from Hollywood-itis, we love to have some blond, blue-eyed person up there for it to make any sense to us."

Terrile says, "There is romance in our type of science. Very few people understand that."

Dilke, agreeing, says, "You're really interested in what the places are like, not what kind of personal adventure someone is having while getting there." By this time Torrence Johnson, another astronomer and a very clean-cut one at that, has walked into the hallway.

"I'm a Trekkie," Johnson says, "and given my druthers, I'd like to visit these places on the bridge of the Enterprise. I love dashing down black holes and across warps in space. But my opinion is that the light barrier is a major problem. It may be built into the fabric of the universe. And that's discouraging to real life Star-Wars-dashing-about."

The light barrier. We would hear more about that.

The scientists end their conversation with a suggestion:

Talk to a guy named Bob Forward.

Building 180 is a tall glassy obelisk, not unlike a giant silicon chip, so wafer-thin it could almost serve as a facade for something else. This is the administrative headquarters, center of the 6,500 employee complex. Lew Allen, director of the Lab, is a Visionary. He is keen on interstellar missions. He has a liberal conception of Time. But this morning he is tied up with a team of congressmen and technocrats, who have come to town to talk disaster. They want to know what Challenger will mean for the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Ulysses probe to the Sun. The people from Washington are not Visionaries. They are bean-counters. They have trouble conceiving of Time in dimensions broader than a fiscal year.

Downstairs, in the public affairs office, a man is yelling into a phone: "It's just an awesome mess, because everything NASA does is built around the dumb shuttle."

The dumb shuttle. Though sickened by the death of seven astronauts and the loss of a $1.2 billion spacecraft, the people here feel a twinge of vindication for their own brand of space travel--the kind without people, just machines. Voyager II had just whipped by Uranus and performed perfectly. Why send people into space when machines can do the job just as well and often better? Whatever happened to just rocketing the stuff up there? If the thing blows, nobody'll care but the insurance company. The Lab understands this concept because back in the good old days it blew up and crash-landed rockets like a kid playing a video game.

"That was way back in the days when it was easy to do things," says a little old man with wispy eyebrows who has walked into the public affairs office. He turns to a PR man, and says, "I need a videotape of Ranger 7 crash-landing."

The little old man turns out to be William Pickering, the 76-year-old former director of the Lab, the man who oversaw the launching of Explorer 1 in 1958. He's given up on space. He manufactures fuel pellets in Idaho. Sometimes he lectures. He has to give a talk on Ranger 7 at an aerospace conference.

Pronto comes the videotape. Pickering, quick on his feet, leaves the building and crosses the courtyard to an auditorium, where he announces, "I'm Pickering." Recognized as a VIP, he is led into a cluttered storage room. He loops the tape through a machine called a previewer module. The pictures are black and white. (This was 1964, after all.) A photograph of the Moon's surface appears on the screen, then another one from slightly closer, then another, descending to the pocked lunar surface, where craters lie within craters. A narrator speaks: "One hundred miles to impact . . . Fifty miles to the Moon . . . 25 miles . . . "

The last picture is from 1 1/2 miles up. Then: FOOM!

Pickering looks happy. Those were the days, when the craving to go into space was so feverish you could smash machines with impunity.

Failures? Pickering saw loads of them. Explorer 2 never made it off the launch pad. The first Pioneer probe rose 10 miles and blew up. Pioneer 2, Pioneer 3, Pioneer P-3 and Pioneer P-30 all blasted off successfully, bound for the Moon, but each one crashed into Africa. Pioneer 4 was supposed to take pictures of the Moon but went thousands of miles off course. Pioneer P-1 exploded during a launch-pad test. Pioneer P-31 climbed nine miles and blew up.

Ranger 1 went into the wrong orbit. Ranger 3 was supposed to hit the Moon but missed by 22,862 miles. Ranger 4, as planned, smashed into the Moon, but it did not manage to send back any data. Ranger 5 suffered a failure of the "switching and logic circuitry" and missed the moon by about 500 miles. Ranger 6 hit the Moon a mere 15 miles from the aiming point, but the camera failed.

Mariner 3 was supposed to go to Mars but it ended up in orbit around the Sun. Surveyor 2 was supposed to soft-land on the Moon, but it began tumbling out of control and smashed to the surface near the crater Copernicus. Surveyor 4 was supposed to soft-land in the same area, but 2 1/2 minutes before touchdown it suddenly blipped off the control screens back on Earth, for reasons that are still unclear.

And the space program went on, as though driven by instinct. Because the perpetuation of the species disallows the memory of pain. Because there also were great successes. And because in any case, these were just machines.

"What are we doing out here, anyway? We bring pain and trouble with us. What are we doing out here in space? Good? What good? If man was meant to fly, he'd have wings. If he was supposed to be out in space he wouldn't need air to breathe, wouldn't need life-support systems to keep from freezing to death. We don't belong here. It's not ours. Not ours."

--Joey, crewman contaminated by mysterious brain disease, Star Trek episode, The Naked Time.

There is something peculiar about the Lab. People here are talking about raw, crude, subtle, arcane, empirical knowledge. They are talking about science. And that is strange to hear in the context of space travel, because of all the reasons that America has been going into space since 1958 there is hardly a one that has anything, anything at all, to do with science.

There were more pressing reasons. National pride. Military superiority. Adventure.

History tells us that all great voyages come during a country's cultural upswing, that there must be both the ability and the will to explore, and this in the 1960s was a better description of the United States than of the Soviet Union. So we reached the Moon and they didn't.

The golden age of space travel ended almost as soon as Apollo 11 returned to Earth. A Vietnam- induced malaise set in, a disenchantment with the expenditures, with the linkage to the military, with those big bomb-like rockets. With the exception of Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz mission (a stunt on behalf of detente), the manned space program petered out. NASA's budget, which had reached $5.6 billion in 1966, bottomed out in 1974 at $3.2 billion. The emotional nadir came in 1977, when, after a stunning technological success, the two Viking landers scratched the surface of Mars and found only sand.

Renaissance came in 1981. The space shuttle Columbia blasted off, and suddenly space flight was starting to become as the Visionaries had dreamed it--casual, regular, ubiquitous, not even front-page news. Ronald Reagan is another reason for the Renaissance. His plan for a Star Wars nuclear defense requires great strides in aerospace technology. NASA's budget in 1985 set a record at about $7.3 billion. In 1984, in his State of the Union Address, Reagan set four major goals for the United States, one of which was "to build on America's pioneer spirit and develop our next frontier--space."

Reagan focused on the construction of a permanently manned space station, NASA's next big project. He said the station will enable the nation "to follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain."

To distant stars. The president said that.

Then the space shuttle blew up.

At a memorial service three days later in Houston, the president said "the frontier is space and boundaries of human knowledge. Sometimes when we reach for the stars, we fall short. But we must pick ourselves up again and press on despite the pain.

"Man," he said, "will continue his conquest of space."

The novelty of space travel has worn off, but our leaders still portray the cosmos as an Alaska- style frontier, the conquest of which is essential to our self-respect, to the expression of our humanity, to the exercise of our native courage.

We share a desire, largely subconscious in the modern era, to spread our way of thinking, our vision of God. On the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, rocket genius Wernher von Braun said, "Through a closer look at creation, we ought to gain a better knowledge of the Creator."

When the white man rolled across the North American continent and wiped out the native population, the justification was codified in a simple term: Manifest Destiny. It was the white man's destiny, granted by divine Providence, to occupy this land, and the heathen be damned.

Of course, we don't believe in Manifest Destiny anymore. At least no one calls it that. Flickering marches back out in the courtyard and stops in front of a large diagram that shows the path of the two Voyager spacecrafts. The diagram is for visitors, a place for snapshots. The board shows Voyager I slanting away from Saturn into the void beyond the solar system. Voyager II is curling past Uranus. A sign says:

Voyager II

Speed Rel Uranus 33,106 mph

Speed Rel Sun 44,192 mhp

Voyager is traveling at two different speeds, at the same time. It just depends on how you look at it.

Einstein is the cause of this confusion. Einstein destroyed once and for all the notion of fixed space. His Theory of Relativity is aptly named, because he revealed that time and space--and motion, velocity, acceleration--are "relative" values. We say that a walking child is moving and the sidewalk underfoot is stationary, and yet Einstein told us that it is no less accurate to say that the child is stationary and the sidewalk moving. At the dawn of the Modern era, Einstein eradicated the world of absolutes.

"There is no absolute point in space. That's what Mr. Einstein said," Pickering says. He tries to explain: "If I measure the speed of light beamed in the direction that the Earth is moving, and in the direction away from where the Earth is moving, the speed is the same. . . . "

He trails off. The theory is universally accepted, and yet it still defies easy description.

What Pickering is talking about is Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, an idea very hostile to space travel. Einstein, to state the case in its most dramatic terms, is one of the two great conspirators in trapping the human race in the Near Universe.

The other is God. Let us start with Him and come back to Einstein.

God made the universe too big.

The stars are too far apart. The distances are insuperable. There is too much void.

The vastness of the universe has been comprehended with varying levels of sophistication by astronomers since the time of the ancient Greeks. Today any schoolkid can tell you that the universe is a very large place.

Yet very few people fully grasp the orders of magnitude involved. The scale is simply so great that the human mind has trouble making room for the dimensions. The old simile that the Earth is like a grain in the Sahara of the universe is easy to say, but hard to register. As a general rule, only the pros are able to roll over in their mind an accurate picture of the universe, only the pros know how pathetically small, how granular is our own world. The revelation is enough to change a person.

Charles Seeger, astronomer: "As a result of thinking about physics and the size of the universe, I have come to some clear conclusions that most of the people on Earth do not come to, which is that I am the natural result of the workings of certain physical laws in the universe. I'm just a particular item, just as Sirius is a particular star. It allows me to look at theuniverse and not expect that it gives one goddamn about me. We can't expect the universe to be in our favor. It may help us or it may hurt us drastically."

Let us try to communicate the scale in terms of space travel.

The Pioneer 10 spacecraft, launched in 1972 to take pictures of Jupiter and Saturn, didn't make it out of our solar system until 1983. It carries a plaque with drawings and codes that tell aliens about the Earth. The ship is traveling several times faster than the space shuttle at maximum speed. At this rate, it will make its nearest approach to the nearest star in 26,135 years.

The next generation of spacecraft will be faster. They will probably use what is called "nuclear electric" propulsion. Instead of a 10-minute rocket burst, these spacecraft will accelerate slowly over time, building up speeds many times greater than Pioneer 10. They will cut the trip to the nearest star down to about 5,000 years.

Light itself--hustling along at 186,000 miles per second--takes more than four years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which unfortunately shows no sign of having planets or supporting life. To get to Beta Pictoris, the nearest star thought likely to have a planet or two, it would take 52 years. One way. Nothing can move faster than that. Nothing ever will.

This is Einstein's fault. His Special Theory of Relativity shows that 186,000 miles per second is the speed limit of the universe. The proof is complex, but it is universally accepted. Universally accepted. One cannot easily find a scientist who questions the Special Theory of Relativity.

Space cadets are quick to exploit Einstein's revelation about one-way time travel. Einstein showed that a spacecraft nearing the speed of light will experience a compression of time, so that, although years may pass on Earth, up in the spaceship the astronauts will age only a few months. But one has to be extremely close to the speed of light for there to be any noticeable effect. At the speed of light itself, there will be no sense of time at all. A spaceman could point himself at an object five billion light-years away, a third of the distance across the known universe, and suddenly just be there. But this doesn't solve the problems back home, where, in the meantime, the Sun would have become unstable, expanded, shed its outer layer in a huge explosion, destroyed the Earth and then shrunk back to a tiny, slowly darkening ball of white fire.

The truth is very simple, or at least it appears very simple in 1986: God and Einstein have confined the human race to one small corner of a certain spiral galaxy. The view is very good, but there is only one decent place to live.

Kirk: "Phaser banks, lock onto the enemy vessel."

Sulu: "They must know we're after them. They've gone to Warp 6 also."

Kirk: "Warp factor 7."

Spock: "A sustained Warp 7 speed will be dangerous, Captain."

Kirk: "Thank you, Mr. Spock. I aim to catch them."

Scotty: "We'll either catch them or blow up, Captain. They may be faster than we are."

Kirk: "They'll have to prove it."

Sulu: "Alien ship now at Warp 7."

Kirk: "Warp factor 8."

(Spock, Scotty and Sulu stare at Kirk in amazement. Music pounds.)

Sulu: "Aye aye, Captain."

--Star Trek episode, "Arena."

Maybe Einstein's wrong.

This would be the first comment of the many people who believe--who passionately hope--that Star Trek will come true. Richard Arnold, the curator of virtually all existing Star Trek prints at the Paramount studio in Los Angeles, a man who goes to 80 Star Trek conventions a year, gets very defensive if someone questions the scientific veracity of his favorite show. He's touchy about warp drive (warp 1 is the speed of light, warp 2 is the speed of light squared, warp 3 the speed of light cubed, and so on). He says, "Everything in Star Trek was thoroughly researched by scientists."

Asked about the light barrier, Arnold insisted that waves have been discovered that travel faster than the speed of light. He said he learned this on "some show that Carl Sagan was on."

Alas, it is not a fact. It is not true.

But what exactly (just for the sake of argument) is so farfetched about warp drive?

What about hyperspace?

What about bending space?

We went up to the seventh floor of Building 180 to see a senior staff scientist named Al Hibbs. Hibbs is one of the few Lab employees who is trusted to go on television, because he talks like a normal person. He was the Voice of Voyager.

Hibbs says all the young turks at the Lab want to go to the stars.

"Every young engineer who comes here has looked at that idea on his own, and has always been frustrated that the answer (to how long it would take a ship to get to the nearest star) comes out to be 5,000 to 10,000 years."

But what about warp drive?

"We don't know what the words mean."

Hyperspace? Bending space?

"Just words."

There is a danger writing about the future of science. Any prediction seems to stand a better chance of being wrong than being right. The cliche says: A hundred years ago no one dreamed of going to the Moon. How can we presume to know what will happen next?

But that may be too cautious. A lot of good science has gone down in the past 100 years, and we are better than ever at knowing the kinds of breakthroughs that we might see in the future. Physicists now seriously discuss the possibility that they may eventually have an essentially complete understanding of how the universe works.

Since Einstein's day the most vigorous quest has been for a "unified field theory" that would interconnect the four major forces in the universe--gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Since those forces explain just about every phenomenon that can be observed or experimentally created, no one expects to discover a major new force (say, "thought power") that would change the nature of space travel. At this point space travel is looking more and more like a problem not of physics but biology. We don't live long enough.

A common rule of thumb in anticipating scientific advances is this: If a scientist says a given venture can't be done because it is too costly, then there is still hope. Costs change. But if the scientist says it can't be done because, say, it would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then there is not much hope.

Even if there is some secret force or power out there, awaiting our inspired gaze, there remains another obstacle to star travel: National will. A society has to be fairly healthy, fairly happy, to make an investment in space. Consider this: We have the technology to send people to Mars, but we haven't done it. We may in the next decade. The aerospace community is gung-ho. But there remains the question of will, inextricably linked with a stickier issue: Why go to a dead world?

And then there is space colonization, dogged forever by a paradox: A society so desperate and troubled that it would need to expand into space couldn't afford to do so. And if it could, would the problems be left behind?

Space travel is like a Great Society program, in that it asks the federal government to assume a task that is purportedly in the best interest of mankind but for which there seems to be no private sector incentive. Despite the bluster about the economic bonuses of space travel (such as the manufacture of drugs in zero gravity), it is still a losing venture, financially.

Al Hibbs, for one, always thought we'd have made it to Mars by the mid-1980s.

"The schedules that we conceived when this all began were much more rapid," Hibbs sighs. "Space travel," he says, "is more difficult, technologically, than we anticipated."

But Hibbs, as if not to close the door altogether, says, "There's a guy you should talk to, named Bob F--"

Right, right.

We find Bob Forward by driving west on the Ventura Highway, down the length of the San Fernando Valley, then south into the mountains that guard the coast. Past the crest, through a tunnel in the rock, the road rounds a spur in the mountain and suddenly opens up into a view of the Pacific far below. And just then there is a driveway on the right, and a T-shaped building, jammed into the side of the mountain, several hundred feet above the village of Malibu, among the pines. This place is called the Hughes Research Labs, and it is owned by Hughes Aircraft, which in turn is owned by General Motors.

This is where Bob Forward works.

He is waiting at the entrance. He has a big pink face, shocking white hair, and an ample waistline. His suit pants have a sheen that suggests Miami Vice, but then there is his vest, which is psychedelic, striped in every mod color. He wears a white bow tie. Bob Forward could be a tour guide for children at a candy factory.

He has many jobs here. But there is one thing he does that makes him unique. He is supposed to think about a question, and try to answer it:

Will mankind ever reach the stars?

After a warm greeting he goes to his office and plops down behind a video display terminal. His office is filled with his publications, with such titles as "Anti-Proton Annihilation Propulsion" and "Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails." He has argued that it is theoretically possible to drive a ship with large amounts of negatively charged anti-matter, which turns into almost pure energy when it touches regular matter. He also has proposed the placement of a giant laser around the Sun, which would beam to a 500-kilometer lens hovering between Saturn and Uranus, which would in turn narrow the beam sufficiently to reach a solar-sailing spacecraft at Alpha Centauri. There's nothing wrong with his math. The engineering--and the money, and the patience--just isn't there. The materials would have to be too lightweight, too strong; anti-matter has been produced in labs, but there is no way to store more than the most minute amounts.

On the bookshelf are some of his science fiction novels. He writes them on the side.

"In my first book," he says, "I described life on a neutron star. I figured out that the aliens would be about the size of a sesame seed. They weigh about as much as we do, but they're tiny. I worked out their biology. They're built like a slug with 12 eyes. They don't have a front or a back. They make love with their eyes, all 12 at the same time.

"They also live about a million times faster than we do, because they use nuclear chemistry instead of electron chemistry. One second for us is like a week to them."

In his novel, humans go out to visit the neutron star.

"It's only 20 miles across. When the humans arrive, the aliens are savages. They see the humans arrive and they think that's amazing. They try to figure it out, and in the process they develop mathematics, and they develop writing, and they stop being savages. That takes half a day, human-time. They decide this (spaceship) is God, and they build a temple to it. It takes less than a minute. The humans realize there's something down there. There's no way to talk to them, so they just dump the ship's computer encyclopedia down. The aliens develop a civilization, they develop space travel, they develop faster than light drives, and then we erase our computer files and they start teaching us. And that's where the story ends. The whole book takes place in one day."

He pauses from this long narrative, takes a breath, and says, "Starquake, the sequel, takes another day."

We tell him that we came to find out the answer to a question: the question of man's destiny in space, the question of reaching the stars. He listens attentively and then says, "We were very lucky that God put the Moon where he did, because it made that first step so easy. It would be nice if there was a star about a tenth of a light- year away, with some planets around it, because we could go visit it in less than the lifetime of a human being. Unfortunately the stars are not that close. If we were living in a typical globular cluster, they would be. But we're living in the boondocks.

"I don't see an unmanned interstellar probe going for 50 years. I'd like to see it happen before I die, but I don't think it will."

He walks outside and leans against a railing. The sun is obscured by a February haze, but the view to Malibu is clear. The Pacific barely ripples, true to its name.

He leans against the railing and looks at the ocean far below, and says, "It's going to be about 200 years before human beings go to the stars. By then we'll be a lot smarter and wiser."

The wise man has spoken. The wise man says that the destiny of human beings is in the stars.

But then he clarifies himself. He looks far beyond the shore, and says:

"I really prefer to think of myself not as a human being, but as an intelligent being. I happen to be made out of meat and bone and blood, and I happen to use ionic currents to do my thinking. A couple of hundred years from now we will finally have intelligent beings that will be using silicon and gallium arsenide to do their thinking.

"They will probably be smarter than we are because they'll think faster than we do. The intellectual community is ultimately going to have intellectual children, but they're not going to be made of meat and bone. They will do the exploring."

Bob Forward is talking about robots.

There is a disturbing conclusion--suspicion, rather--that comes from talking to the Visionaries, and from comparing the cosmological facts that we see on paper with the cosmological spectacle that we see up in the sky: Space has tricked us.

So hypnotic is its beauty that we tend to forget the harshness of it. When the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey showed a large space station slowly orbiting above Earth while the soundtrack played Strauss' The Blue Danube, the viewer had to wish that it would come true, so powerful was the image. And yet what kind of environment is space? Space is literally the absence of anything. There is no air. No resources. The temperature borders on absolute zero. There is no pressure. The solar radiation is lethally intense. The empty continent of Antarctica is a more hospitable environment for a colony. In space only massive feats of engineering could keep a person alive. That engineering prowess, that commitment of energy, could go toward the saving of the Earth.

And yet . . . The Blue Danube.

Space has hypnotized the human race into believing that what we see at night is an unlimited frontier. And yet there seems to be no way for mortal man to breach the void beyond our own star system. Curse the indestructible light wave! It can travel a billion light-years, 10 billion, 15 billion, travel the void from the edge of the universe, from the beginning of time itself, until finally it reaches the lens of our most powerful telescopes, beckoning us to go where we cannot. The stars are visually but not physically accessible, they merely serve to taunt us.

Copyright (c) 1986 The Miami Herald
Section: TROPIC