Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery

by Stephen J. Pyne

  Then he realized it wouldn’t; not in his lifetime, not outside science fiction novels. The spectacular supernova of exploring that Voyager had “epitomized” he came to regard as “a very brief anomaly,” one that expressed a “combination of politics and economics and technology” that had allowed American society to rush through a phase at “an extraordinary rate” before hitting a limit. He raised the possibility that there would be no further escalation to the stars, that “this was the end,” that it was “the end of adolescence for humanity,” that “we’ll have to learn to live within the space we have, physically and intellectually.” In the unmanned exploration of the solar system, he thought “we’ve already reached the limits of what we’re going to be doing. We’re not going to the nearest star.” Voyager, he believed, was “a symbol” and an “extraordinary historical event.” But it also raised questions about whether such rates of activity were “unsupportable.” Murray concluded they were: it was not possible to “keep exploring like that.” There would be a falloff, which he found both depressing and impossible to stop. He wondered what such a lapse might mean for a society that “has always been expanding.”231

  Space proponents hated the meditation. Even close friends like Philip Morrison and Carl Sagan found that such prospects “violated their intuitive beliefs.” But the longer the American space program continues, the longer exists the empirical record of what the public will support, and what out of the general “space” budget it will expend on genuine exploration. In 2007 the NASA budget for planetary exploration was some $3 billion. This was more than the American college textbook and resale market ($2.3 billion), and less than the estimated sales from fast food restaurants in Los Angeles ($3.4 billion). That same year, the National Football League and Major League Baseball each accrued roughly $6 billion in revenue. Those who claimed in the early 1960s that the space program would inaugurate an economic revolution had been proved wildly wrong. 232

  Planetary exploration, in particular, was a significant but niche enterprise, larger than handmade soap and self-publishing, smaller than professional sports and movies. It was, in brief, a cost that society justified as it did much scientific research and art museums. Observatories in space were on par with opera houses, and for similar reasons: they were a chosen, discretionary cultural activity, and to a large extent, an elite activity. They satisfied social needs and yearnings. They might vanish if alternate or surrogate activities could meet those desires. Society might choose instead to colonize cyberspace. It might prefer virtual exploration and extreme sports.

  How does a society respond to the passing of a golden age? Some would reverse the stance of King Knute trying to halt the rising tide and stem its ebb. The danger especially exists of the quixotic turn, the determination to pursue the old glories and chivalry into new times. The scene abounds with fancied Isaiahs and aspiring Cassandras, alternately warning and threatening, all abuzz with prophecies and jeremiads. But an exploring age integrates too many activities to respond to rhetoric and vision alone.

  If the social order doesn’t collapse entirely, golden ages segue into silver ones. These tend to be more broadly based, less given to heroic posturing, more prone to irony and a sense of constraint. In place of new initiatives, its participants fill out the old agenda, stabilize and firm up its institutional foundations, and replace raw if grand gestures with more polished manners and elegant phrasing. The edge is off. Steady work replaces inspiration. Rude narratives become textbooks. Epic poems become eclogues and elegies. For exploration, bold traverses into the wild give way to trading posts, land surveys, and intercultural exchanges. It is not that participants are less hardy or courageous or clever; they just perform in a different context, in new settings of time and place. Besides, massive programs create a kind of wake turbulence after their passage. The institution pauses; a sequel requires a caesura.

  Something like this has happened with planetary exploration. After a hard crash, programs have recovered equilibrium. Complex single missions have taken Magellan to Venus, Galileo to Jupiter, Cassini to Saturn, and Huygens to Titan, and a small fleet of rovers and orbital observers to Mars. These are brilliant, successful missions, but they necessarily lack the zest of the vision quest and the drama of first-time encounter. Perhaps from a vantage point in the distant future, everything from Mariner 2 to the New Horizons mission to Pluto and other expeditions yet to launch will all merge into a single, heroic panorama. But from the perspective of those present when Voyager completed its Grand Tour, a golden age had declined into a silver one and struggled not to sink into bronze.

  PARTING, TWO

  As the adage goes, it’s better to be lucky than good. The Voyagers were both. They were lucky in the providential alignment of a Grand Tour and a golden age, lucky in their handlers and their determination to rescue them from a shaky launch, lucky in that their revelations beat those from orbiting telescopes. It was good in that they didn’t just hit their designated target as Viking did at Mars, or orbit a planet endlessly like Pioneer Venus. They spanned the solar system.

  Voyager was, in Bruce Murray’s words, “a concatenation of really good people, good ideas, support by society, luck in the engineering sense and luck in the scientific sense.” The mission was “always successful.” And more than any other space enterprise, it has lasted. It has outlived all its competitors. It has renewed itself. It has retained the capacity to discover. “History is what you write when a mission is over,” Murray observed in 1997, but “this mission keeps on going.”233

  It continued after Neptune. Voyager 1 still arced upward toward the heliosphere, one final task remaining for the Grand Tour. Voyager 2 spun downward, also on a trajectory to termination shock. Both continued to sample the interplanetary medium and report back to Earth, still going. They are still going today.

  DAY 3,950—∞

  19. Cruise

  Once again, the Voyager staff began to turn off instruments. Those most closely linked with hard-geography science went first, along with those most prone to guzzle power and hydrazine. But this time some would never be revived. Infrared sensors, imaging systems, the photoelectric photometer—these were instruments designed to inventory worlds, and the Voyagers had no more worlds to visit.

  Even the exploration of the solar system’s soft geography was reaching a terminus. Time and again, planet after planet, encounter had begun and ended with bow shock, that fluid, twisting field where the planet’s magnetosphere collided with the solar wind. Now there remained one last such border, the heliopause, a thick fringe of ions and rays, where the Sun’s magnetosphere met the interstellar medium. “Termination shock,” its inner edge was called, and that phrase might stand not only for the clashing of electromagnetic fields but for the Grand Tour itself.

  This time, too, there were no further burns or gravity assists. The trajectory each spacecraft had was the trajectory it would always have. The Voyagers’ pasts set their futures.

  TRIANGULATING THE THIRD AGE

  Why does a society explore? For many reasons, but at base because it chooses to, and it chooses to because the enterprise appeals to felt needs. What makes exploration powerful is that it bundles those longings into compelling packages and sends them on a journey. Over time some pieces are lost and some added, and the assemblage bonds to its culture with weaker or stronger valences. When those mixings give rise to qualitative change, they can spark great ages of discovery; the Third Age is such a moment.

  But how to parse the significant new from the enduring old? The space program’s instinct to look back as well as ahead may help. The program had begun by looking back. It looked back to Columbus for an exploring legacy, back to America’s westering frontier for a past that it could project forward, and back to the memory of a murdered president who first set the lunar lander on its way. Its most celebrated crewed and robotic missions framed their images of the future with glances back to Earth. Apollo 8 gave us earthrise, and Apollo 17 the whole Earth. Voyager framed the
Grand Tour with a first look back to Earth and its Moon and a last look back at the solar system. Along the way it framed its discoveries by backsiting on the eruptions of Io and Triton, by backlighting Jupiter’s storms and Saturn’s rings, and by sculpted backviewing of Uranus and Neptune that transformed their cloudy murk into haunting crescents of light.

  In a similar way Voyager has looked back on the long chronicle of geographic exploration by the West, and in so doing it has highlighted those features of the Third Age that are most distinctive. What they share is that the Third Age is going where no one is or ever has been. In past ages, geographic discovery had to be done by people. There was no other option by which to learn the languages, to record data and impressions, to gather specimens, to meet other societies and translate their accumulated wisdom. It is impossible to imagine the great expeditions of the past without considering the personality of individual explorers who inspired, collected, witnessed, fought, wrote, sketched, exulted, feared, suffered, and otherwise expressed the aspirations and alarms of their civilization. But it is entirely possible to do so now. Not only is there no encounter between people, there need not even be a human encounterer.

  The geographic realms of the Third Age are not places where people learn from indigenes or live off the land. These are environs that offer no sustaining ecosystems; their geographies remain, for all practical purposes, abiotic and acultural worlds. If the Third Age has propelled exploration beyond the ethnocentric realm of Western discovery, it has also thrust it beyond the sphere of the human and, with regard to space, perhaps beyond the provenance of life. No one will live off the land on Demos, go native on Titan, absorb the art of Venus, the mythology of Uranus, the religious precepts of Mars, or the literature of Ceres. There will be no one to talk to except ourselves.

  This is a cultural barrier to exploration, in comparison to which the limiting velocity of light may prove a mere technological inconvenience. The reason goes to the heart of exploration: that it is not simply an expression of curiosity but also involves the encounter with a world beyond our ken that challenges our sense of who we are. It is a moral act, one often tragic, that bonds discovery to society. It means that exploration is more than adventuring, more than entertainment, more than inquisitiveness. It means that exploration asks, if indirectly, core questions about what the exploring people are like. In the past this happened when one people met another. In the future it won’t, and the explorer is most likely to be a robotic surrogate.

  The good news is that the coruscating ethical dilemmas of so much earlier exploring and empire building will disappear. No group need expand at the expense of another. Ethnocentricity will vanish: there is only one culture, that of the explorer. As long as other life or cultures are not present, there is no ethical or political crisis except whatever we choose to impose on ourselves. Beyond Earth there may well be no morality as traditionally understood, that is, as a means of shaping behavior between peoples. The morality at issue is one of the self, not between the self and an Other.

  The bad news is that exploration’s moral power—the tension, awful and enlightening both, that is involved in a clash of cultures—also vanishes. The price of ethically sanitizing exploration is to strip it of compelling human drama and the kind of narrative and poetry and epic tragedy that have historically joined heart to head. Planetary probes become technical challenges, to make machines to withstand the rigors of space travel, a technological equivalent to extreme sports, like white-water kayaking in Borneo or racing in NASCAR’s Daytona 500. The space enterprise may become a kind of national hobby, a jobs program, or a daytime TV soap opera.

  People do not have to be physically present at the discoveries of the Third Age, and there are sound reasons for arguing that they should not be. Even if colonization is attempted, successful settlements historically followed after long gestation periods of reconnaissance with aid from indigenes. More likely is an era of space tourism or historical reenactment. A risk is that partisans will try to force the Third Age into an earlier model that no longer connects to the lived world, or that they will choose to indulge in digital or chemical surrogates, or that they might simply give up on the project altogether.

  COURSE CORRECTIONS: THE FUTURES OF EXPLORATION

  As the Grand Tour faded, space exploration, too, seems to have entered a long cruise phase. Although the Voyagers have no more course corrections scheduled, some are possible—and likely—for the tradition of exploration they embody, and would point that larger enterprise to its future, which is less a spectrum of choices than a constellation of options from which various patterns might be traced. Three figurations, in particular, seem plausible. One points to cyberspace; one to a Third Age that, in closing, might also close the Great Ages; and one to an untraditional narrative in which the journey becomes its own purpose.

  The first prospect assumes that exploration is a response to humans’ need to know bonded to the stimulus of adventure, and asserts that it will not be possible to shut those instincts off. Technology will continue to make them possible. From its origins, in fact, space travel has exhibited just such a hybrid of people and machines. Humans must rely on an artificial habitat; and spacecraft and rovers must possess a degree of autonomy. Designers have even come to speak of an “embodied experience” with regard to Mars rovers such that robots not only behave more like people, but that people identify with, and behave more in conformity with, the robots.234

  But this might lead to a virtualized exploration. After all, curiosity can be satisfied by many means. Literature, art, laboratory science, invention, travel, collecting—individuals and societies have filled, and overtopped, their urge for the curious (and avoided boredom) in many ways. Scholars have spent lifetimes pondering Shakespeare without exhaustion. Researches in field and lab have proved unbounded if not infinite. Geographic exploration is only one anodyne among an infinite set. Already both planetary and oceanographic discovery have apparatuses by which distant observers, far removed from the operational staff, can share in discovery by watching in real time through the same cameras. Geographic exploration is no longer something that an individual alone must do or experience; it can occur among millions simultaneously. It is only a short mutation of technology and a hop-skip of faith to have exploration venture into cyberspace altogether.

  Engineers might take the process further. Science might find what physiological triggers exploration satisfies, and technology might discover ways to satisfy them without the bother and boredom of trekking, just as vitamin C can be distilled from oranges into a pill or amphetamines can bring a rush that in the past had to come from danger and adventure. The old quarrel between robots and astronauts might pale before the opportunity for virtual exploration. One could experience the ecstasy of first-contact discovery without the annoyance of first-contact mosquitoes, fevers, troublesome natives, unreliable collaborators, and a nature reluctant to yield its secrets.

  Each of the motives bundled into exploration might be separately satisfied by other means. The reductionism that allows science to express itself in machines might equally be applied to disaggregate the experience of exploring and to address each urge independently of the others. It would be but a series of short steps to go from remote sensing to remote exploring to virtual exploring. Already NASA has Web sites devoted to the task. The massively multiplayer online game Second Life has an exploring option, an island named CoLab, operated by NASA Ames Research Center. Here, it is hoped, a new generation can develop a “vision for space exploration” where “participatory exploration” could emerge and where earthlings’ avatars might join astronauts as they return to the Moon. The island could serve as a “portal” to new, virtual worlds. A cyber Ocean Sea has again been populated with imagined isles awaiting discoverers.235

  Will such exercises consume the varied cultural urges that exploration has, for half a millennium, satisfied for Western civilization? Virtual reality is rolling over one frontier after another. A generation that has
grown up immersed in high-tech gadgets may respond less to their ambient environment than to their digital one; their community is what they connect to electronically. Already nature enthusiasts are vocally worrying about the future of conservation as children come to experience nature not from personal contact but by digital simulacra. Will exploration be next? Could designer drugs trigger the ventral striatum to release neurostimulators such as dopamine in the absence of tangible stimuli? Could a tamed exploration-designed LSD allow “trips” through space? Could cyberspace supply the wonder without the bother? Perhaps. Almost certainly the exploring tradition will adjust. And if it does not expire, it might, like big game hunting, morph into surrogates such as nature tourism or digital voyeurism, or become ceremonial, as with reenactments of Civil War battles.

  In the end exploration will remain a cultural creation, and it will assume the character of its sustaining society. How that civilization hybridizes with its technologies will shape the future of geographic discovery and decide the future cadences of cruising and encountering.

  A second option points to the rhythms of great ages, and suggests not only that the Third Age, too, will wax and then wane, but that its ebb might take the ages with it. In this conception, if the Voyagers could see beyond the termination shock of the golden age, they would find a future exploration that may look a lot like the past, only different. Exploration will go back to the future, with the Third Age recapitulating the First, and then perhaps reverting to its pre-exploring ancestry.