Even if the grand objective of a man in space is not attained for a long time to come, many of the scientists on the project are convinced that their work will bring about some fairly immediate benefits on earth. Animals that are to be catapulted into space in the near future, for instance, will have instruments attached to their bodies that will send back data on their physiological reactions, and these instruments—very possibly like those that were attached to the late Laika—may have their medical uses here and now. Heart action, brain waves, changes in both deep and superficial reflexes, and a wide variety of other information will be recorded, and the effort to develop instruments for this purpose, in the opinion of General Ogle, is hastening the improvement (the miniaturization, for one thing) of many appliances used in terrestrial diagnostic procedures. Moreover, he said, devices that will eventually be used for transmitting data from spaceships may soon be used to send information to centralized hospitals, where panels of specialists can diagnose difficult cases no matter how far away the patients are. “Maybe they’ll save the life of an Ozark woman whose hill doctor is stumped,” General Ogle remarked. Another doctor general, Don Flickinger, who is director of Life Sciences for the Air Research and Development Command, told me that wired monkeys, mice, and rats have already been rocketed and ballooned to high altitudes, though within the earth’s atmosphere, and these, he said, may one day furnish leads for cancer research. He was particularly interested in the fact that certain black mice, dispatched from the Holloman Air Force Base, have white streaks in their fur where cosmic rays hit it. The black fur has never grown back, and this interests the General. “The white streak isn’t just an ordinary burn,” he said. “It represents a deleterious transfer of energy from ray to rodent, and it produces a basic alteration in cell function, though the cells continue to live. Well, what the cancer-re-search people are doing, to put it in basic terms, is to find out all they can about what influences and stimulates and changes the cell.”
Another study that has been speeded up by the man-in-space program is that of the stress hormones, like adrenalin, which accelerate our mental processes and quicken our reflexes. Fear triggers the flow of adrenalin, and adrenalin thereupon intensifies some of the side effects of fear—a faster heartbeat, for instance, and a tendency of the blood to clot. Now some scientists are calculating that if a man were to be given small doses of the stress hormones, he might develop a tolerance for them, and the dangerous effects of anxiety would be brought more or less under control—an achievement that, an Air Force physiologist told me, would benefit people here as well as out in space. “Certainly a space man is going to get the quakes,” he told me, “but no worse than those poor wretches who were tossed to the lions in ancient Rome. A fellow can get just so scared and no more.” As various medical discoveries give us increasing control over the nervous system, General Flickinger said, it may become possible to predict human performance under pressure. “This question is a dilly,” he said. “To tackle it, one has to deal with the whole spectrum of personality, from a genius to an African Bushman, say—a simple fellow with a stomach that tells him he’s hungry and eyes that tell him when the sun goes down. We know right now that if the heart does this and the cerebral cortex that, then, as a functional organism, a particular fellow can do this and that. But to translate this into terms of human performance, of what he will do when the chips are down— that’s something else again. It’s possible that I will have a hand in picking our first space operator, and in any case he’ll surely be someone who has passed all the tests and who has a record of behaving well under stress. But how he’ll behave once he gets up there—all we can do is hope.”
Interesting though the terrestrial by-products of space research may be, the experts are concerned principally with the big prize. They want a man in space, and nothing less will do. Some of them have even begun to wonder exactly why. Some laymen are intrigued by the idea that space stations might have a military value, but not many scientists. In fact, Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, president of the California Institute of Technology, speaking at the Second Symposium on Basic and Applied Science in the Navy, held a few months ago in San Diego, dismissed the whole idea. If any military commander looks forward to launching missiles from Fortress Moon, Dr. DuBridge said, “Well, more power to him! He’ll find the temperature a bit variable— boiling water by day, dry ice by night. And the days and nights are each two weeks long! He will find the lack of air, water and any appreciable or usable source of energy a bit inconvenient. And he will be bothered by the logistic problem of shooting his materials and supplies and weapons and personnel up there in the first place. Why shoot a load of explosives plus all auxiliary equipment two hundred and forty thousand miles to the moon, then two hundred and forty thousand miles back to hit a target only five thousand miles away? I’ll guarantee to shoot a thousand missiles from the U.S. to any point on earth while our moon man is waiting twelve hours, more or less, for the earth to turn around and bring the target into shooting position. Finally ... a bomb projected on a zero-angular-momentum path from the moon to the earth will take just five days to get there. . . . And we will hope the bombardier can figure correctly which side of the earth will be up by then.”
To Dr. Edson, the assistant to the director of Army Research and Development, the exploration of space presents itself not as a potential means of mutual annihilation but as a chance—perhaps our last—to perpetuate the race. His position is that if we can no longer take to the hills, perhaps we can take to the planets. “In olden days,” he told me, “a defeated people could always find a new green valley in which to start life afresh, but that is hardly feasible today. I see but two approaches to our plight. One is to reduce human destructiveness through some international plan. The other is the old one of finding a new green valley, of expanding the range of human habitat, and this can be done only through astronautics. People sense that the race is in peril, and this, I believe, is a powerful, if unstated, reason for the widespread interest in space and space travel.”
Colonel John Paul Stapp, chief of the Aero Medical Laboratory in Dayton and the man who, a few years back, rode a rocket sled at nearly the speed of sound, suspects that “survival euphoria” may be at the bottom of it all—a desire to win out over the near-death that a space journey would involve. “The Chinese say that narrow escapes are like cutting off the Devil’s tail,” he told me, and I was not surprised when I learned later that he has already volunteered to go into space if and when the time comes. A colleague of his had a less adventurous approach. “Live, intelligent individuals have got to go up or we won’t get the information we need,” he said. As for General Ogle, he told me that the urge to send a man up is largely explained by half a sentence from the President’s Science Advisory Committee’s “Introduction to Outer Space,” a White House document issued last spring: “... the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.” Then, perhaps visualizing a man in space with an algae garden and a still unknown defense against weightlessness, he invoked another quotation, this one from Einstein: “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead.”
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* * * *
ROCKETS TO WHERE?
by Judith Merril
“In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything. . . . We need to cherish man’s curiosity, his understanding, his love, so that he may indeed learn what is new and hard and deep. . . .”
“Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on man except man himself.”
* * * *
The first quotation is from an interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer in Look magazine last year. The second is from the “Three Fundamental Laws of Astronautics,” as set
forth in a publication of the American Rocket Society by Krafft A. Ehricke (theorist-designer for the General Dynamics Corporation, and the man responsible for much of the planning that has gone into our ICBM’s, as well as the solving of the re-entry problem and the new plans for a manned orbital vehicle).
Taken together with the words of the late Albert Einstein at the close of the preceding article, these excerpts comprise a potent statement of the essential philosophy of the scientist, a philosophy which has perhaps become essential to all thinking citizens in the “Age of Space.”
The sense of wonder, the desire to know; the will to work at finding out; freedom to learn—but even more vitally the inward freedom implicit in the conviction that man’s capacity for curiosity and for endeavor is the only measure of his potential growth: these are the tenets of world sanity and human survival now. (As ever—but now more than ever.)
To the extent that we can cherish curiosity (learn to question the obvious, rather than accept unthinkingly), cherish understanding (the why? and wherefore? . . . not just the who-what-where-when-how) and cherish love (learn that we need each other more than we need fear each other)—to the extent, in short, that “scientific man” can become thoughtful man—to this extent only can we hope to outlast our own powers of destruction.
* * * *
I understand that a new model Detroit automobile takes eighteen months or more from the drawing board to the dealer’s display room. It is eighteen months, as I write this, since the launching of Sputnik I. In that brief time, we have witnessed so many further “breakthroughs” on so many scientific fronts (not necessarily connected with space flight at all) that to attempt even to summarize them here would be absurd. (The headline in my morning paper said today: PIONEER IV NEARS MOON ON WAY TO DATE WITH SUN!) The record of physical accomplishment, here and abroad, has been so steadily spectacular that I think most of us have lost the faculty for amazement —at engineering feats. But there is still cause for wonder (and lots of it) in another sphere—and that is in the unmeasured, and as yet barely recognizable capacity of the human being for intellectual, spiritual, and emotional attainment.
“The readjustment of attitudes toward the universe” made necessary by the immediate prospect of space flight was compared to “the beginning of the readjustment of man to a round instead of a flat earth,” by The New York Times’ science writer, Richard Witkin, just last year.
I do not think he overstated. And what he asked for was not far short of a miracle—considering that the four hundred years since Copernicus has been inadequate to sell mankind in general on the existence of the solar system.
Not even that comparatively small segment of humanity that we call “Western Culture” was entirely convinced. At least, one generation back, in Arkansas, a teacher could— and did—lose his position for instructing his pupils in contradiction of Solomon’s clearly stated biblical precept that “the earth is flat, has four corners, and is the center of the universe.” (I quote from the decision of the presiding Justice of the Peace. Whether the Copernican heresy is countenanced today in the same small community just south of Little Rock, I do not know.)
We needed a miracle, and it seemed we were little likely to be given one. (Modern miracles have been moved from the Handout Department to Do-It-Yourself.) The truly amazing and heartening thing is that we are showing signs of producing it—eventually.
* * * *
The prevailing pre-Sputnik attitude toward space ran a gamut from tolerance to hilarity.
“Before Sputnik, it was considered bad taste for the military to mention space,” Wernher von Braun said in a Life interview.
“The long-time dream of little children has come true,” one Boston paper started its feature piece on the first satellite. Most of the press preferred to say “science-fiction dream.”
A rather self-consciously courageous editorial in Newsweek (for Oct. 21, 1957) proclaimed our entry into the Age of Space . . . “whether we like it or not.” And plenty of people did not—especially if, as seemed inevitable, there would be Russians up in heaven too.
But even in those first few weeks, the job of psychological retooling had begun. The same issue of Newsweek, for instance, carried a full-page advertisement headed, “Instrumentation—stepping stone to the stars”; and under a science-fictiony illustration, in dignified text, came a pitch for the long-range investment policies of the First National City Bank of New York! The New Yorker (dated two days earlier) had an ad with a starmap, a spacesuit, and a map of Florida, saying, “The earth has now launched its first man-made satellite . . . when the rockets take off for outer space ... [it will be] . . . only natural to stop at your nearest ‘moon’ and ask the man for a free Rand-McNally space chart.”
It took the nation’s publishers practically no time at all to get onto the same good thing (whether they liked it or not). The newspapers poured out a deluge of I.G.Y. and Vanguard promotional pieces—some rewritten, some pulled fresh from the files of the past two years. Hot on their heels, the weekly news magazines beat the bushes of industry, government, and universities for fugitive eggheads to “expertize” for the “news analysts.” (I wonder if anyone has calculated whether the total energy expended by physicists in interviews during October-November, 1957, would have been sufficient to lift a lunar probe?)
By now, of course, there is hardly a publication in the country that has not featured some sort of something about space. And a whole new category of publishing has been born, ranging from comic books and True Space Secrets (one issue of which contains a revealing article entitled “Sex in Space”) to the Washington Space Letter (subscription, $25 quarterly, $75 the year, as advertised in the Times financial section, for manufacturers who want “space contracts”) and the Space Journal published in Huntsville, Ala., by the Rocket City Astronomical Association (and featuring such sensational articles as “The Purpose of Man in the Universe”).
* * * *
From a standing (if not sitting-down, or sound-asleep) start eighteen months ago, we have covered a truly fantastic stretch of psychological ground. The staggering fact is that today the American public as a whole has come to accept the imminence of space flight as a reality no less tangible than, say, the likelihood of another World Series next year —and hardly less exciting, either, if probably not quite so enjoyable. (I wonder, though, what might happen if someone were to start some office pools on the next series of Florida vs. California rocket launchings?)
I wonder, too, whether sound asleep was not after all the best way to speak of the national state of mind two years ago? Asleep, and dreaming? Whether you thought of it as childish or inspired, science-fictional, scientific, ennobling or illusory, the “dream” was there—as far back as man’s memory goes. Our language, folklore, and religion are all full of it. Ambitious, we “hitch our wagon to a star.” Demanding, we “want the moon on a platter.” Happy, we sit “on top of the world.” Prayerful, we seek eternal paradise —in heaven.
Perhaps this new reality is easier to accept than some others because it has the quality of awakening from a dream? Let us hope so: once fully awakened, we cannot but perceive, and accept, the equal reality of global brotherhood—and thus end forever the nightmare of global war.
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THE THUNDER-THIEVES
by Isaac Asimov
S-f writers are restless types, generally. They seem to come from—and be forever going off to—bizarre employments and unlikely places. Even inside the field there are few “name writers” who have not at some time switched teams, and tried their hands at editing or criticism.
Dr. Asimov lives quietly in Boston, and his career as a Professor of Biochemistry is just what one might expect (but seldom find) in a science-fiction writer. He has never edited a magazine or conducted a review column. Apparently he is content with two fictional personalities (the other is juvenile author Paul French). Co-author of five (at last count) biochemistry textbooks, Isaac Asimov ha
s a growing reputation for non-fiction science writing. As a notorious composer of hoax and spoof articles, he is among the leaders of the slim ranks of s-f humorists. He is the author of many, many short stories, and a versifier and parodist of note.
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4 - [Anthology] Page 27
