The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

by Alain De Botton

  We had all been billeted together in the Atlantis Hotel which, though only newly built, was fast surrendering itself to tropical mould and the incursions of jungle fauna. Vivid yellow lizards scuttled across the hotel’s floors and on returning to the room late at night, it was not uncommon to be confronted by a muscular and implausibly furry spider standing stationary on the wall above the television, a situation resolved by a Creole maintenance man who dispatched the monster with a decisive slap of rolled-up newspaper, leaving nothing but a brown sediment to commemorate the presence, then tossed the corpse off the balcony and, with apparent sincerity, bade one a pleasant end to the evening.

  Kourou, the purpose-built town next to the space centre, was in no better shape than the hotel on its perimeter. Evoking comparison with Chandigarh and Brasilia, two other examples of modern architecture’s impressive track record of indifference to issues of context and culture, it was in an advanced stage of decomposition after only a few decades of existence. Unshaded wooden benches rotted unused by the man-made lake, having been designed to provide respite on the kind of afternoon stroll which it had not yet occurred to anyone in the tropics to take, whilst the concrete façades of buildings had buckled in a climate which from April to July could deliver in a single week as much rainfall as northern France might see in an entire year.

  4.

  However, once inside the heavily fortified gates of the space centre itself, the situation was transformed. Immaculate buildings were dedicated to the assembly of satellites, the preparation of Ariane boosters and the storage of propellants. These were scattered across hectares of marsh and jungle, generating bewildering contrasts for visitors who might walk out of a rocket-nozzle-actuator building and a moment later find themselves in a section of rain forest sheltering round-eared bats and white-eyed parakeets, before arriving at a propulsion facility whose corridors were lined with Evian dispensers.

  Early on our first morning in the country, we were driven to a hangar not much smaller than Reims cathedral where we caught our first glimpse of the satellite, resting on a central platform, bathed in a powerful white light, being ministered to by a congregation of engineers in gowns, hairnets and slippers. They were filling the satellite’s tanks, charging its batteries and testing its transponders. Given the cost of carrying matter into space, it was surprisingly modest in size, a box measuring just four metres high by two wide, flanked by a pair of fourteen-metre long solar panels topped by a reflecting dish. Its inner works consisted of an electric motor, some thrusters to help counteract the effects of solar wind and twelve 130-watt broadcast channels with which to beam down an electronic footprint of WOWOW TV’s programming.

  To be allowed into the satellite’s presence, we were requested to undertake purification rituals akin to those required for admittance to an operating theatre, for the machine was a curious synthesis of robustness and hypersensitivity. At the speed it would soon be travelling – 3.07 kilometres per second – a stray human hair inside one of its transponders could create a disastrous force field of electromagnetic energy or a single oily fingerprint could fissure its solar panels. The satellite was like a frontline soldier who could be reduced to tears by reading a children’s book, though in fairness, its vulnerability obtained only under the eccentric conditions of outer space, where powerful ultraviolet rays and clusters of oxygen atoms were capable of exploiting any weakness in an electrical system, and where extreme variations in temperature, from 200 degrees centigrade in the sun to minus 200 in the earth’s shadow, could crack any part of the machine which had not been immaculately cleaned and wrapped in a protective carapace of gold-tinted polyimide film.

  Raised up on its dais – its surfaces seeming to emit a pinky-red glow, its compartments opened to reveal dense wiring, the whole assembled out of such unfamiliar components as pyromellitic acid – the satellite looked like one of the most unnatural objects imaginable. Yet in truth it contained nothing which had not been present on the earth in the earliest days of creation, nor anything which had not (in its basic form, at least) originally been lodged in the chemical structures of the seas and mountains. It was the cogitations of the human mind which had cooked and recombined the planet’s raw materials into this most unlikely offering to the heavens.

  5.

  The sight of different groups of hairnetted engineers helping to prepare the satellite suggested what restraint, what effacement of the individual ego, a life in science now entailed. There were no opportunities for individual glory here, no prospect of biographies or street names to be remembered by. This was a collective project or which no one person, not even any single commercial or academic organisation, could take the commanding credit.

  Gone were the days of geniuses in their observatories and workshops, single-handedly rerouting scientific history. We had entered the sober era of the collaborative laboratory, where astrophysicists and aeronautical engineers banded themselves together for decade-long assaults on minor mysteries, resisting the media’s attempts to raise any one of their number into a contemporary Galileo. A company might limit itself to perfecting the performance of silver-zinc batteries in zero-gravity conditions, rightly sensing the foolishness of expanding to address further puzzles in satellite electrics. A scientist might spend a lifetime examining the properties of titanium at high temperatures or the behaviour of hydrogen at the moment of ignition. The sum total of one’s contributions to mankind might end up in an issue of the Journal of Advanced Propulsion Methods.

  Some of the technical properties of WOWOW TV’s new machine were the result of research done in the early 1980s by a team of scientists from Milan Polytechnic, who, in investigating the use of the upper reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum in communications satellites, had found a way around the interference caused by low cloud and misty rain at microwave frequencies above 10 gigahertz – slow and unheroic work that now, a quarter of a century later, ensured that Japanese viewers would be able to enjoy the uncut version of the anime film Cowboy Bebop even during the worst downpours in Japan’s rainy season.

  Though there had certainly been a loss of colour and novelistic detail in the passing of the age of geniuses, there was perhaps something greater and more reassuring in our graduation to a time of collective effort, for it meant that never again would the fate of planetary exploration depend to a hazardous degree on such unpredictable variables as the mood of Johannes Kepler’s wife, Barbara, or the inclinations of his patron Emperor Rudolf II – though the German astronomer, like many of his fellow geniuses, had at least provided Kourou with a name for one of its dispiriting streets, a rectangle of waste ground bordered by a dry cleaner at one end and a burnt-out Internet café at the other, a matter in which the collated proponents of later discoveries would perhaps never be quite so obliging.

  6.

  Just a short drive away through the jungle, two thirty-metre-high booster rockets were undergoing their penultimate preparations. These delicately tapered structures, decorated with the flags of the European nations which had contributed to their funding, would be responsible for propelling the satellite on the first stage of its journey. They were in truth more bombs than engines, for they had no throttle and once ignited, had to be allowed to expend their full fury, whatever the circumstances, inspiring a particular respect in all those involved in their detonation.

  Dr Thierry Proudhon was directing operations. He held a degree in pyrotechnics from the National School of Aeronautical Engineering in Toulouse and had been living in French Guiana with his family for three years. A finely chiselled man in his early forties, he seemed about as reasonable, impersonal and solemn as it is possible for any human to be, given the follies and convulsions to which our race appears prone. Not for him the torments of the insomniac or the agitations of the neurotic. On the day of the launch, he would be responsible for the ignition of 500 tonnes of ammonium perchlorate composite, which would burn for only 130 seconds, but would in that time succeed in firing the fifty-two-metre-high Ariane
launcher 150 kilometres into the sky, generating a thrust of 1,100 tonnes and a concomitant boom which would be heard over the border in Brazil. Then, their titanic energies spent, the boosters would detach themselves from the mother ship and drop down into the Atlantic ocean, where a French naval frigate would be standing by to collect them.

  Prompted by a question from the Hong Kong television presenter, but chary of the sensationalist tenor of her enquiry, Dr Proudhon paused for a moment to consider what might ‘go wrong’, responding with all the austerity of a chemistry teacher reviewing the risks of the Bunsen burner before an assembly of excitable pupils. He explained that if the propellant paste were incorrectly mixed in such a way that it retained air pockets, it could produce a sudden increase in the surface area of flammable material and a corresponding rise in exhaust gases, which might well have the power to rupture the casing of the rocket and cause an explosion equivalent in its short-term destructive force to that of a small nuclear device. But, he added to reassure – and thereby also, inadvertently, to disappoint – his audience, there was only a 0.2 percent chance of such an incident’s occurring on any given launch.

  At a loss as to how to return to the salient topic, but unwilling to conclude the conversation, the presenter asked what this mysterious propellent substance might look like. Was it a little like toothpaste? Or perhaps more like cake mix? Dr Proudhon fixed her with his grey-green eyes and, answering the query at the level of detail he felt the media deserved, embarked upon a monologue that wandered with archaeological precision through the history and byways of chemistry, disclosing along the way that the paste consisted of ammonium perchlorate (69.6 percent), aluminium (16.0 percent), HTPB polymer (12.04 percent), an epoxy curing agent (1.96 percent) and iron oxide catalyst (0.4 percent).

  But Dr Proudhon was not finished with us yet, for he now revealed that the booster rockets constituted only a part, and perhaps not the most important, of the mechanics of propulsion, for the main rocket was in addition equipped with a liquid-hydrogen-and-oxygen engine to help it complete its journey into space. This masterwork of engineering, named Vulcain after the francophone-version of the Roman god of fire and iron, had been thirty years in the making and based its claim to greatness on its ability to keep two highly reactive and pressurised propellants safely separated in adjoining tanks, preventing them from combining prematurely and maintaining them at their different freezing temperatures (minus 251 degrees centigrade for hydrogen and minus 184 for oxygen) even when, just fifty centimetres away, the combustion chamber into which they were being driven by a turbo pump, at a rate of six hundred litres per second, was burning at 1,500 degrees centrigrade. There were a thousand other things about Vulcain which might interest anyone seeking more than a cursory journalistic understanding, Dr Proudhon concluded coldly, but he hoped that we might excuse him: he was due back at his home in Kourou shortly, as he and his wife planned to take their children on a late-afternoon outing to watch the newly hatched baby turtles learning to swim in the Maroni River.

  The pyrotechnician appeared imperturbable in the face of his power. He had at his command more force than almost any ruler in history, more – for example – than the eighteenth-century Chinese emperor Qianlong, a paper tiger by comparison, whose armies had viciously subdued both the Uyghurs and the Mongols. But Dr Proudhon’s strength was the opposite of intemperate might, it was the disciplined and sedated authority of the scientist entrusted with the safe management of unfeasible rage. Somewhere inside this white-coated man, there must have remained vestigial urges to dominate, shout, master, blow up and attack, but how carefully such instincts had been contained, by what cautious laboratory rules his urges had been governed, how quiet modern omnipotence could be.

  7.

  The satellite and its launch vehicle were practical achievements no doubt, but they were also, and perhaps primarily, the products of revolutionary changes in belief systems.

  Isaac Newton (whose namesake street was home to Kourou’s only travel agency) was the first to postulate the theories on which the launch itself would be based, when he speculated that if a cannonball could be fired at a tremendous speed from a great height, the top of an implausibly tall mountain, for instance, it would orbit right around the earth, for gravity would pull it downwards at the same rate at which the planet spun away from it. The Englishman’s ideas, along with a raft of other discoveries in chemistry and physics, were the fruits of a scientific perspective that had marked a gradual separation in European consciousness from the long and tenebrous age of magic that had preceded it.

  Four hundred kilometres from where the rocket was being readied, in the rain forest on the border with Brazil, lived the last of the Waiwai Indians. The majority of the tribe had long ago left the jungle and moved into towns or government-sponsored camps (one group lived in Kourou, where they ran the popular Waiwai takeaway restaurant in the Place de l’Europe). But those left in the wild preserved the rudiments of a cosmology comparable in structure to that of the inhabitants of the prescientific West.

  For the Waiwai, the movements of the planets, the cycles of the weather, the behaviour of animals and the properties of plants, were all apprehended mythologically, without any attempt at precise observation or detached understanding. There was no room for developments in knowledge. Time stood still. Traditions could not be altered or probed, being the preserve of sacred elders and medicine men. The Waiwai projected themselves into all they saw. Why might the moon be a particularly deep shade of red in the evening? Because someone in the tribe had developed violent thoughts, likely to break into bloodshed the next day. Why had it not rained? Because the network of anacondas who lived in the clouds and spat down droplets of water had been angered during a hunt. What was the sky? A clay pan resting on three upright rocks.

  In the Waiwai schema, man could not directly affect the world. He would have to ask, or more accurately implore, the spirits responsible for its functioning. On a breathless day, he would have to take care not to injure any tapirs, for the wind was controlled by a giant example of one hidden in the sky, responsible for wafting a large palm leaf to create a breeze. If he wanted the sun to come out, he would have to put on a diadem of toucan feathers and blow down a long pipe carved with anaconda patterns, so as to flatter the sacred orb into rising into the sky.

  The scientists now occupied by fuelling and loading in their hangars at the edge of the jungle had moved unrecognisably far from such thinking. They had completed PhDs on the numerical analysis of stirred-tank hydronynamics and the drag reduction effects of polymer additives on turbulent pipe flow. They read the universe as an orderly and logical machine, which worked independently of their sins and virtues, a mere impassive clock, which could be taken apart by reason and rendered theoretically predictable without requiring recourse to incantation.

  And yet, as a non-scientist examining the rocket-assembly building, gazing at a needle of solid propellant nine storeys tall, one felt that a most unmagical of approaches had nevertheless succeeded in producing a device which was not entirely free of supernatural associations. Living with science without understanding it forced one to consider machines in the same quasi-mystical way in which a sparsely clothed Waiwai might have contemplated the phenomena of the heavens. What talent and insolence it was on the part of the white-coated fraternity to have succeeded in generating an impression of mystical awe with the help only of an ammonium perchlorate composite.

  8.

  Nevertheless, as the appointed launch time approached, a feeling of tension and of foreboding became palpable. The sky turned a purply-grey, and the air was oddly still. In Kourou, a France Telecom van collided with a car at the corner of the Avenue Nobel and the rue Mère Theresa. The lizards were out in force at the Atlantis Hotel.

  The weather, always complex and histrionic in the region, was of particular concern to the scientists. Almost every afternoon brought a violent thunderstorm, with clouds up to eighteen kilometres thick, eight kilometres being the usual
maximum over northern Europe. In tearing through such a lofty mass at great velocity, the rocket ran a risk of driving a lightning bolt into its own flight path. Furthermore, the area was known for its high atmospheric winds, which meant that even if all was still at ground level, thirty kilometres up, a tapir with a palm leaf might be stirring up a current capable of deflecting the rocket onto a catastrophically errant trajectory.

  At eight in the evening, an hour before launch, under armed guard, we were driven in the darkness to an observation site in the jungle, only three kilometres from where the boosters would be ignited. We took our places on a raised clearing with uninterrupted views onto the launchpad – and said little.

  Technologically extreme situations have a habit of whetting the appetite for sentimental safety briefings, which in turn tend to reveal both the scale of the danger involved and the inadequacy of the proposed response to it. A member of the elite Brigade de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris – a branch office of which operated in the space centre – came forward to address our group. At this distance, a malfunctioning rocket would be upon us in under a second, the fireman declared, though this hopeless prospect did not prevent him from distributing a set of yellow gas masks and explaining that we should secure them over our heads to activate their breathing tubes, then leave them alone until, and unless, there was an emergency. Despite these instructions, a few minutes later, ever alert to the need to bring science to life, the Hong Kong television presenter removed her cameraman’s mask from its casing and, with it hanging loosely over her face, delivered a muffled soliloquy to the camera, outlining the hazards to which she was exposing herself for her audience – while her own mask remained cocooned inside a tasselled Balenciaga handbag.