"Bye-bye, sci-fi"

The summer I was 12, I spent a day at the beach in bed with badly sunburned legs, reading my parents' copy of The Exploration of Space, by Arthur C. Clarke. (The very same Arthur C. Clarke who wrote Sentinal of Eternity, the short story upon which the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was loosely based.)

I was thinking that I still had Clarke's book on my bookshelves, but a frustrating search just now has failed to locate it. It's been a number of years since I last glanced at it -- a non-fictional discussion of space travel, written in 1951, at a time when earth satellites still seemed a distant dream. But I remember the strong fascination it had for my young mind. Much of the book explained in simple terms the physics of rocket propulsion in the vacuum of outer space -- many non-scientifically trained people at the time still believed that rockets wouldn't work unless they had some atmosphere "to push against" -- and how a satellite, once in orbit, would continue circling the earth indefinitely without needing any further propulsion.

This book was intended for the general reader, and for the general reader in 1951 the science involved in space travel seems to have been novel.

So most of the book would now be outdated, although its science still accurate -- material that today's reader with only a casual knowledge of science already understands. Pushed by competition with the USSR, moreover, rocket and satellite technology developed perhaps even faster than Clarke had anticipated.

But what I really remember from the book are the beautiful color plates with imaginative renderings of domed colonies on the Moon and on Mars. As I recall, Clarke forecast a moon base by about 2000, and a colony planted on the Martian surface not too many years later. I was excited to realize that my generation would live to witness these achievements -- maybe not yet to visit foreign colonies, but at least to read about them in magazines and to watch activities within them on television.

After all, as Clarke said himself -- in a quotation from the book that I found on-line:

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

So -- here we are in 2011. Where is our colony on Mars? Where is the permanent Moon base? Where are signs of Clarke's "laughably conservative" prophesies?

Today, in the 135th launch of the space shuttle program, the shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center. It was America's last launch. The program now ends. Last week's cover of the Economist showed a photograph of a space shuttle against the curvature of the Earth, overprinted with the legend, "The End of the Space Age." The magazine's leader editorializes, apparently with some satisfaction:

It is quite conceivable that 36,000 km [the orbit of communications satellites] will prove the limit of human ambition. It is equally conceivable that the fantasy-made-reality of human space flight will return to fantasy. It is likely that the Space Age is over. ... There is no appetite to return to the moon, let alone push on to Mars, El Dorado of space exploration. The technology could be there, but the passion has gone. ... [H]umanity's dreams of a future beyond that final frontier have, largely, faded.

Well, screw you, 21st century mankind, for spitting a 12-year-old in the face, and grinding his dreams underfoot.

I imagine darkly an alternative universe, where a Lisbon business-oriented newspaper might have written, snidely, 500 years ago:

Now that we have explored the Azores, there is little appetite for further exploration. The dreamers -- with their incessant chatter about a spherical Earth and of distant lands of gold and spices -- have had their day. We have the ships to sail farther, but not the passion. So, stop dreaming, Portugal. Smother your childish excitement, and teach your own children to be hard-nosed realists. Nothing beyond the Azores is worth thinking about. Let's all learn to just be the best farmers and wine-makers that we know how.