About then some savages moved up on the hill and got to raiding the basket and pot trade. The only thing to do was for Bugsy, the basket, to marry the daughter of Willy, the pot, and when they all died off, Herman Pot-Basket pulled the whole business together and made a little state and that worked out fine.
Well, it went on from state to league and from league to nation. (A nation usually had some kind of natural boundary like an ocean or a mountain range or a river to keep it from spilling over.) It worked out fine until a bunch of jokers invented long-distance stuff like directed missiles and atom bombs. Then a river or an ocean didn’t do a bit of good. It got too dangerous to have separate nations just as it had been to have separate families.
When people are finally faced with extinction, they have to do something about it. Now we’ve got the United Nations and the elders are right in there fighting it the way they fought coming out of caves. But we don’t have much choice about it. It isn’t any goodness of heart and we may not want to go ahead but right from the cave time we’ve had to choose and so far we’ve never chosen extinction. It’d be kind of silly if we killed ourselves off after all this time. If we do, we’re stupider than the cave people and I don’t think we are. I think we’re just exactly as stupid and that’s pretty bright in the long run.
From Science Fiction to Science Fact:
The Universe and Us
Last year’s edition of SF devoted a special section to non-fiction coverage of the beginnings of space flight. The innovation was so well received (I mean the section, though its subject is also doing pretty well) that it has been made a permanent feature of the anthology.
Space flight as such is now almost out of the range of fantasy or science fiction, but the adjustments to it, the challenge of new technology to human habits, the unknown potentials—for satisfaction, fear, delight—of the unguessed-at environments men will face beyond earth; this is the stuff that science fantasy is made of.
The present attainments and near-future promises of physical science leave little scope for speculative thought. It used to be a joke: “The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer.” Now, I do not think any conception of the most imaginative mind, within the realm of physical science, could pose a problem that would cause the appropriate expert to answer, “No one knows” or “Never!” . . . just “I don’t know, quite yet.”
The great frontiers of the unknown now lie at man’s own door. The urgent questions now are not “What is it?” or “How does it work?” or “How do we make it?”
Rather, we are asking, “Who are we?” and “What are we doing here?” . . .”Where are we going?” and “Why?” and “How will we make out when we get there?”
These are the themes of the best new science fantasy and also the working problems of the new generation of scientists. The first set of answers will derive, it seems, from studies now being made of man’s chances for surviving out in space.
MAN IN SPACE
by Daniel Lang
In the welter of wordage published during 1958 about the prospects of manned space flight, very little was at once comprehending, comprehensive, and comprehensible. Mr. Lang’s article combines these virtues with the authoritative documentation and stylistic excellence for which his reportage and the pages of The New Yorker are both known—and a certain skepticism of viewpoint is, I expect, a healthy thing.
In spite of all the serious investigation that our scientists and engineers are devoting to the possibilities of space travel, the would-be voyager to Mars or Venus need not pack his bags quite yet—or so I have gathered after looking into the progress of what is known to researchers, in and out of the government, as “the man-in-space program.” One thing that is holding up the program is the machine; engineers have been turning out better and better experimental rocket planes, but they are by no means ready to launch a really spaceworthy ship—a passenger-carrying vehicle capable of making its way through the earth’s atmosphere into outer space and coming back to terra firma, itself and its cargo reasonably intact. Formidable as this part of the job is, however, most of the experts assume that, sooner or later, it will be accomplished; all that is required is technological improvement. Many scientists are a good deal more puzzled, I have discovered, over what to do about the one element in space travel that is technologically unimprovable. This element is none other than the space traveler—man.
Man’s age-old physical and psychological needs and frailties, it seems—”the human factors,” as man-in-space experts call them—make him a rather poor risk for space voyaging, and some of the scientists I have talked to, or whose treatises I have read, have expressed mild disappointment with man for not coming up to the astronautical mark. “Man’s functional system cannot be fooled by gimmicks and gadgets,” a comprehensive report on space flight got up for the Air University Command and Staff School, in Alabama, remarks. “He cannot be altered dimensionally, biologically or chemically. None of the conditions necessary to sustain his life-cycle functions can be compromised to any great extent.” Wherever man is and whatever his circumstances, the report says, in effect, he simply must have many of the things that sustain him here below—air, food, and a certain amount of intellectual and physical activity. “Encapsulated atmosphere is what we’re after,” one scientist told me, and went on to explain that the space traveler— whether wearing a space suit in an airless cabin or, as most scientists would prefer, wearing ordinary clothes in a pressurized cabin—would have to have enough of the familiar earthly environment to see him through his voyage. “A spaceship,” this scientist said, “must, you see, be a ‘terrella,’ a little earth.”
The human factors in space travel are being studied on a broad front, and at every level from the immediately practical to the highly theoretical, by special groups set up within our armed services, universities, and private aircraft companies—groups like the Space Biology Branch of the Air Force Aero Medical Field Laboratory, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the Human Factors Engineering Group of the Convair Division of General Dynamics Corporation, in San Diego, California. The assignments these groups have taken on are myriad, and practically every one of them necessarily involves guesswork, or what one man calls “the vagueness of imagination,” to a degree that most scientists abhor. Nonetheless, the job is being tackled, in its various aspects, by biochemists (who are concerned with the space traveler’s physical care and feeding), radiobiologists (who worry about the effects of cosmic rays in outer space), sanitary engineers (who are figuring out how to dispose of wastes and insure the cleanliness of the terrella), anthropometrists (who measure the functional capacities of man), astrobotanists (who are attempting to discover what sort of food, if any, the space man might find on other celestial bodies), and psychologists (who tend to doubt whether a man can roam extraterrestrially for years, months, or even weeks without going batty). Physiologists, chemists, pharmacologists, physicists, and astronomers are also making contributions to the man-in-space program, as are sociologists, whose responsibilities would seem to be remote at the moment but who foresee all kinds of catastrophic dilemmas in the future. “What will happen to a man’s wife and children when he embarks on a prolonged space trip, perhaps for years, with every chance of not returning?” one scholar asked not long ago, in a symposium called “Man in Space: A Tool and Program for the Study of Social Change,” which was held in the sober halls of the New York Academy of Sciences. “How long a separation in space would justify divorce, and if he should return, how will the [possible] Enoch Arden triangle be handled?” At the same symposium, Professor Harold D. Lasswell, of the Yale Department of Political Science, envisioned an even more drastic jolting of the status quo. He asked his learned audience to imagine what might happen if a spaceship’s crew landed on a celestial body whose inhabitants were not only more than a match for us technologically but had created a more peaceable political and social order. “Assume,” he said, “that the explorers are convinced of the stability and decency of the . . . system of public order that exists alongside superlative achievements in science and engineering. Suppose that they are convinced of the militaristic disunity and scientific backwardness of earth. Is it not conceivable that the members of the expedition will voluntarily assist in a police action to conquer and unify earth as a probationary colony of the new order?”