The Penguin History of the World

These achievements were tremendous, yet now there is great uncertainty about the way forward in man’s encounter with space. The end of the space shuttle programme raises questions about whether manned exploration has a future in space research. Yet to have landed safely on the moon and returned had been a dazzling affirmation of the belief that we live in a universe we can manage. The instruments for doing so were once magic and prayer; they are now science and technology. But continuity lies in the growing human confidence throughout history that the natural world could be manipulated. Landing on the moon was a landmark in that continuity, an event perhaps of the same order as the mastery of fire, the invention of agriculture or the discovery of nuclear power. It will be followed up, as the 2012 landing of an unmanned American science laboratory on Mars shows. (Perhaps symbolically, the Soviets had crash-landed a probe on Mars forty years earlier.)

Exploration of the skies can be compared also to the great age of terrestrial discovery, even though space travel is a good deal safer and more predictable than fifteenth-century seafaring. Both, however, build on a slow accumulation of knowledge. Cumulatively, the base of exploration widened as data was added, piece by piece, to what was known. Da Gama had to pick up an Arab navigator once around the Cape of Good Hope. Unknown seas lay ahead. Five hundred years later, Apollo was launched from a far broader but still cumulative base – nothing less than the whole scientific knowledge of mankind. In 1969, the distance to the moon was already known, so were the conditions that would greet men arriving there, most of the hazards they might encounter, the quantities of power, supplies and the nature of the other support systems they would need to return, the stresses their bodies would undergo. Though things might have gone wrong, there was a widespread feeling that they would not. In its predictable, as in its cumulative quality, space exploration epitomizes our science-based civilization. Perhaps this is why space does not seem to have changed minds and imaginations as did former great discoveries.

Behind the increasing mastery of nature achieved in over 10,000 years lay the hundreds of millennia during which prehistoric technology had inched forwards from the discovery that a cutting edge could be put on a stone chopper and that fire could be mastered, while the weight of genetic programming and environmental pressure still loomed much larger then than did conscious control. The dawning of consciousness that more than this was possible was the major step in man’s evolution after his physical structure had settled into more or less what it is today. With it, the control and use of experience had become possible.

Already in the 1980s, nevertheless, space exploration was overshadowed in many minds by a new uneasiness about man’s interference with nature. Within only a few years of Sputnik I, doubts were being voiced about the ideological roots of so masterful a view of our relationship to the natural world. This uneasiness, too, could now be expressed with a precision based on observed facts not hitherto available or not considered in that light; it was science itself which provided the instrumentation and data that led to dismay about what was going on. A recognition of the possible future damage interference with the environment might bring was beginning to arise.

It was, of course, the recognition that was new, not the phenomena which provoked it. Homo sapiens (and perhaps his predecessors) had always scratched away at the natural world in which he lived, modifying it in many particulars, destroying other species. Millennia later, migration southward and the adoption of dryland crops from the Americas had devastated the great forests of south-west China, bringing soil erosion and the consequential silting of the Yangzi drainage system in its train, and so culminating in repeated flooding over wide areas. In the early Middle Ages, Islamic conquest had brought goat-herding and tree-felling to the North African littoral on a scale that destroyed a fertility once able to fill the granaries of Rome. But such sweeping changes, though hardly unnoticed, were not understood. The unprecedented rapidity of ecological interference initiated from the seventeenth century onwards by Europeans, however, was to bring things to a head. The unconsidered power of technology forced the dangers on the attention of mankind in the second half of the twentieth century. People began to reckon up damage as well as achievement, and by the middle of the 1970s it seemed to some of them that even if the story of growing human mastery of the environment was an epic, that epic might well turn out to be a tragic one.