“I’m old enough to remember the announcement. The Russians launched a satellite. “Wow! I’m living in the space age,” I thought. Some six decades later, we’ve launched so many satellites and bits and pieces of other rockets and materials that we now have space junk, a danger to space traffic. Lonely out-in-space-country orbits are highways with driverless vehicles controlled only by gravity and interaction with the top of the atmosphere and wayward meteorites. The space junk has even been featured in movies and news stories. And now, SpaceX gets the go-ahead to launch 12,000 more satellites. It’s a big home, this planet Earth, but the attic is now as crowded as that in an old house. There goes the neighborhood. I can see alien visitors not stopping by as they comment, “Not there. If their orbital sidewalks are that cluttered, can you imagine their house?”
“Apart from my worries that on my next trip to outer space I will encounter a traffic jam between mile markers 208 and 215, I am concerned that so many decaying orbits will make a rain of fragments as significant as the Perseid meteor shower.
“At the time of Sputnik’s launch, America didn’t have a fully developed and currently overcrowded interstate highway system. The vehicles were gas and diesel powered. Natural gas and electric vehicles were a novelty and an imaginative dream that Disney used to design propane vehicles to transport people around Epcot when it first opened. Now, BepiColombo, a spaceship that will go to Mercury, is powered by ion thrusters. Wow! Now we’ve entered the space age with the kind of propulsion only science fiction authors used.
“Am I sounding a bit like the couple in Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs. They perform on a semicircular stage that hints of a circle, seem locked in an endless cycle of life that has become just ‘more of the same,’ and speak without really saying much. Of course, Ionesco was part of the Theatre of the Absurd movement, so one might expect some existential pessimism or nihilism. More people arrive at the couples’ home during the play, even an ‘emperor,’ and they all get chairs. Chairs in the play accumulate like satellites. And the message that the old man delivers to the ‘emperor’ falls on his deafness.
“Satellites. These new ones will put us under an umbrella of WiFi, I think, really, we’ll be virtually in the same “room.” We’ll all be communicating and learning from one another as Earth turns beneath the new shield of space junk. We’ll be inside a ‘larger’ entity, a sphere of new space junk that will have us talking to one another, not just soon, but as long as the satellites work—that is, until the force of gravity, collisions with other space junk, micrometeorites, or disinterest in hearing the same stuff repeated in decaying circularity bring down the system.”
“Hey! This is too negative. I don’t want to hear any of this. Think of the benefits. Mankind truly connected, not just by a single satellite like NASA’s Echo I that it launched in 1960, but really connected by thousands of satellites: A Brotherhood of Man from the US to Sudan.”
“Okay, but WiFi brings its own problem, that of hacking, of eavesdropping. And the universality of the system will flatten Earth.”
“Flatten Earth?” you ask.
“Well, not the physical planet, but the inhabitants. We’ll reap the benefits of diversity at first, but then we’ll probably succumb more and more to worldthink. Perspectives will merge, ‘flatten.’ I’m for the access to the world, but not for others’ access to me. And I’m not a one-worlder if being so lessens diversity and creativity as political correctness and extremism always do.
“We’ve already seen the benefits and the ills of a worldwide communication system. It’s great to be connected as long as we aren’t personally so connected we feel handcuffed to the system and to what others think. Crowded space is about to become cyberspace.
“But like the couple in Ionesco’s The Chairs, are we going to think we are in a cycle of nothing new, chatting to one another, but like the deaf Emperor, not hearing? Once the WiFi room is built, will we simply carry in more ‘chairs’ until we fill it and make everything not only the same, but also the overcrowded same? In the world portrayed in the play, the old couple jumps out the window, but we won’t have that escape option, for if we do choose to jump from the room, we’re likely to get hit by the space junk we so happily and optimistically added to the once lonely space traveled by a little Russian satellite promising a space-age future in which technology would benefit all mankind.
“In the play, the old man says, ‘the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It's because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around.’ It’s really a depressing attitude, but then, it was a play in a genre that expressed despair in a meaningless world. Obviously, we can find meaning—even in a meaninglessness-themed play—and optimism in our technology. But we have spent years filling our spaces—and now cyberspaces—with products of that technology. Yet, we still have all of mankind’s ills, and with more of us sharing the ‘room’ more of those ills in absolute numbers, if not in proportion.
“But, hypocrite that I am, when the universal WiFi is up and running, I’ll probably tie in. I’ll connect. And I’ll say, ‘Gee, isn’t technology wonderful. Thank those Russians for putting up that first satellite.’ It was a time of wonder, not because it was a Russian accomplishment—that was a wakeup call for Americans—but because it was a human accomplishment, just like the landing on the moon a little over a decade later could be considered a human triumph. I just have to keep remembering that with all those technological advancements and with the coming universal WiFi, we have yet to eliminate man’s inhumanity to man. If we eliminated all the tech stuff, all the gadgets, all the materials of our affluence, and we imported through time a person from the pre-tech age, and asked him or her to look around, would we hear, “the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It’s because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around’?
“I just don’t want to be a character in a play from the Theatre of the Absurd.”
“Apart from my worries that on my next trip to outer space I will encounter a traffic jam between mile markers 208 and 215, I am concerned that so many decaying orbits will make a rain of fragments as significant as the Perseid meteor shower.
“At the time of Sputnik’s launch, America didn’t have a fully developed and currently overcrowded interstate highway system. The vehicles were gas and diesel powered. Natural gas and electric vehicles were a novelty and an imaginative dream that Disney used to design propane vehicles to transport people around Epcot when it first opened. Now, BepiColombo, a spaceship that will go to Mercury, is powered by ion thrusters. Wow! Now we’ve entered the space age with the kind of propulsion only science fiction authors used.
“Am I sounding a bit like the couple in Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs. They perform on a semicircular stage that hints of a circle, seem locked in an endless cycle of life that has become just ‘more of the same,’ and speak without really saying much. Of course, Ionesco was part of the Theatre of the Absurd movement, so one might expect some existential pessimism or nihilism. More people arrive at the couples’ home during the play, even an ‘emperor,’ and they all get chairs. Chairs in the play accumulate like satellites. And the message that the old man delivers to the ‘emperor’ falls on his deafness.
“Satellites. These new ones will put us under an umbrella of WiFi, I think, really, we’ll be virtually in the same “room.” We’ll all be communicating and learning from one another as Earth turns beneath the new shield of space junk. We’ll be inside a ‘larger’ entity, a sphere of new space junk that will have us talking to one another, not just soon, but as long as the satellites work—that is, until the force of gravity, collisions with other space junk, micrometeorites, or disinterest in hearing the same stuff repeated in decaying circularity bring down the system.”
“Hey! This is too negative. I don’t want to hear any of this. Think of the benefits. Mankind truly connected, not just by a single satellite like NASA’s Echo I that it launched in 1960, but really connected by thousands of satellites: A Brotherhood of Man from the US to Sudan.”
“Okay, but WiFi brings its own problem, that of hacking, of eavesdropping. And the universality of the system will flatten Earth.”
“Flatten Earth?” you ask.
“Well, not the physical planet, but the inhabitants. We’ll reap the benefits of diversity at first, but then we’ll probably succumb more and more to worldthink. Perspectives will merge, ‘flatten.’ I’m for the access to the world, but not for others’ access to me. And I’m not a one-worlder if being so lessens diversity and creativity as political correctness and extremism always do.
“We’ve already seen the benefits and the ills of a worldwide communication system. It’s great to be connected as long as we aren’t personally so connected we feel handcuffed to the system and to what others think. Crowded space is about to become cyberspace.
“But like the couple in Ionesco’s The Chairs, are we going to think we are in a cycle of nothing new, chatting to one another, but like the deaf Emperor, not hearing? Once the WiFi room is built, will we simply carry in more ‘chairs’ until we fill it and make everything not only the same, but also the overcrowded same? In the world portrayed in the play, the old couple jumps out the window, but we won’t have that escape option, for if we do choose to jump from the room, we’re likely to get hit by the space junk we so happily and optimistically added to the once lonely space traveled by a little Russian satellite promising a space-age future in which technology would benefit all mankind.
“In the play, the old man says, ‘the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It's because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around.’ It’s really a depressing attitude, but then, it was a play in a genre that expressed despair in a meaningless world. Obviously, we can find meaning—even in a meaninglessness-themed play—and optimism in our technology. But we have spent years filling our spaces—and now cyberspaces—with products of that technology. Yet, we still have all of mankind’s ills, and with more of us sharing the ‘room’ more of those ills in absolute numbers, if not in proportion.
“But, hypocrite that I am, when the universal WiFi is up and running, I’ll probably tie in. I’ll connect. And I’ll say, ‘Gee, isn’t technology wonderful. Thank those Russians for putting up that first satellite.’ It was a time of wonder, not because it was a Russian accomplishment—that was a wakeup call for Americans—but because it was a human accomplishment, just like the landing on the moon a little over a decade later could be considered a human triumph. I just have to keep remembering that with all those technological advancements and with the coming universal WiFi, we have yet to eliminate man’s inhumanity to man. If we eliminated all the tech stuff, all the gadgets, all the materials of our affluence, and we imported through time a person from the pre-tech age, and asked him or her to look around, would we hear, “the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It’s because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around’?
“I just don’t want to be a character in a play from the Theatre of the Absurd.”
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