The following is the unedited version of an abstract currently featured
in the 20th revised edition of Malleus
Maleficus' [title withheld]. If you wish to report intrusiveness, defamation or inaccuracies, please email
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Belinda Blew-James was known in academic circles for
being light-hearted and vivacious, as well as
supportive of Professor von Donnersborn,
with whom she had become close as his head of media relations at a time when he
attracted a good deal of flak with the fMRI-Ganzfeld
controversy. But the combination worked. Donnersborn,
like Belinda, was a charismatic iconoclast and, like her, he had an extravagant
disregard for predictable conventions.
Her exquisite appearance and her
devotion to a mission, which for her own reasons she found totally engrossing,
had helped her to gain a first-rate reputation.
As one of Donnersborn’s representatives she was, moreover, on terms of personal acquaintance with a fair
number of the physicists on the rostrum. One
of the first Belinda recollected meeting was none other than Dr. Chris Lintott, professor of astrophysics at Oxford. As she said later: “The moment we met I was taken. His warm
personality and beautiful eyes; they just held you.” Plainly, if
not smitten, she was stirred by his fresh-faced appeal - a look of flawless
affability combined with a babyish charm. Though
I’m less sure that his motives were
equally benign. Casting back
upon my time of undergraduate and graduate work, and the twenty odd years I
spent lecturing at various American
colleges and UK institutions, I do not believe that anything with a PhD in its name
can ever be truly benign.
With meticulously perfect timing,
and crucially in this context, V.H. Ironside, the visionary apologist of an
anthropoid Superspecies,[1]
claimed that Nasa needed a spectacular mission to rally public support behind
the agency after successive administrations had happened to be sleepwalking
through the world’s greatest opportunity to return to the Moon - a landmark in
America’s spiritual decline. “There is no period in the entire history of
civilization that is as close as ours is to either death or immortality,” he exclaimed.
“Why has progress stalled, when all the indications are that economic and demographic growth is loading
this planet with billions more people.”
There was now but Rosetta, he
added, and its gallant little lander Philae, the sustaining visionary hope of
the ESA, clinging to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko it had chased across
space for 4bn miles.
And
this was the existential question – why bother with space when the planet Earth
had such unrelenting problems? With hope and trepidation, but always with
infinite courage - he instantly replied - the Third Dimension was
the long-term solution to man’s evolutionary challenge, the great alma mater
of our future. As for the heartbreaks and tragedies of the Challenger program, its
very termination implied a wrongful comprehension of the mission. The simple fact of the matter was, he said,
that rather than assigning large numbers of people to the predetermined
conflict between demographic growth and global capacity, the conquest of Space,
too, ought to be viewed as a continuation of the great era of geographical
discoveries, as an outlet in effect
which might have been invented with demographic expansion in mind, or as
a fresh pioneering adventure even, as well as of profitable commercial
enterprise. And certainly, if such an agenda prevailed, he could perceive, not
the death of a species, but the forthcoming establishment, by multinational
consortia, of commercial foundations in space, indeed, of commercial empires –
and once again there was a close parallel with the systematic expansion of
corporate enterprise in past geographical history – powerful enough to rival the future even of the planet Earth itself.
He was totally persuasive, to the point of
exhibiting flashes of genuine prophecy. He was also totally incredulous that
the Apollo program, after six lunar landings between 1969 and 1972, should
simply have been discarded and “forgotten.”
Had it never been terminated, man might have been on Mars by now.[2]
And for all its breathtaking scientific scope and technological innovation, he
said, the planet Earth was an
evolutionary cul-de-sac. He thoroughly detested what might be called
cosmological indifference, “the Great Stagnation of our time,” in his own
words, and emphasized that the
repudiation of the conquest of space in favour of a sustained existence on
Earth, would at once demoralize the very idea of human beings creating value
with their minds. It would also mean – if not its actual disintegration - a decline in the expected lifetime of a
scientific civilization, not to mention a refutation of its virtual and
mathematical imagination, an essential impoverishment in human comprehension;
“a decay”, as he called it, foregoing the equations and contingent configurations
essential for compound neuro-scientific thinking, or in truth, a conceptual
failure to develop highly anthropomorphous constructions - the entire raison
d’être of scientific evolution as well as the foundation of man’s cosmological
identity...
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