Space: a Third Great Age of Discovery

Space Policy 37 (2016) 113e119

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Space Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/spacepol

Space: a Third Great Age of Discovery* Stephen J. Pyne 1 Arizona State University e West Campus, Phoenix, AZ 85017, USA

a b s t r a c t The world has known three great ages of exploration-the circumnavigation of the globe, with its attendant discovery of new lands; the traversing and cataloguing of the newly-found continents; and the exploration of the uninhabited regions of Antarctica, the deep ocean basins and outer space. The author points to the culturally and historically determined nature of discovery, which has thus far been largely a Western phenomenon, but emphasizes the qualitatively different character of space which takes the Earth, rather than any particular part of it, as its starting point, and which sets forth to chart regions that are most probably abiotic. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Thirty years ago the International Geophysical Year (IGY) provided an institutional and intellectual context for the first launch of a satellite to orbit the Earth. IGY did more than inaugurate Sputnik and its successors, however; it announced a new epoch of exploration, a Third Great Age of Discovery. Like its predecessors the Third Age would claim special realms of geography, interact with distinctive syndromes of thought, pose immense new problems of assimilation for politics, economics and scholarship, and demand a new moral drama to give it legitimacy. And like its predecessors, the Third Age of Discovery is establishing a vigorous, new dialectic with the civilization that it both serves and inspires. Why three ages? Why not four, or 13, or 30? Why partition at all a phenomenon that like all historical processes is a seamless web? The justification is that exploration cannot be abstracted from the historical and cultural context within which it occurs, and the same arguments that allow us to discriminate between any historical periods should encourage us to differentiate historically among modes of exploration. The reason for a Third Age is that William Goetzmann has recently e convincingly e argued for a Second Age of Disocvery which, because of an alliance with modern science, made exploration in the 18th and 19th centuries qualitatively different from exploration in the Renaissance. His argument is made primarily on intellectual grounds. I accept it, with the proviso that several dimensions, not primarily one, distinguish the Second * This is an abridged and edited version of a paper prepared for a symposium on ‘Solar system exploration: origins, evolution, and future prospects’, sponsored by the Space Policy Institute, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA on 9 December 1987. Copies of the complete paper and an accompanying talk by Carl Sagan on the scientific rationale of solar system exploration are available free from the Space Policy Institute. 1 He is the author of The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica and Fire in America.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.spacepol.2016.11.008 0265-9646/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Age from the First. And I propose that the same reasoning which encourages us to discriminate between a First and Second Age should encourage us to identify a Third.2 By the conclusion of IGY, the contours of that new age were apparent. The Third Great Age of Discovery has claimed as its geographic domain the solar system, beginning with planet Earth. It shares the intellectual syndrome known as Modernism. It has posed novel problems of assimilation for politics, economics, science, law, literature and art that are directly related to the discovery of new lands and the production of new information. It has demanded an appropriate mythology to explain and justify its activities within the moral universe of human society, and it has perhaps found one by retrofitting the epic of Western expansionism with a high-tech 2 My conception of a Third Age of Discovery has evolved out of discussions with William Goetzmann, who invented the concept of the Second Age and who supervised my doctoral dissertation (a biography of the American geologist and explorer, G.K. Gilbert). Both of us presented papers at an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) session in 1976 in which we developed our ideas, and these were published in a common volume: W. Goetzmann, digm lost’, pp 21e34, and S.J. Pyne, ‘From the Grand Canyon to the Marianas Trench: the earth sciences after Darwin’, pp 165e192, in Nathan Reingold, ed, The Sciences in the American Context: New Perspectives, Smithsonian [Press,Washington,DC,1979]. I expanded my own thoughts on the Second Age in a study entitled Dutton's Point: An Intellectual History of the Grand Canyon, Monograph 5, Grand Canyon Natural History Association, Grand [Canyon,AZ,1983], and elaborated on the Third Age in The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, University of Iowa Press, Iowa [City,IA,1986]. In both cases, however, the concepts were used more intuitively than rigorously and the Grand Canyon and Antarctica respectively, not the Second and Third Ages, were my primary concerns. At the same time that The Ice appeared, Goetzmann published New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery, Viking, New [York,1986], which explains his understanding of the concept of a Second Age. The present paper is my first attempt to explicate the Third Age e that is, to make the Third Age the object of inquiry, not to use it to refine inquiries into other subjects.

114

S.J. Pyne / Space Policy 37 (2016) 113e119

craft adequate to survive the voids of interplanetary space. It insists, with an extraordinary self-consciousness, that it shares the historic process that we call exploration and that, accordingly, it deserves the same relationship to its originating civilization. Taken together these phenomena constitute a Third Great Age of Discovery.

1. The discovery of exploration That exploration has a tradition e that it has a culture, a history, a mythology e says something about its specific character. There is frequently a tendency to generalize exploration into a universal expression of the human gene, to equate discovery with curiosity or with the human spirit.3 That it is, but not uniquely. If exploration is to claim special attention, it must perform a special role. Exploration is a specific invention of specific civilizations conducted at specific historical times. It is not a universal property of all human societies. Not all cultures have explored or even travelled widely. Some have been content to exist in xenophobic isolation, Many have actively resented visitations from curious outsiders. Even the emissaries of the discovering West came to doubt the propriety of connecting remote cultures with a larger world about which they had no interest. Most cultures have lived contentedly at home, and an alarming number of Western explorers have lived haunted, diseased, querulous existences or simply perished. It has not always been obvious, even to the West, that travel and discovery are unquestionable values. On the eve of James Cook's celebrated voyages, for example, Samuel Johnson wrote a didactic novella based on the 17th-century travels of Father Lobo to Ethiopia as a cautionary tale against those ‘who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and persue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect … that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow’. If what the human spirit craves is experience and information, then why travel? The Earth is infinite, Or at least unbounded, in its information content; in fact, it probably contains a hierarchy of infinite information sets. If what humans need is information, then why leave the laboratory? Why leave a library? Why not ponder our dreams? There is more to know than we will ever absorb in our own backyard. A child could spend a lifetime learning and never exhaust all that is known within any single culture. If what we as humans need is to engage our ‘spirit’, we can read Shakespeare or ponder the Dreamtime. Even among those cultures prone to travel, there are many ways by which one culture can learn about other lands and peoples. By themselves, the voyages of Renaissance Europe were logical successors to centuries of travel, trade, pilgrimage, conquest and seafaring. The exploits of Alexander the Great, for example, may be thought of as a kind of exploration by conquest; the sudden acquisition of lands, wealth, exotic peoples and knowledge created problems in intellectual and geopolitical assimilation identical to those posed by the voyages of the Rennaissance. Yet the pattern in the 15th century was different, too. Other times and other peoples had experienced challenges similar to that posed by Alexander in the ancient world without becoming the basis for a world system. By contrast, the European voyages of discovery catalysed a process of world discovery, and once allied with the scientific revolution, this resulted in a single world geography. Geographic discovery, the articulation of a scientific

3 For an example of this tendency, see Norman Cousins et al., Why Man Explores, NASA Educational Publication (EP 125), Government Printing [Office,Washington,DC,1976]. Obviously the capacity to explore is latent within the genetic make-up of humans, But why curiosity should take the form of exploration, as we understand that term, seems to me a matter of culture and history, not biology.

philosophy, a religious reformation, a rebirth of trade, art and maritime city states e all reinforced each other to make the nation states of modern Europe different from the tribal entities and empires of antiquity, the scientific outlook distinct from earlier natural philosophies, and the process of exploration something curiously different from the varieties of travel and discovery that had occurred previously. This is not to say that exploration as an institution could not have existed elsewhere, nor that the process of world discovery could not have been carried out by other cultures. Clearly other civilizations had the wherewithal, and in the 15th century there were several more promising candidates than Europe. Which civilization began the process, and when it occurred, were largely a matter of chance, of specific cultural propensities and historical opportunities. In this sense the ‘discovery’ of exploration parallels the ‘invention’ of modern science as a means of inquiry distinct from other forms of scholarship.4 It is, however, a matter of historic record that Western civilizations oversaw the geographic discovery of the globe and that in consequence what we consider as ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ have been profoundly influenced by the circumstances of that act. The outcome partially transcends the ethnocentricity of its origins. What Western explorers ‘discovered’, of course, were places, peoples and facts largely unknown to other peoples. But once having assembled these spheres of knowledge into a coherent whole, it was not possible for the process of geographic discovery to be repeated by other cultures. If a party of Andaman Islanders wanted to discover the geography of the Earth today, they need only visit a library or stop at virtually any location and gain knowledge of the rest of the globe. The alternative would require a massive act of wilful ignorance. In this sense, there was only one world to discover. Exploration, in brief, appears to be a cultural invention. Its appearance and shape are largely functions of historical and social circumstances. Its discoveries are culture-bound e the discovery by one people of geographies, knowledge, and experience unknown to it, but not typically unknown to other peoples. Its vitality as an institution depends on the vitality of the whole civilization with which it interacts. To survey the motives for exploration is to survey all the motives that animate a thriving civilization. We explore not because it is in our genetic make-up but because it is within our cultural heritage. Its experiences make the exploration of the solar system historically and institutionally plausible for Western civilization in ways that are not true for other cultures. It is no accident that space exploration is being pioneered by two aggressively expansionist nation states, themselves logical inheritors of the

4 It is worth quoting at length from an essay by Derek Price entitled ‘The peculiarity of a scientific civilization’:‘ We know now that none of the other great civilizations followed a comparable scientific path. It becomes ever clearer from our fragmentary historical understanding of their case histories that none of them was even approaching it. Two distinct attitudes are possible. The conventional one is to examine each civilization in turn and to show how the exigencies of wars and invasions, political and social conditions, economic disadvantage, or phi- Iosophical strait-jackets prevented the rise of any sort of Scientific Revolution. Perhaps it is a natural vanity to attempt to show that ours is the only one in step. A more rational alternative is to entertain the possibility that it is our civilization which might be out of step. Conceivably, the others were, for the most part, normal, and only our own heritage contained some intruding element, rare and peculiar, which mushroomed into the activity that now dominates our lives. One may legitimately speculate about the rarity of science in civilizations, just as the astronomer may speculate about the rarity of planetary systems among suns, or the biologist about the rarity of life on planets.’ By analogy one may also puzzle about the peculiarity and rarity of an ‘exploring’ civilization. The events that led to the institutionalization of exploration and, within two centuries e with a growing heritage of geographic discovery e the scientific revolution, appear to be strange indeed (Derek Price, Science Since Babylon, Yale University Press, New [Haven,CT,1975], pp 10e11).

S.J. Pyne / Space Policy 37 (2016) 113e119

tradition of Western discovery. At the same time, this heritage creates certain problems for the Third Age, because discovery among the planets is qualitatively different from the discovery of continents and seas. The Third Age has forced us to rethink our expectations for exploration. The relationship between a culture and its explorers is an uneasy one. Exploration has not just been something done by the West but to it. Only a peculiar civilization will allow itself, its understandings, its values, institutions and learning to be constantly bombarded with novelty e much less to encourage and promote novelty, with the inevitable consequences that the perspectives and values of that civilization will be in constant turmoil. That exploration has become itself a central institution e and its capacity to challenge, a value e is part of the dynamism of Western discovery. It is part of what has prevented those nations who have been active in exploration from lapsing into the status of folk societies.5 Still, it matters less what specific motives drive a participating nation than the fact that it competes. The fragmented political landscape of Western civilization, with its endlessly quarrelsome nation states, has installed a chronic competitiveness that has been an important contributor to the dynamic of discovery. While exploration, like modern science, has become more and more transnational e no longer dependent on the broader culture of the West, clearly capable of being grafted onto other root stocks e that informing rivalry has not been eliminated. Rather the scope of the rivalry has been expanded. New nations tend to compete to the extent that they accept particular Western institutions and values. A Third Age of Discovery confronts two challenges that directly relate to the cultural character of exploration. As a new epoch of exploration it must demonstrate continuity with the long-standing tradition of discovery by the West, while at the same time it has learned that it must redefine that tradition. Especially as the Second Age exhausted geographies accessible to its modes of discovery, exploration became increasingly a metaphor rather than a factual expression. But the Third Age has vigorously restored the original conception of exploration as geographic discovery by unveiling the exogeography of the solar system. This is one of its great strengths. The trade-off is that these new worlds are probably abiotic and insentient, and discovery will be dramatically different in character from its historical precedents. As the Third Age sheds its ethnocentricity, it also risks losing its anthropocentricity. As it moves into geographies previously uninhabited or visited by humans, exploration will look different. It will have to proceed without direct human agents, it must broaden its institutional scope beyond its origins as an exclusive club of the West, and it will have to base its claim to legitimacy on transnational or ecumenical values. That these concerns are problematic only restates the cultural basis of exploration.

5 The argument about values, which I believe is correct, is not simple. The values that exploration seems to promote belong properly with open, syncretic societies that are capable of rapid change. Yet the USSR has clearly demonstrated a capacity for space exploration. It may be that, by participating in exploration, the USSR will be forced to restructure some of its institutions or to accept certain social and intellectual values more commonly identified with the West. Equally, it has been argued by Walter McDougall (… The Heavens and the Earth: a Political History of the Space Age, Basic [Books,NewYork,1985]) that the essence of space programmes e the high cost of high tech and big science e are ruthlessly technocratic and intrinsically subversive of pluralistic, open, democratic societies. That the USSR seems to lead in overall commitment to space appears, to McDougall, a function of the alliance between technocracy and autocracy. The trend seems to be that every society will remake its space programme into something that resembles its prevailing institutions.

115

2. The geography of discovery The three ages of discovery have occupied different geographies, or rather each has added new realms while it resurveyed with new perspectives and instruments lands explored by earlier ages. For the First Age, this meant the geography of the continents, beginning with a new scientific Grand Tour of Europe; for the Third, the geography of the solar system, beginning with planet Earth. Accordingly, each epoch has had a characteristic mode of exploration and a gesture that has typified its ambitions. For the First Age, exploration was by ship, and its grand gesture was the circumnavigation of the world ocean. For the Second Age, travel was predominantly overland, and its classic expression was the traverse of a continent, a cross-section of its natural history. For the Third Age, exploration has depended on remote sensing platforms, most often spacecraft, and its defining gesture has been the geophysical inventory of a planet. In the earlier two Ages, as Alfred Crosby reminds us, the frontiers were not colonized by Westerners alone, but by a ‘portmanteau biota’ e a swarm of intended and accidental biological allies e that remade settled lands into neo-Europes.6 What colonization means in the Third Age is not yet clear. The deep ocean basins, the Antarctic interior, the solar system e all offer, at most, restricted bioases at submarine vents, deglaciated valleys, and other exotic niches. Life is an object of curiosity, not a sustaining biota. Human settlement will require the establishment of technological neoEarths. Thus, not only will the Third Age lack human guides from other cultures but a symbiotic biota as well. The Third Age features geographies that are both new and old. The Antarctic, in particular, has given the Third Age a point of departure from the geographies of previous epochs, so there are continuities possible. But it was the exploration of the deep oceans (which together with the sub-ice terrains of Antarctica make up 80% of the Earth's previously unknown solid surface) that provided the database for a revolution in the earth sciences. For the Third Age to flourish, it must expand beyond Earth, and even the Earth-Moon system, into the solar system at large.7 The exploration of planets is what really qualifies this epoch as a new age of discovery, and not as a technological afterthought of the Second Age. In this context, the Earth will assume the role for the Third Age that the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas did for the First Age, and continental Europe for the Second. The overall impact of exploration, however, involved not just land but information. Thus each succeeding Age could resurvey ‘known’ lands, as each did, with new instruments and concepts and extract new categories of information. Geodetic maps were not possible until chronometers were invented that could determine longitude with accuracy. Natural history surveys could not be conducted with real impact until a systematics existed that could organize their collections. In 1740, for example, Johann Dopplemayr estimated that not more than 116 places on the face of the Earth had been correctly located. Even so, the new geographies exposed to first-order reconnaissance were critical. The bulk e the monumental e data came from the new landscapes. No amount of laboratory interrogation, no increase in cleverness, no number of new calculations with improved mathematical techniques could have generated the same

6 Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Social Consequences of 1492, [Greenwood,1972], and Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe, Cambridge University [Press,Cambridge,UK,1985]. 7 The history of plate tectonics clearly demonstrates the critical role of oceanographic discovery, See, eg, Henry Menard, The Ocean of Truth, Princeton University [Press, Princeton, NJ, 1986].

116

S.J. Pyne / Space Policy 37 (2016) 113e119

torrent or calibre of information. When the data came, it arrived in great gulps, and it arrived with a staggering suddenness that took decades to absorb. The overall momentum of the process helps explain its shock value, which worked not so much in the manner of an instantaneous revelation but as a relentless, exponentially accelerating stress that caused all kinds of fracture planes in the culture to slip and fail. New systems of learning; new concepts, new genres of art and literature, new sciences; new institutions for the discovery, storage, interpretation and promulgation of discovered knowledge, and for the assimilation of the social, economic, political and legal consequences of discovery e all had to be redesigned, in some instances invented, and often rebuilt on new foundations. Even this proved inadequate. The Third Age promises to be no different. Even amid a crying need for renewed vigour in planetary exploration, even as realms of the solar system remain unvisited by so much as reconnaissance satellites, much of the existing data lies unused. The reason for overload is that, as in the past, large chunks of unknown lands were visited quickly, that the information did not emerge incrementally out of existing institutions of science and scholarship. In this sense, the geography and the technologies that made those geographies accessible drove the process. One of the attractions of the Third Age is that it has reunited geography with exploration. It has re-reified the metaphor. 3. The intellectual culture of exploration But geography is only part of the story. When Goetzmann sought to identify the defining feature of the Second Age, he cited the penetration of the Renaissance mode of exploration by modern science. The process was manifest in many forms during the 18th century, among them the paired expeditions of Maupertuis to Lapland and LaCondamine to the Andes to measure the arc of meridian; and the international endeavour to measure the transits of Venus that virtually retriangulated Europe with astronomical observatories and sent a complement of savants to the Americas, the South Seas, India, South Africa, the East Indies, Siberia and Lapland. In particular, the voyages of James Cook to the last major islands and the last unmapped littoral of the Pacific and the cavalcade led by Peter Pallas across Asia (to the ‘Land of Sibir’) mark a transition not primarily in geographic domain, though that was present, but in the mode of exploration. A grand alliance between exploration and modern science was forged that would persist into the early 20th century. Actually the association is broader than with science alone, as Goetzmann has himself amply demonstrated.8 There was a reformation in intellectual culture at large e the Greater Enlightenment e that invaded and incorporated exploration as it did nearly every other dimension of Western civilization. Thus Cook can be understood as an Enlightenment explorer e practical, sceptical, inquisitive; his maps, an expression of the urge to codify that resulted in Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, Johnson's Dictionary, Diderot's Enclyclop edie, the obsessive revisions of the Rudolphine tables by Halley and his successors. But the relationship was reciprocal. As exploration oriented itself to the imperatives of science and other cultural reforms, as it progressed from the littorals of the world ocean into the continental interiors and unveiled whole new worlds of natural history, both of space and time, it began to alter the social and intellectual parameters of the Greater Enlightenment. Systems had to be restructured, and learning broadened; enlightenment

8 The range of impacts is brilliantly presented in William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: the Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the West, Knopf, New [York,1966].

had to advance from elites housed in academies to include a literate public; exploration became an enormously popular activity. The Romantic revolution was in no small way inspired by the data, experiences and exotica shipped back by the exploring expeditions that proliferated at the end of the 18th century. There was an information explosion, a tumult of data, that could not be encased within existing aesthetic canons, literary and artistic genres, scientific schemas, and the careful, codified summas of the 18th century. Romanticism raged. The explorer metamorphosed into the Romantic hero. What Napoleon was to the politics of the age, what Beethoven was to its music, Humboldt and his successors were to its science. Yet the whole process remained strongly ethnocentric. What occurred was primarily an internal reformation within the confines of Western civilization. Discovery meant, in reality, discovery by and for the West. The bulk of knowledge came by transfer from other cultures; most of the expeditions e the successful ones, at any rate e relied on native guides; and many of the artefacts were the product of native collectors. Interpreters, scholars versed in the lore of other societies, adventurers capable of submerging themselves within an alien culture were the point men of discovery. Nearly everywhere that Western explorers ventured during the First and Second Ages, there were already human societies and systems of knowledge in place. As J.H. Parry has shown, the real achievement of the First Age was to connect into a coherent whole those existing maritime states that already inhabited and understood most of the seas that make up the world ocean.9 To these components, the West furnished a larger context e with the ship, an integrating technology; with the institutions of imperialism, an increasingly encompassing political and economic matrix; and with modern science, an insatiable appetite for data, an adaptable means to acquire it, and the presumption of a universal framework in which to locate it. What the explorer did was to recruit native guides, pilots, collectors, scholars, interpreters e or assume their role himself e to help introduce the existent knowledge of those societies into the protean culture of the West. The greatest of Western travellers and explorers went ‘native’. Nansen, Peary, Stefannson e the outstanding Arctic explorers became, in effect, white Eskimos, and relied on native hunters and modified Eskimo technology. Barth, Burton, Bruce e the most successful of North African explorers became Arabized Europeans, camouflaged Muslims, and accomplished linguists. But the story goes deeper than impersonation. Much of the charm of exploration literature derives from the relationship of the explorer to his native guides, and his encounters with tribes and civilizations that lived by precepts different from those of Christian Europe; so that, even as the explorer coded his discoveries into forms that allowed their absorption by Western scholarship, he learned to see the world differently. The explorer to such lands became a practising anthropologist; and among the most expressive data returned from discovery was the perspective gleaned from a journey into an alternative moral universe. Anthropology was not only enlarged in its data but ultimately relativized in its judgment. Only its alliance with modern science spared Western ‘discovery’ from the charge of total ethnocentricity. Science promised a transnational, if not a wholly transcultural perspective. It made possible an abstraction from the knowledge of various peoples into a more universal framework, a global scholarship of nature. It laid down an intellectual prime meridian by which information from around the globe could be organized into a universal projection. It

9 J.H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea, University of California [Press,Berkeley,CA,1971], pp xiii-xv.

S.J. Pyne / Space Policy 37 (2016) 113e119

even reformed and partially transcended its originating civilization, the West. Western civilization was the first of the world's civilizations to have its folklore and inherited beliefs subjected to the acid scepticism of modern science, so that the West was vastly different after several centuries of science and exploration than it was before. Even science itself was subject to evolution. So it went, until the Second Age ran out of new lands and new peoples. The exhaustion of continental geographies coincided with a faltering in the intellectual culture and even in the moral drama that had sustained the Second Age. The philosophical underpinnings of the Greater Enlightenment gave way to the precepts, reformed genres, perspectives and data sets of Modernism. Virtually every expression of high culture would, in time, feel this reformation. Even the perspective of science itself was relativized. The intellectual justification for geographic exploration subsided. Sciences, like geology and anthropology, that were too closely dependent on the Second Age, became moribund. Others, like biology, reconstructed themselves around the laboratory. The vision of the explorer as Romantic hero ended on the ice sheets of Antarctica and in the trenches of the Great War. As Modernism grew, classic exploration receded. Instead Modernism celebrated the interior journey, more pleased to follow Conrad into a heart of darkness or Freud into a murky subconscious than a Henry Stanley across tropical Africa or a John Wesley Powell through the Grand Canyon. Modernism and the Third Age are not yet fully synchronized. The problem is mutual. Not all of high culture has been brought comfortably under the banner of Modernism, and the Third Age has made itself felt selectively, with primary impacts in certain fields of science, technology, international politics and law e the latter in a spectacular set of treaties to govern the geographies of the Third Age.10 The Third Age is simply too recent for the reconciliation to have been consummated. What is incontestable, however, is that the exploration of the solar system cannot be understood as a simple extension of the mode of exploration that carried Western civilization across the continents. The discovery of abiotic planets is fundamentally different from the discovery of inhabitable continents. The Third Age of Discovery cannot be subsumed under the intellectual aegis of the Greater Enlightenment. The exploration of the solar system looks different because it is different. The images of the Second Age are still powerful in shaping our expectations about exploration. They lead us to believe that discovery must produce the same kind of experiences if it is to qualify as exploration. Even popular writings and TV shows about space exploration tend merely to retrofit the explorer of the Second Age with newer-model hardware. Science fiction novels recycle the Romance genre, but set it in more far-flung places and times. Star Trek, for example, is the voyage of the Beagle at warp drive. The peculiarities of the Third Age, however, are basically the peculiarities of Modernism. No one would confuse the exploration of Martian rift valleys by Viking spacecraft in orbit about the planet with the exploration of the East African rift valleys by Livingstone, yet that difference is no greater than the difference between quantum physics and Newtonian mechanics. The good news is that exploration has joined the Modernist syndrome. The bad news is that Modernism has not yet caught up with that fact. Their decoupling is metastable. The Third Age is Modernism as explorer.

10 The Antarctica Treaty pioneered new concepts of sovereignty; the Law of the Sea has been revised to accommodate the new regime of the deep oceans (and continental shelves); and a series of treaties have been ratified to govern human conduct on the Moon, the bodies of the solar system, and, more awkwardly, nearEarth space.

117

When reconciliation comes, the consequences will be profound for both. If the exploration of the solar system is to develop into a full-blown Age of Discovery, it must have broader liaisons with high culture than it has enjoyed so far. Apart from the natural sciences, its cultural strengths have come, ironically, from popular culture. Television and the Third Age have grown up together; TV has given a popular access and an immediacy to geographic discovery that is unprecedented. It is also a medium with which the high culture of Modernism has barely come to grips. Much of the, machinery by which high culture has traditionally transferred the data and images of discovery to society has been bypassed, and new ones are not yet installed. Yet volcanoes on Io, filigree rings around Saturn, red deserts, rift valleys and ice caps on Mars are images as compelling as any our civilization has produced in recent decades. It is inconceivable that they will not influence our art and literature and philosophy in the near future as profoundly as Wallis's and Cook's images of balmy, sybaritic Tahiti. Their impact should broadcast throughout high culture. All this is not to deny the traditional ‘spin-offs’ of exploration e its political, economic, technological or military consequences. But it is intended to broaden our understanding of how exploration has historically evolved within our civilization. It suggests that exploration has been an organic component of Western civilization, and that its significance will influence expressions of high culture that may on the surface seem remote to the concerns of planetary discovery. Modernism and the Third Age need each other. Many of the special concepts, techniques and perspectives required by the Third Age, which were beyond the reach of the Second Age and the Greater Enlightenment, are common lore within Modernism. This is most apparent in certain areas of natural science and international politics; but it races beyond. In particular, Modernism has addressed the philosophical conundrum of planetary discovery in which, to explore abiotic and insentient environments, robots e extensions of the Self e must take the place of native guides and an Other. They propose a way for the Third Age to make contact with the natural universe without losing its moral universe. In return, the Third Age should do for Modernism what the First did to the Renaissance and the Second to the Greater Enlightenment. 4. Exploration as moral drama Exploration proceeds from many motives e economic and political gain, scholarship and curiosity, religious compulsion, the relentless imperialism of science, national prestige; a full rendering would be nothing less than a spectrum of those things that motivate its sustaining civilization. For exploration to become a selfreinforcing dynamic, however, the critical requirement is that there be rivalry across a range of motives and institutions. But there is a larger issue, the choice to participate at all. That requires a conviction that can only come from the sense that exploration is part of a moral drama of fundamental significance to the originating civilization. The moral drama of discovery has had many parts. Some are ancient, some more modern; some endemic to Western civilization, some more specifically tied to national cultures. These elements are constantly reshaped, like pieces in a kaleidoscope, into new patterns by each generation. The patterns describe the deep location of exploration within that civilization. They organize a set of complementary expectations. They take the form of creation myths for Western civilization. The explorer becomes, intentionally or not, a moral missionary, telling others and his sustaining civilization who they are and how and why they ought to behave. The explorer necessarily evaluates one civilization against another and justifies them. The triumphs and failures of explorers become parables and the act of discovery e of exploring, reclaiming, pioneering,

118

S.J. Pyne / Space Policy 37 (2016) 113e119

expanding e has itself become a-prominent value of our civilization. The argument is often made that our civilization cannot thrive in its absence. In this view, expansion must continue not for what it finds but for the renewal of spirit it encourages. The process, not the product, is critical. The sense of moral discovery, too, has been sharpened by the continual experience, on the part of explorers, of moral universes different from that of the West. This was an inevitable consequence of the encounter with other peoples and of the reliance by explorers on other peoples for the transfer of knowledge and technology, and often for survival. It was impossible, for example, to use Eskimos as hunters and partners in sledging across the Arctic icepack without entering their particular vision of nature, their conceptions of good and evil, of a proper code of human behaviour. This led eventually to the reconstitution of anthropology on the principle of cultural relativity, which in turn contributed to a reexamination by some Western intellectuals of the assumptions underlying their own moral precepts, with sometimes unexpected outcomes. The kaleidoscope is still turning for the Third Age, even as the exploration of the solar system, beginning with a dramatic geophysical resurvey of the Earth, is under way. The Cold War helped jump-start the Third Age into motion e gave it an inaugural rivalry. Other nations are now rushing to participate, however; and there is no reason to think that international programmes will eliminate that competitive dynamic. International ventures in science have tended to show the same spirit of cooperation that the Olympic Games do; they do not banish rivalry e and in fact, they fan nationalist sentiment e but rather direct it to useful purposes. The international effort in 1761 to measure the transit of Venus did not cause Britain and France, then embroiled in the Seven Years War, to cease their bloody sprawl across North America, India, the East and West Indies, and Europe.11 IGY did not abolish the Cold War, but suspended it in Antarctica and projected it into interplanetary space.12 It is possible that the peculiar geography of the Third Age and its inclusion of non-Western nations may change the historical character of that informing rivalry. There are no obvious, short-term resources other than information, national prestige, and selected technological developments. Exploration, however, has never concentrated unto itself the whole rivalry, but has manifest only one dimension of a deeper competition. To restructure the informing rivalry would require that the entire spectrum of competing interests be reconstituted. Yet those nations like Japan that are entering into space exploration seem to do so to the extent that they have adopted critical Western institutions and have, since modernization, become themselves aggressive in economic, political and scientific endeavours. They are expanding the rivalry. Similarly, modern science is itself highly competitive, almost imperialistic, acting as though there were but one world to discover. Science may sublimate rivalry e offering an alternative to military conflict e but it does not eliminate rivalry. It is difficult to imagine a non-competitive science. Thus it is unlikely that the Third Age will proceed without an informing rivalry, whether based on nationalism, or on science, or on trade, or on arms, or on something as yet unanticipated. The moral dramas proposed for the Third Age have largely

11 Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus, Princeton University [Press,Princeton,NJ,1959]. The arguments advanced by the scientists as to why their respective nations should participate sound remarkably modern. 12 See, eg, the story of how the USA came to establish a station at the South Pole during IGY, primarily to forestall a Soviet station; described in Walter Sullivan, Assault on the Unknown, McGraw-Hill, New [York,1959].

clothed the old myths with a high-tech hardware. But questions crowd the enterprise. Can we generalize from the belief that it was the manifest destiny of Americans to occupy the North American continent to the assertion that it is the manifest destiny of humanity to occupy the solar system? Can we retrofit the search for Prester John into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Can we pioneer the planets in any meaningful sense as we could the New World? Can we save the Earth by establishing New Jerusalems on the moons of Saturn, or by unravelling alternative histories of planets, or by plotting out different evolutions of life? Can we claim that the exploration of space is a genetic imperative, a recapitulation of the colonization of the continents by Life? Can the technologically advanced civilizations honestly assume a new White Man's Burden, the exploration and colonization of the solar system, and claim that they act as emissaries for all humanity? Can we, by leaving the Earth, also leave the context that for Modernism has made irony inevitable and self-reference inescapable? What kind of moral epic can exist when exploration only proposes extensions of the Self, when there is no Other against which to measure behaviour? Can we restore historicism e the determinism of predestined expansion e by naturalizing it into human genes, and in this way simply avoid the moral dilemma of expansionism? The essence of the old drama was its combination of expansionism with determinism and the belief that someone (or some institution) must act as an agent of destiny. In this regard there is little distinction between a recycled manifest destiny and a high-tech Marxism.13 However the old components come together, I suggest that the moral drama of the Third Age will have at its core a happy, peculiarly Modernist paradox that has to do with its insentient, abiotic geography and the self-referential tendencies of Modernism. The first challenge is to our concept of moral behaviour. It is counter-intuitive to have a morality without an Other e yet this is what exploration by mechanical probes and information colonies means. It is increasingly unlikely, however, that either sustaining ecosystems or interplanetary cultures will be found within the geographic range of the Third Age. If life is found, it will probably exist as a scientific curiosity e as bioases, not as sustaining biotas. If extraterrestrial intelligence is encountered, it will probably exist outside the solar system, so that there will be no indigenous, extraterrestrial source of guides, collectors and interpreters, nor a body of lore to transfer, nor a society against which to measure our own moral worlds. All of this is profoundly different from what exploration has experienced before. Yet there is no reason why this should be any more intrinsically fatal to exploration than the loss of the ether was to modern physics or the loss of geological historicism to modern earth science or the abandonment of mathematical perspective to modern painting. They are fatal only if we interpret the Third Age through the prism of the Second. That we end up talking to ourselves is an endemic attribute of Modernism.

13 The appeal to determinism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it absolves us from having to make a deliberate choice and from explaining ‘ultimate’ reasons for that choice. We explore space because we must explore space; it is in our genes; it is our nature, and we cannot avoid the decision. The move into space by intelligent beings is automatically justified as part of the natural evolution of the universe. On the other hand, the appeal to determinism is unnecessary, it is antithetical to modern concepts of human culture, and it is perhaps politically counterproductive. It is not needed to justify our actions. It is hostile to most 20th-century anthropological and philosophical reasoning, which locates the basis for the almost infinite plasticity of human societies in ‘cultural’ considerations, such as that humans do not evolve according to evolutionary pathways in the same way that stars do. Ironically, the re-emergence of expansionas-destiny rhetoric seems to accompany a re-emergence of other versions of 19th century deterministic philosophies. And by emphasizing predestination, the determinist rationale may absolve civilizations that have the wealth and technological capacity for space travel from making the real-world, real-time decisions to do so.

S.J. Pyne / Space Policy 37 (2016) 113e119

The paradox comes alive, however, precisely because extraterrestrial life and intelligence are not likely to be found. The apparent liability of the Third Age is in fact an asset. The exploration of the planets can resanction the moral drama of expansion in traditional Western archetypes only if life and extraterrestrial cultures, as we understand those phenomena, are not found. What subverted the special claims of Western discovery was its ethnocentricity, much as it simultaneously undermined the legitimacy of Western political and economic expansion. The growth of one group came at the expense of other groups. The Third Age promises to shed ethnocentricity, to relocate manifest destiny among the planets because exploration there will not re-enact the complex encounters between cultures and biotas so characteristic of Earth history, because discovery will not, in the process, corrupt the discoverer. It promises renewal for the explorer without loss for the explored. There is no need to invoke determinism, by which to absolve the expanding society from its moral behaviour, because there is no Other against which to act. There will be no context for the ironic perspective so typical of modernism and so vital to the informing principle of expansionist critiques like Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The real crisis will emerge only if life or intelligence are discovered within the solar system, because the informing moral drama will then be transfigured, like all true creation myths, into a tragedy. It may be that this core paradox, as much as anything, makes Modernism and exploration fellow travellers in the Third Age. It is a paradox with which we can live. 5. Conclusion The exploration of the solar system, dramatized by IGY, is well on its way to status as a true Third Great Age of Discovery. With the deep ocean basins and the interior, sub-ice terrains of Antarctica, it has successfully revealed a new Earth geography, and with its expansion into the solar system, a previously unvisited exogeography. With Modernism it has an intellectual syndrome, with which it has growing rapport, that can furnish the techniques and conceptual tools demanded to explore beyond the Earth. With its relocation of old moral dramas to new landscapes, the Third Age promises to subsume and legitimate a variety of second-order purposes. The exploration of the solar system has reburnished expansionism. Already, too, there is the inevitable, essential rivalry among nations that has historically powered the dynamic of Western exploration. Like the landscape of Venus beneath its clouds, the contours of the Third Age are beginning to emerge. If the concept of a Third Age is valid, then some predictions and cautions are perhaps in order. For five centuries Western civilization has learned to live with exploration e has come to doubt, in fact, that it can thrive without it. The shock of discovery has become a cultural value, part of the dynamo that has powered Western expansionism. Yet one of the real shocks of the Third Age will be to

119

assumptions about how exploration operates, what it discovers, what it must be in order to survive. This may explain, in part, the exceptional self-consciousness of solar system exploration as a perpetuator of an exploring tradition. The Third Age will be closer in temperament to the Second Age than to the First, but there are inexpungeable differences that relate, in particular, to the possibility of interacting with other peoples and other biotas, We will not be re-establishing an older, more familiar pattern of discovery but evolving new and (one hesitates to use the word) alien modes. The character of exploration in the Third Age will look as strange to previous modes of exploration as fauvism and surrealism to representational art. The problems of assimilation e which begin, in a sense, with the problem of assimilating a new mode of exploration e will be difficult. They will deform institutions as well as intellectual systems. And the process will require time. In reality, we are only 30 years into the Third Age, as measured from IGY, and about 40 as measured by the post-World War II expeditions that were the preludes to IGY. The dialectic between Western civilization and the Third Great Age of Discovery has barely begun. Its prospects will be reinforced by the designation of 1992 e the Columbus quingentenary e as International Space Year. The USA pioneered much of the Third Age, especially the reoccupation of Antarctica and the exploration of the deep ocean basins. It lagged behind the USSR in space exploration initially, though it has shared and, at times, led in planetary exploration. The USA was a leader, however, because of its extraordinary status at the conclusion of World War II, which was made possible in large part by the destruction of the industrial base of most of its competitors. As that special economic and political status has eroded, so has its special standing as a participant in the Third Age. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its recession from the continued exploration of the solar system. Now the USA e ‘Exploration's Nation’, as William Goetzmann argues14 e must decide at what level it wishes to compete. With or without the USA the Third Age will go on. Probably nothing short of an apocalypse will stop it. If, indeed, exploration can accept a new style, one less dependent on human actors and more on instrumental probes; if it can learn to interrogate landscapes lacking in human cultures and sustaining biotas; if Modernism, with which the Third Age is necessarily allied, has as an intellectual syndrome a breadth and staying power analogous to that of the Greater Enlightenment; if the allure of expansionism beyond the Earth can claim the moral drama and popular legitimacy enjoyed by past epochs of Western exploration; if, that is, the Third Age does mark a new epoch of discovery equivalent to that of the First and Second Ages, then its impact will ramify throughout our civilization, and the Third Great Age of Discovery will carry us not only into the 21st century but into the 22nd.

14 William Goetzmann, ‘Exploration's nation: the role of discovery in American history’, in Daniel Boorstin, ed, American Civilization, McGraw-Hill, New [York,1972], pp 12e36.