Voyager

Escape Velocity



A Great Age of Discovery, like the epic voyages it encompasses, requires places to visit, the means to get there, and the will to go. For decades, after sledging over Antarctica and suffering through world wars and a global depression, exploration had sunk into a deep trough. But by the late 1950s all those errant requirements, separately evolving, had come into auspicious alignment. With Sputnik, a new era of planetary exploration achieved escape velocity.

There now existed technologies to carry instruments and people into places implacably hostile to life, and once there, to measure, map, and inventory by remote sensing. Some were mechanical devices such as rockets and submersibles; some, intellectual inventions such as maneuvers to boost spacecraft through gravitational assists. Together, machines and minds made possible forays over the ice fields of Antarctica and Greenland, across and down into the oceans’ abysses, and through the solar system, the primary geographic arenas for new discovery. And there were motives aplenty from science, ever competitive, always pushy; from communities of believers and enthusiasts, explorers and space cultists, eager to exploit a congealing alloy of interests; from cultural longings, especially traditions of adventuring and questing, however projected afar; from businesses keen to supply the products of desire, particularly when refracted through governments; military ambitions, either for defense or forward strategies to forestall moves by antagonists.

This bundle of new motives, means, and opportunities made the exploration of the solar system possible, beginning with planet Earth. By themselves, however, they could not guarantee a new great age. Left to its own momentum, scientific inquiry and technological inventiveness would have slowly opened more of Antarctica, here and there, as coastal bases appeared and sledging parties converted from dogs to Sno-Cats and Bell 212 helicopters. Instrumented vessels would have probed the continental shelves and the occasional abyssal plain. Rockets would have supplanted balloons for sampling the upper atmosphere and the fringes of interplanetary space. Geographic adventuring would have merged with extreme sports and exotic tourism. The process would likely have been slow and sporadic, not unlike the Portuguese coasting that mapped the shores of Africa in its and starts over the course of the fifteenth century or that slowly seeped across South America during the sixteenth.

Copyright Stephen J. Pyne, 2010.