LET ME KNOW WHAT SPRING IS LIKE [188]

At a time when society and politics has never felt more tied to the ground, the pride and nostalgia engendered in us all by the Apollo 11 Moon landings fifty years ago was, for me, swiftly replaced with nostalgia for the world into which we thought we would step, but never really did. We are haunted by our past visions of the future we thought would come. (I have also covered “hauntology” here: link)

I am talking about everything from missions to Mars to meals in pill form, from lunar outposts to “The Jetsons.” The Space Age started in the 1950s, and appeared to be declared over when the last of NASA’s space shuttles were decommissioned in 2011, eight years after the last commercial flight on Concorde – regardless of the ticket cost, it is hard to accept that flying from London to New York in under three hours is something no longer possible. Meanwhile, space travel itself is becoming a private enterprise, under people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but I don’t see someone like Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer that posited the idea of geostationary satellites, in their midst.

It is sobering to think that what launched humanity into space was imagination, rocket fuel and slide rules. The world was already transistorised by 1969, but the microchip had yet to open homes - the electronic pocket calculator was still a year away. Irrespective of that, and armed with rocket fuel and slide rules, humanity reached, well, Peak Humanity – it is difficult to top that sort of achievement without looking at what remains undone at home, as concerns over the state of the Earth became more important. It is hard to advocate a “Space Force” if you deny climate change at the same time.

Nationalism could also play no part, even in the space race with the Soviet Union, it was imagination that drove the United States to the Moon. In the May 1961 joint session of Congress where President John F. Kennedy stated the goal to land a man on the moon and return them safely, he said, “Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”

I have only one recurring dream, and it’s a big one. In it, I have been invited to fly to the edge of the atmosphere, if not into space – one day, I may have the chance to fly Virgin Galactic. As the craft reaches the highest point in its journey, I look out of a window, and witness the curvature of the earth. I experience deep emotion, mixed with not a little megalophobia. My whole life flashes before my eyes, because the location of all that has ever happened to me is now within view. I close my eyes for the descent. I am quiet for the next few days, but when I eventually say something, it is to ask why we spend so much time looking down at our feet.

This dream makes far more sense that the one where someone keeps stealing my coat hangers, or when a giant spider clasps onto me as I say, “honestly, this just keeps happening.” These unconscious thoughts may even preclude me from being “the right stuff” for space travel, as if I was the only person who dreamed of going up there. However, as Kennedy had intended, we had to make preparations for the next big steps we wish to take as a race. As much as some don’t think that will be regarding climate change, it will be, but will a return to the space age be next? Perhaps, when we find a way of saying that humanity hasn’t yet peaked.

SOMETIMES THE SUN GOES ROUND THE MOON [95]

Is there a rational reason for believing the Earth is flat?

It’s quite a question to pose, challenging universally held truths about how we see the world, and how we live our lives, but questioning them sometimes reminds us of the concrete truths upon which we base everything else.

But is there a rational reason? Any reason? No. Absolutely not. No way. In fact, I should tell myself to fuck off for even thinking of the question. It is not really even a question, because it is not in question – we all know the Earth is round. There was already enough evidence produced in the last couple of thousand years before anyone could take a picture from space. A bit of me did think of this as being too easy a target to discuss, but when the target - the Flat Earth Society, and there still being a theory about the Earth being flat, takes itself too seriously, it makes itself fair game.

Why would such a stupid question come to mind? It was a simple case of an engineer entrepreneur launching a car into space, and the usual suspects having a go at him using a spurious premise they themselves had set.

Last week, Musk launched the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, a partially-reusable rocket for launching payloads into space. Instead of simulating the weight of a satellite, or other payload, by using concrete or metal, Musk installed one of his Tesla cabriolets, and the unveiling of the car in front of the Earth, with a dummy driver named “Starman” in the driving seat, playing David Bowie songs, could well be cooler than playing golf on the moon.

However, an inevitable statement on the Flat Earth Society’s Twitter feed said, “Why would we believe any privately-held company to report the truth?” Meanwhile, their Facebook page sought to debunk what everyone saw: “we have already witnessed the shortfalls of this blind belief in online materials,” reminding us that “corporations are driven by profit, not the pursuit of knowledge or truth.” For the record, Elon Musk previously questioned on Twitter why there is no Flat Mars Society – the Flat Earth Society replied that Mars has been observed to be round.

The Flat Earth Society’s wiki [link] is aimed at “unravelling the true mysteries of the universe,” while demonstrating that the “Round Earth doctrine” is an “elaborate hoax.” It does this by having an answer for everything: Earth is a disc, with the Arctic in the middle, and the Antarctic as a ring around the edge; magnetic fields are created by ring magnets in the Earth, rather than unipolar ones; weather is created by the landscape; you cannot see the curvature of the earth, even when in a passenger plane flying at 36,000 feet.

I had looked to see how the word “satellite” related to the theory of a flat Earth, since global communications, including Facebook and Twitter, rely on communications satellites, geostationary orbits and atomic clocks to work, all things that require the Earth to be round, and what I found were reports of a campaign led by B.o.B, a rapper, to put a satellite above the earth to gather independent evidence to examine – this is “independent” as in independent of NASA, the perennial target for conspiracy theories. For a theory that distrust the evidence that science brings to the conversation, using science to prove the opposite seems a bit suspect.

The only legacy of flat Earth theory is that “Flat earther” is a term for someone that believes in an outlandish or discredited theory, or refuses to believe something despite overwhelming evidence, and I really have nothing to say further than that. We all know what to think about this, as we have all the evidence for it already.

ARE YOU OK, ARE YOU OK, ARE YOU OK ANNIE? [60]

When I gave myself the OK to write about the word “OK,” I wasn’t OK that some may not be OK with that. Sure, it would be OK to read, but instead of thinking “that was OK,” they may think it was OK instead. Then I thought, OK, if it turns out OK, that’s OK with me, OK?

Well, that is a lot of “OK,” but it reflects the list of possible origins for this word. Most often an abbreviation for fanciful misspellings of “all correct,” an apparent fad in the United States of the 19^th century, though “oll korrect,” or even “oll wright,” is a bit of a stretch, but “Old Kinderhook,” the nickname for President Martin Van Buuren, at least sounds plausible. The alternative spelling “okay” was itself another way of spelling “okeh,” the Choctaw Indian word for “it is so” – several West African languages have something similar. There are various explanations of how “OK” can be abbreviations of German, French, Dutch, Greek and Gaelic (“och aye”) words, among so many others – Puerto Rican rum can be “au quai,” for export from the docks, or an order could be from high command, or “Ober Kommando.”

I got the impression that, no matter how the prevalence of “OK” can be explained away, the fact that the “O” and the “K” are clear, unmistakeable sounds, and every language has both, the only issue is how you write it down: I always use capitals, but “O.K.,” “Ok,” “ok,” and “okay” are all perfectly fine in English, because there has never been a consensus. Meanwhile, the Finnish word “ookoo” is what the letters “O” and “K” sound like by themselves in Finnish, but it is pronounced “OK,” as in the English “OK” - the same goes for the Afrikaans “oukei,” the Maltese “oukej,” and “okey” and “okej” in most of Europe, when they are not writing “OK” themselves.

However, you can blame NASA for giving things the “A-OK.”

Is it OK that we have a word that can be used so easily? “OK” can be used without commitment, when you don’t want to say that something is good or bad. Likewise, you may want to say “OK” to confirm you have understood an order, a decision or a piece of information, but you may only want to give the impression that you have. “OK” can be used to create a distance between what you intend to mean, and what you want someone else to hear. Just like you may want to say “OK,” in a foreign country, you will get further if you have more words at your disposal.

Restricting your language? I’m not OK with that, but if you don’t lose what you want to say, that’s fine, OK?