Battle of the Cemetery

Battle of the Cemetery

Our choice is stark and ironic. The same rocket boosters used to launch probes to the planets are poised to send nuclear warheads to the nations. The radioactive power sources used on Viking, Voyager and other spacecraft and probes derive from the same technology that makes nuclear weapons.

The radar and radio techniques employed to track and guide ballistic missiles and defend against attack are also used to monitor and command those tiny unmanned exploratory spacecraft from Earth which are moving, glistening and elegant, through the solar system and to listen for signals from civilisations near other stars.

If we use these technologies to destroy ourselves, we surely will venture no more to the planets and the stars. But the converse is also true: space exploration – manned and unmanned – uses many of the same technological and organisational skills and demands the same commitment to valor and daring as does the enterprise of war.

Should a time of real disarmament arrive before nuclear war, such exploration would enable the military-industrial establishments of the major powers to engage at long last in untainted enterprise. Time of the Battle of the Cemetary will end. The choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different conetxt, is clearly the universe or nothing.

(Extract from The Rain, the famous SF novel by Elena and George B.)

Battle of the Cemetary. Photo by Elena