You know who I like? I like Elon Musk.

Yeah, I know, he’s a car guy who dislikes public transportation. But it’s possible to disagree with and admire someone at the same time. And last week, he did about the coolest thing it’s possible to do with a car: fling it into space.

Musk’s own Tesla roadster, built by his car company, served as the payload for a test of the Falcon Heavy rocket, built by his other company, SpaceX, which hopes to land humans on Mars within the next 20 years. The car will travel in an elliptical orbit that will periodically cross the orbits of Earth and Mars. Buckled into the driver’s seat is a space-suited mannequin named Starman.

If nothing else, it means there’s one less car clogging up traffic on Earth.

The car could remain in space for millions of years. It’s already made the NASA catalogue of near-Earth objects. On the scale of cool, this doesn’t quite rise to the level of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” on the Voyager record, but it’s close.

Test rockets typically carry payloads like concrete or scrap metal, but I admire Musk’s sense of humor and instinct for self-promotion. And beyond the whimsy, the car will serve a real purpose. Perhaps, in the far-off future, commerce between Earth and Mars will be carried out using vessels in similar orbits.

Critics, as always, were quick to pounce. Writing in the U.S. edition of The Guardian, Nathan Robinson called the launch and its attendant publicity “utterly depressing.”
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Robinson reaches for all the tropes we’ve heard since the Apollo program. How, he asks, can we justify expensive esoterica like launching a car into space when people all over the world are dying from war, preventable disease, and poverty? Although Musk is using primarily his own money to finance his forays into space, Robinson argues that his wealth is the result of intolerable “social inequalities.” He hauls out a poem titled “Whitey on the Moon,” written in 1970 by Gil-Scott Heron, just to throw race into the mix.

I am as concerned about social injustice as any liberal, but I am not buying this tired argument. What I find particularly loathsome is that it always seems to be singularly directed at space exploration. No one says that we shouldn’t build that new art museum or baseball stadium or interstate highway until we’ve solved the problems of poverty and human suffering. Why should space science have to continually defend itself against these kinds of objections?

When NASA launched the Cassini mission to Saturn in 1997, protesters gathered at the launch site, demanding that it be scrubbed. The reason? Cassini carried a small amount of plutonium, which would power it in the outer solar system. To get to Saturn, the spacecraft would use a “gravity assist” flyby of Earth two years after launch, passing within 720 miles of the surface. Critics worried that a mishap could potentially spill the plutonium into the upper atmosphere. But there was no mishap, and Cassini produced discoveries that vastly increased our knowledge of Saturn and its moons. I think it was worth the risk.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, thousands of their countrymen were dying in our tragic and unnecessary intervention in Vietnam. Yet on that night, billions of people watched the electronic images of human beings walking on another world. The United States was, for that moment and in spite of its faults, an inspiration for the human race. It was possible to be against the war and in favor of going to the moon. Conscience practically demanded it.

If Musk’s car helps to pave the way for human colonization of Mars, even if only as an expensive publicity stunt, it will pay for itself may times over. It will also address, albeit indirectly, many of the problems that seem so vexing today. Space helps us see the world whole, and to realize, in Carl Sagan’s words, that for now, Earth is where we make our stand. Treat each other more kindly, and take care of the planet.

But Musk is also right that our long-term future is as a multi-planet species. And to demonstrate that it can be done, he’s launched his own car into an eternal commute between the orbits of Earth and Mars. That he undertakes the serious business of space with aplomb and élan is all the more reason to cheer him on.

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Don’t be like Dean Martin, or Carl Sagan, or Benazir Bhutto. Don’t die in the last weeks of the year. You will have already missed the deadline for the Year In Review retrospectives, and you won’t be in them next year, either. History forgets you in a hurry without publicity.

Sagan was just 62 when he died in 1996, four years younger than Tom Petty, whose recent passing seems so premature. I am a member of the Planetary Society, which Sagan co-founded in 1980 (with Bruce Morgan and Louis Friedman) to advocate for space exploration and space science. Sagan was among the first scientists to warn us about the dangers of carbon emissions from motor vehicles and industry, pointing to Venus, where surface temperatures are hot enough to melt lead, as an example of a “runaway greenhouse effect.”

Stephen Jay Gould was only sixty when he checked out, leaving behind a lifetime of paleontological research, provocative theories, and a trove of extraordinary essays for general audiences. To my everlasting regret, I did not discover the bulk of his writing until after his death in 2002. I could have been one of the thousands of his readers who sent him letters on the astonishing varieties of topics he addressed. These letters, Gould wrote in the introduction to Bully For Brontosaurus, his last published essay collection, gave him faith in the intellectual curiosity of the ordinary citizen.

Like Sagan, Gould had the facility to convey complex concepts in ordinary English. Also like Sagan, he delighted in making connections between seemingly disparate topics. Sagan’s interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life took him deep into anthropology and geopolitics. Gould turned Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak into a meditation on “statistics and mythology,” and the human tendency to impart meaning to random patterns, much as we conjure constellations from the stars in the night sky.

Gould was fond of skewering popular perceptions, especially those with which he had some sympathy. For example, he took the environmental movement to task for the exaggeration that Earth is a fragile planet, threatened by human activity. It is our civilization, he wrote, not the Earth itself, that we endanger:

“We certainly cannot wipe out bacteria (they have been the modal organisms on Earth right from the start, and probably will be until the sun explodes); I doubt we can wreak much permanent havoc upon insects as a whole (whatever our power to destroy local populations and species). But we can surely eliminate our fragile selves – and our well-buffered Earth might then breathe a metaphorical sigh of relief at the ultimate failure of an interesting but dangerous experiment in consciousness. Global warming is worrisome because it will flood our cities (built so often at sea level as ports and harbors), and alter our agricultural patterns to the severe detriment of millions.

“Our planet is not fragile at its own time scale, and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run. Yet no political movement is more vital and timely than modern environmentalism – because we must save ourselves (and our neighbor species) from our own immediate folly.”*
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I’ve always hated the movie Waterworld, because it’s preposterous: if all the ice on Earth melted, sea level would rise by about 250 feet. When Kevin Costner dives on submerged Los Angeles, he would see the San Gabriel Mountains and the foothills from the deck of his ship.

The world’s population of motor vehicles now numbers approximately 1.2 billion. The United States is by far the worst offender, with five vehicles for every six people. If the Chinese owned cars in the same proportion as we do, they would need a billion vehicles just for themselves.

The average weight of a car or light truck is 4,079 pounds. A gas-powered vehicle spews its weight in carbon compounds into the atmosphere each year. That means that our automotive infrastructure is annually pumping 4,894,800,000,000 (4.9 trillion) pounds of greenhouse gases into the clear blue sky. (And that’s not even counting the impact of the trucking industry, the byproducts of road construction, and vehicle manufacturing and disposal.) While these gases won’t turn our planet into Venus, they will continue to contribute to rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, disruption of food supplies, and other life-threatening challenges.

This January marks eleven years since I last owned a car. I am under no delusion that I’m changing the world. But the world is changing, nonetheless.

 

* from Bully For Brontosaurus, copyright 1991 by Stephen Jay Gould.

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