Lots of news from outer space last week. Somewhere at the back end of the solar system, a huge, icy new planet is lurking, behind Pluto, which, according to the panic merchants, may come crashing by around the end of April – yes, this coming April – and wipe us out. Worse still, we are filling space with a gazillion bits of debris and satellites, which will eventually start colliding, until one day, said Nasa employee Donald Kessler, back in 1978, anything that we send up there will be “sandblasted into smithereens”.
What is so thrilling and romantic about space travel and exploration? I am bored stiff with it, and fairly terrified, and what good does it do me if there’s another planet out there? I am stuck on this one. Soon there are going to be squabbles about whose space junk smacked into whose satellite/spaceship/chunk of outrageously expensive equipment at 30,000mph; was it an accidental bit of whirling crap, or did the Russians/Chinese/Americans do it on purpose? Then it will be armed conflict and the third world/space war, as if we didn’t have enough trouble down here already, with our relatively small wars, displaced millions, nuclear risks, mishaps and general wreckage.
It’s all a bit Johnny Head-in-air, only worse, because although the boy in Heinrich Hoffman’s poem fell flat on his face and into the river, at least he had been admiring the sky, clouds, swallows flying and “the bright, round sun”. We’re just sending up endless rubbish and are never, ever satisfied with what we can see.
Yes, I know there have been fabulous spin-offs from Nasa research: robotics, artificial limbs, remotely controlled ovens, infrared thermometers and memory foam, but couldn’t we have spent a fortune inventing better prosthetics because we really needed them, or on lovelier mattresses, if we really wanted them, without making a pig’s ear of space first?
“There’s something wrong with us,” I tell Fielding.
“There’s no fooling you,” he says, wearily.
I’m just hoping that somewhere out there in infinity, there is another planet Earth in another solar system without a rogue species like us, which I hope we never discover or get anywhere near.
