Eccentric Flower:200907/The Moon and Phineas

Y'all have been very quiet. I don't just mean here. On Friday it seemed like no one was posting anything anywhere. I thought about posting about it. Then I realized that LiveJournal was doing its stupids and that none of the RSS feeds it picked up were working properly. They eventually all unconstipated Friday evening about five o'clock. (Oh, LiveJournal, I would be so happy to be shut of you forever.)

Of course weekends are always quiet. The web might as well stop existing on weekends. Even when things do happen on weekends, no one writes about it until Sunday night or Monday morning. I've stopped bothering putting up a new picture of the day on Friday or Saturday nights. No one will go look at them those two days, and I'd just cover them up with another one on Sunday night and so they'd never get seen at all.

Now it's Monday, and there's the usual amount of catch-up traffic, and yet I still feel like some sort of dead zone is in effect. Unnatural stillness. I'm sure I'm just imagining it.

Among this morning's crop of web pages, I find a number of contextual clues which eventually led me to go check Wikipedia and confirm that, indeed, today is the anniversary of a couple of people landing on a useless satellite as an international political demonstration which was ultimately meaningless.

It didn't have to be meaningless. It shouldn't have been. But it turned out that way. As Tom Wolfe puts it in this excellent article, because of the misguided "space race" reasons which led us to the moon in the first place, the dismantling was pretty much destined to begin as soon as we succeeded with Apollo 11:

Which, ultimately, is a failure that was dictated by going into the program for the wrong reasons to begin with. Kennedy's only interest in the space program was giving the USSR a black eye. That's not a very good long-term motivation.

Tom Wolfe (a man whom, I hasten to disclaim, I normally dismiss as full of malarkey) says the problem with the space program is that "NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers," and I disagree with that statement, but it's not fatal, because I agree with his conclusion:

Von Braun was right. This here is a very fragile basket and we have all our eggs in it. There are plenty of other reasons to go into space, but for me this will always be the primary one, the only one which is a high priority: Establishing footholds in other places, ensuring that when Earth is hit by an asteroid of sufficient size, or any of a thousand other calamities which would make the planet uninhabitable by mankind, there will still be some other outpost of humanity to carry on. Somewhere. Anywhere. Ideally not in this system. The further away, the better; the more we can send, the better. As far as I'm concerned we are already on borrowed time. We should be working on scattering seed across the galaxy. Instead we are "killing time" (Wolfe's words, and I agree with them).

I don't give a damn about the manned/unmanned debate; yes, manned carries more cachet and gets the laymen to sit up and take notice; it makes good television. It is also far more expensive and puts far more at risk. But I don't care about the methodology, as long as we are moving toward a goal: Get people off this goddamned planet on a permanent basis.

I disagree with Wolfe's use of "philosopher" because that is a bad word for me. To me a philosopher is someone who sits around woolgathering about why things are, and what they should be, without ever actually going and getting their hands dirty. I indulge in philosophy a fair bit in this journal, because I need to get it out of my system as quickly as possible; philosophy makes me feel like I need to take a shower afterward, in a way that, say, writing pornography does not. The latter strikes me as a far more honest and worthwhile occupation.

To my mind the problem with NASA is not that they need abstract thought, higher direction, but that they need concrete practice and base motivation. They need to aim at something and actually do it, instead of dicking around with their current busywork. I would say less philosophy and more practicality. Philosophy is for people who have nothing better to do, or, situationally and specifically, for people who cannot possibly influence the outcome in any real way. Like me, in this case. All I can do about NASA is holler; and, despite his being approximately one billion times more famous than I am, that's all Wolfe can do as well.

In truth, I don't really expect that any amount of hand-wringing, from anyone, will motivate the present governments of Earth to spend money on trying to get people out into space. And I'm not entirely sure it should. In fact I am not sure it is a good use of government money at all. Governments, part of me insists, should be preoccupied with the mundane problems of the populace - their proper job is at the very bottom of the Maslow hierarchy, trying to ensure food and clothing and shelter and that the corporations don't slip melamine into our coffee or deforest Brazil.

On the other hand, I have been waiting for private enterprise to invest private capital in commercial exploitation of space for twenty-some years, ever since I read the sentence, "For there is intelligent life in Tokyo," and it h'aint happened yet. Richard Branson does not count until he proves he can walk the walk. We already know he can talk the talk.

So I think the clear conclusion is that no one cares about extraterrestrial colonization or expansion but me and a crowd of other diehard weirdos, and that we must assume that no one will make any serious attempts to do so until they see the asteroid coming - by which point it will be far, far too late.

Phineas Gage is a man who was working on blasting a railroad right-of-way in 1848, packing a mixture of gunpowder and sand into a drilled hole using a tapered 13-pound metal rod. As he pounded the mixture in, the gunpowder detonated, driving the rod past his jaw, through his left eye, and out the top of his head, landing about thirty yards behind him.

Gage not only regained consciousness shortly after the accident, but made a full recovery over the course of the next several months. But he was no longer suitable for his job.

He was, in essence, Patient Zero for the idea that parts of the brain can affect not just thought processes but personality. Gage lived eleven more years after his accident, but was never the same man.

Gage is, of course, old news to people like me with Velcro brains, and therefore will be old news to some of you as well, but the new bit is that apparently a photo of him has surfaced. (Well, not a photo exactly, but I can't spell "daguerreotype.") If it is him, and the evidence suggests it is, it is the only known image of the man. You should click on the image to get a better view. It's quite haunting. One half of the face is an alive, alert man, fairly good looking; the other half might as well be a death mask. Part of him had literally died.

And yes, that's the tamping rod he's holding.

The companion article in the L.A. Times
Malcolm Macmillan is probably the only serious professional scholar of Gage's history, and certainly the only person ever to write a book about him
The source page for the daggur dagguero photograph