The Future of Geography E-Book

Tim Marshall

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Tim Marshall on Geopolitics
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 352

Beschreibung

THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF 2023 A WATERSTONES PAPERBACK OF THE YEAR 2023 Space: the biggest geopolitical story of the coming century – new from the multi-million-copy international bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography and The Power of Geography Spy satellites orbiting the Moon. Space metals worth billions. Humans on Mars within our lifetimes. This isn't science fiction. It's astropolitics. We're entering a new space race – and it could revolutionise life on Earth. Space: the new frontier, a wild and lawless place. It is already central to communication, economics, military strategy and international relations on Earth. Now, it is the latest arena for human exploration, exploitation – and, possibly, conquest. We're heading up and out, and we're taking our power struggles with us. China, the USA and Russia are leading the way. From physical territory and resources to satellites, weaponry and strategic choke points, geopolitics is as important in the skies above us as it is down below. If you've ever wondered if humans are going back to the Moon, who will benefit from exploration or what space wars might look like, the answers are here. With all the insight and wit that have made Tim Marshall the UK's most popular writer on geopolitics, this gripping book shows how we got here and where we're going, covering great-power rivalry; technology; commerce; combat in space; and what it means for all of us down here on Earth. This is essential reading on power, politics and the future of humanity. Praise for The Future of Geography: 'A voyage of galactic discovery' The Mail on Sunday '[An] engaging exploration of power politics in space' Irish Independent 'A superb survey of planetary politics' The Sunday Times 'Deeply thought-provoking' BBC Sky at Night 'Marshall is an engaging writer, good at explaining the science as well as the politics, and with an eye for a telling fact' Lawrence Freedman, The New Statesman 'Written with insight and great wit, this is an essential take on power, politics and the future of humanity from the UK's most popular writer on geopolitics.' The Daily Telegraph 'In the latest instalment of his popular books on the meaning of geography, Marshall looks to the stars and the new frontier where astropolitics will be the new geopolitics' Financial Times *The Future of Geography was a No.1 Sunday Times non-fiction paperback bestseller w/c 1st Oct 2023 for 5 weeks.

Leseprobe

‘In his typical style – wielding a wickedly clever pen – Marshall provides a thoroughly enjoyable, dizzyingly thought-provoking, and technologically plausible ride through the terrain of solar space. Along the way, he shows how irretrievably entwined with space humanity has become, pathways to a space future we could take and, fortunately for us, a few that we should. I’m envious. This is a book I wish I could have written. Fortunately, I got to read it.’

Professor Everett Dolman, Professor of Comparative Military Studies and Strategy, US Air Force

‘A fascinating and crucial insight into how, even as humanity moves upwards into the final frontier, we’ll be influenced by the geographies of space. Marshall has done it again!’

Professor Lewis Dartnell, author of Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

‘A chilling, insightful exploration of the political and military implications of our presence in space.’

Brian Clegg, author of Final Frontier

‘Astropolitics is a word I never thought would enter my lexicon – but after reading this fascinating book, I’m hooked!’

Dr Becky Smethurst, astrophysicist at the University of Oxford and author of A Brief History of Black Holes

‘If space is our future, this urgent book reveals that we’re in danger of handing it over to warmongers, plutocrats and conquistadors as rapacious as those on Earth. Tim Marshall shows us why we need to look up – fast.’

Tom Burgis, author of Kleptopia

Praise for The Power of Geography:

‘I can’t imagine reading a better book this year.’

Daily Mirror

‘A useful reminder of the value of consulting an atlas before blundering into world affairs, and especially so in times of rising geopolitical tensions . . . interesting insights.’

Financial Times

‘A skilful navigation of the regions that could define geopolitics for future generations. One to read to stay ahead of the game.’

Dharshini David, author of The Almighty Dollar

Praise for Prisoners of Geography:

‘One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine: reading it is like having a light shone on your understanding.’

Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard

‘A fresh and original insight into the geopolitics behind today’s foreign policy challenges.’

Andrew Neil

‘Sharp insights into the way geography shapes the choices of world leaders.’

Gideon Rachman, ft.com

‘Marshall is not afraid to ask tough questions and provide sharp answers.’

Newsweek

To my family

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART 1: THE PATH TO THE STARS

1.   Looking Up

2.   The Road to the Heavens

PART 2: RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW

3.   The Era of Astropolitics

4.   Outlaws

5.   China: The Long March . . . into Space

6.   The USA: Back to the Future

7.   Russia in Retrograde

8.   Fellow Travellers

PART 3: FUTURE PAST

9.   Space Wars

10. Tomorrow’s World

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Selected Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

‘I haven’t been everywhere,but it’s on my list.’

Susan Sontag

WE EXPLORED THE WORLD AND DISCOVERED IT IS FINITE. Now, just as our territory and resources begin to run out, we find that the big, beautiful ball in the sky – the Moon – is full of the minerals and elements we all need. It’s also a launchpad: just as early humans went from island to island as they crossed the seas, so the Moon will allow us to reach across the solar system and beyond.

It’s no surprise, then, that we are in a new Space Race. To the victor the spoils. The challenge will be to ensure that humanity is the victor.

Space has shaped human life from our very beginning. The heavens explained our early creation stories, influenced our cultures, and inspired scientific advances. But our view of space is changing. It is now, more than ever, becoming an extension of the geography of Earth: humans are taking our nation states, our corporations, our history, politics and conflicts way up above us. And that could revolutionize life down on Earth’s surface.

Space has already changed much in our everyday lives. It is central to communication, economics and military strategy, and increasingly important to international relations. It is now also becoming the latest arena for intense human competition.

The signs that space is going to be a huge geopolitical narrative of the twenty-first century have been accumulating for some time. In recent years, rare metals and water have been found on the Moon; private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX have massively lowered the cost of breaking through the atmosphere; and the big powers have fired missiles from Earth, blowing up their own satellites to test new weapons. All of these events have been pieces of the bigger story emerging.

To understand that story, it is helpful to see space as a place with geography: it has corridors suited to travel, regions with key natural assets, land on which to build and dangerous hazards to avoid. For the last few decades all of this was considered to be the common property of humanity – no sovereign nation could exploit or lay claim to any of it in its own name. But that idea, enshrined in several noble, albeit outdated and unenforceable documents, is fraying badly. The nations of Earth are all looking to take advantage where they can. Throughout recorded history, civilizations fortunate enough to be able to utilize natural resources have developed technologies to help themselves grow stronger, and eventually to dominate others.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We have many examples of cooperation in space, and many of the space-related technologies being developed, in medicine and clean energy for example, will help us all. Several countries are working on ways to deflect huge asteroids, capable of destroying the world, off a collision course – and it doesn’t get more common property than that. As the science-fiction writer Larry Niven said, ‘The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space programme.’ It would be beyond inconvenient to suffer another hit like that.

It’s taken a long time to get where we are. The Big Bang theory suggests that 13.7 billion years ago, give or take the odd few thousand years, every single thing in the universe that exists today was compressed into an infinitesimally tiny particle existing in nothingness. Some concepts related to the universe can be difficult to get your head around, and ‘nothingness’ is one that scientists argue over endlessly. They go into notions such as quantum vacuums, in which ripples in space can cause things to pop into existence, but after reading and rereading the theories several times over I’m never much further along. The universe is expanding – but into what? What is outside its current boundaries? I can’t imagine nothing. An endless wall of grey does the trick (beige is also available), but only for a second because, of course, grey is something and not nothing . . . and then I give up. Fortunately, theoretical physicists and cosmologists are made of sterner stuff.

From ‘nothingness’ the particle exploded – although it wasn’t so much ‘flash, bang, wallop!’ as ‘bang, wallop, flash!’ as it took about 380,000 years for the first particles of light to emerge. This is the cosmic microwave background, which scientists can see through modern space telescopes – all the way back, almost to the very beginning. You can see it for yourself in the static fuzz between channels when you tune an old analogue TV. The universe expanded and cooled, and gravity caused gas clouds to gather and condense into stars.

We now know that our Sun was formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago – a relative newcomer in the universe. A huge disc of gas and heavier debris swirling around the new star then created the planets and their moons in our solar system.

Planet Earth is the third rock from the Sun. It’s a good place to be. In fact, for now it’s the only place because if it were anywhere else – we wouldn’t be. Everything that has happened since the Big Bang has shaped the geography of what we see now and allowed us to evolve to where we are. Earth is the Goldilocks of planets. Not too hot, not too cold – just right for life. Earth’s position, size and atmosphere all contribute to keeping us grounded. Literally. Its size means gravity has enough strength to hold on to the atmosphere. Move elsewhere in our neck of infinity and we’d either fry, freeze or suffocate due to a lack of breathable air.

As the great American cosmologist Carl Sagan said in his book Billions and Billions, ‘Many astronauts have reported seeing that delicate, thin blue aura at the horizon of the daylit hemisphere – that represents the thickness of the entire atmosphere – and immediately, unbidden, began contemplating its fragility and vulnerability. They worry about it. They have reason to worry.’ You’d think we might take better care of it.

But humans have always been wanderers, and in the last century have begun to move far from our planet. Space is such a massive canvas that we have only sketched our presence on it in a tiny corner. The rest is there for us to draw on in detail – together. If we’re to navigate our way outwards into the next era of the Space Age in a peaceful and cooperative fashion, we need to understand space in its historical, political and military contexts, and to grasp what it will mean for our future.

In these chapters, we will look back in time to see how space has influenced our cultures and our ideas, from societies organized largely around religion, all the way to scientific revolutions. From there, it was the Cold War that drove the Space Race – prompting huge leaps in human endeavour and innovation that finally allowed us to break the bonds of Earth. Once out, we started to see opportunities, resources and strategic points worth competing for. We are now in the era of astropolitics. But what we’ve failed to establish so far is a set of universally agreed-upon rules to regulate this competition; without laws governing human activity in space, the stage is set for disagreements on an astronomical level.

In the modern era, there are three main players we need to know about: China, the USA and Russia. These are the independent spacefaring nations, and how they choose to proceed will affect everyone else on Earth. The militaries of each have a version of a ‘Space Force’ that provides war-fighting capabilities for their forces on land, sea and in the air. All are increasing their capacity to attack and defend the satellites that provide those capabilities.

The rest of the nations know they can’t compete with the Big Three, but they still want to have a say in what goes up and what comes down; they are assessing their options and aligning into ‘space blocs’. If we cannot find a way to move forward as one unified planet, there is an inevitable outcome: competition and possibly conflict played out in the new arena of space.

And finally, we’ll look far forward into our future, to see what space could hold for us – on the Moon, on Mars and beyond.

The Moon pulls the sea to the shore, and humans to its surface. Wolves raise their muzzles and howl at the silvery disc hanging in the night sky. Humans raise their eyes and look further, to infinity. We always have, and now we are on our way.

PART 1

THE PATH TO THE STARS

CHAPTER 1

LOOKING UP

‘To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.’

Stephen Hawking

Our solar system.

THE FLICKERING LIGHTS OF THE STARS TELL MANY STORIES. Long before we ever dreamed of venturing into space, before artificial light dimmed our view, we stared up at the skies and asked – why is there something rather than nothing? Much of human endeavour has been driven by our desire to reach for the stars.

The first recorded beliefs about creation, the gods and constellations must have come from an oral storytelling tradition stretching back into prehistory. All ancient cultures saw in the sky an idea of what might have created them, who they were, what was their role and how they should behave. If there were gods – and what else could explain what was seen – it was logical to believe that some of them lived in the heavens above.

Humans are hardwired to look at things and see patterns. People joined the dots and made a picture corresponding to what they saw on Earth and what they knew from their legends. Those in hot climates might see the shapes of scorpions or lions, while those in colder realms would pick out a moose. In Finland the Northern Lights are known as ‘fox fires’ because of the ancient tale of a magical fox whose tail swept snow up into the heavens, while in parts of Africa there is a legend that the Sun is behind the night sky and the stars are holes that let some of its light through. The stars were inseparable from our stories, myths and legends.

The earliest potential evidence of people trying to analyse and understand the skies dates to about 30,000 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age. In the early 1960s the prehistorian Alexander Marshack interpreted marks carved into animal bones as being lunar calendars. The bones show sequences of twenty-eight and twenty-nine points. Experts still argue about exactly what women and men in the Late Palaeolithic period might have known, but there is a body of evidence that they were studying the stars.

Scientists speculate that these early astronomers used their portable calendars as they moved on long hunting trips and migrations, and possibly for rituals. It makes sense that a way of marking time would develop. You would need to know when, for example, the mosquito season was about to begin, or when you should move on towards the trees whose fruit was ripe.

The more practical side of watching the skies was also crucial as hunter-gatherers became more sedentary, a process that began roughly 12,000 years ago. The first farmers and herders needed to know when to sow seeds and how long it was before harvest. Some of the Neolithic cave paintings found in Europe, which are over 10,000 years old, are thought to depict star formations. Again, the claims are debated, but the pattern of constellations can be found in some of the animal drawings. People who looked at the stars every clear night must have noticed that the lights were in different positions at different times, even if they had not yet worked out that 365 periods of daylight and darkness equalled one unit of time.

We are still a long way from any proof of accurate measurement of the movement of the planets and stars at that time. Even when we arrive at the beginning of the building of stone circles, the evidence is sketchy.

The oldest known is Nabta Playa in what is now Egypt. It’s sometimes called the Stonehenge in the Sahara, which is a bit unfair as it was built about 7,000 years ago, some 2,000 years before the world’s most famous henge. This is because the site was only discovered in the 1970s and fully excavated in the 1990s. It’s thought it was built by semi-nomadic herders to help them know when they should be on the move. There’s some evidence to suggest that the stones were aligned with key stars, such as Sirius, which is the brightest star in the night sky. Evidence for the more fanciful suggestion that they could also measure the distance to those stars is harder to find, mostly because, according to experts, it isn’t there.

The same is true of Stonehenge and the many other stone circles in north-west Europe. Stonehenge was first constructed about 5,000 years ago, by which time farming had been a way of life in the region for 1,000 years. It is safe to say that Stonehenge lines up with the Sun on the winter and summer solstices, but beyond that any association with astronomy is far more speculative. It’s known that great feasts were held near the monument from the 38,000 discarded animal bones found at a settlement 3 kilometres away. Alas, Druids are not thought to have been present at these events as they didn’t show up in Britain until about 2,000 years later, which must be quite disappointing for those people who descend on the site today dressed in white gowns and carrying sticks.

It’s when we reach back about 4,000 years that we begin to find written proof that people were analysing the skies with a high level of sophistication and the ability to predict movements accurately. Writing and mathematics were the keys enabling the breakthrough.

In around 1800 BCE the Babylonians, borrowing from their predecessors, the Sumerians, wrote down the signs of the zodiac based on the constellations as they saw them. They had long believed that the gods sent them warnings from the sky about future events such as famine. Priests developed the ability to record celestial movements on clay tablets and designed a calendar featuring twelve lunar months. That was the relatively easy part. After a few generations of storing the data, and using advancements in mathematics, they noticed that planets do not move in the same way in consecutive years but, given long enough, patterns of repetition do occur. This allowed them to work out where in the sky a planet would be on a specific date in the future.

It’s largely down to the Babylonians that we divide time into seven-day weeks. They saw seven celestial bodies, figured that each one oversaw a particular day, and so divided the lunar cycle of twenty-eight days into four parts. At the time, the Egyptians were using a ten-day division, which, had it lasted, would make for a long working week. As for a two-day weekend? Well, the Babylonians did designate one day for relaxation, but we can also thank the Hebrews for letting us know that if God wanted to rest on the seventh day, then so should we. Somewhat later, the unions won us another day off whether God wanted one or not.

The Assyrians, Egyptians and others made similar advances in astronomy, but humanity still believed that astronomical events were caused by the gods. Astronomy and astrology were inseparable. The ancient Greeks thought the same way as they took up the mantle of these scientific pioneers. The Greeks put their stamp on cosmology like no other civilization. By looking up at the stars, they also changed the way we think about the world.

The Greeks had been learning from the Babylonians for centuries. Pythagoras was just one of those who had benefited when, c.550 BCE, he worked out that what were called the morning star and the evening star were the same thing – the planet Venus. The breakthroughs he and others went on to achieve came as they applied geometry and trigonometry to cosmic questions.

One of the greats was Hipparchus, who is thought to have invented the astrolabe – Greek for ‘star taker’. This was the ‘smartphone’ of the ancients and, unlike some of today’s consumer technology, it didn’t have a built-in failure date. Astrolabes were used for almost 2,000 years. They could tell you where you were, what time it was, when the Sun would set, and give you your horoscope. They functioned using a series of sliding plates, including ones containing Earth’s latitudinal lines and the location of certain stars. They spread from the Hellenic Greek region into the Arab countries and later to western Europe. The Muslims used them to locate the direction of Mecca; Columbus used them as he headed towards the Americas.

The Greeks believed Earth to be round several generations before Aristotle describes it as such in his On the Heavens, written in 350 BCE. He noted that Earth’s shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is circular. If Earth was a flat disc, then at some point, when sunlight struck it side on, its shadow on the Moon would be a line. As this did not happen, logic suggested a round Earth.

Aristotle writes about mathematicians measuring distance in stades (from where we get the word stadium) and finding that Earth’s circumference was 400,000 stadia – about 72,000 kilometres. They may have been off by 32,000 kilometres, but it was still a massive leap forward in our thinking.

About a hundred years later, Eratosthenes of Cyrene worked out how to measure the circumference of Earth accurately. He knew of a well in Syene (now called Aswan) in Egypt where every year at the summer solstice the Sun illuminated the bottom of the well without casting any shadows. This meant the Sun was directly overhead. He then measured the length of the shadow cast by a stick at noon on the summer solstice in Alexandria. From this, he calculated that the difference in the Sun’s elevation between the two cities equated to an angle of 7.2 degrees along the curvature of Earth – roughly 1/50th of a circle. Now all he needed was an accurate measurement of the distance from Alexandria to Syene. He hired professional surveyors, trained to walk with equal strides, and was told the distance was 5,000 stadia. His conclusion was that Earth’s circumference was between 40,250 and 45,900 kilometres. The actual circumference is now usually accepted as 40,096 kilometres.

At its heart, Greek learning argued that there is an underlying order to the universe and that this could be discovered and expressed by observation and mathematics. This was the beginning of the idea that the world could be understood through natural processes, rather than with reference to the gods. The Greeks worked to find the circumference of the Moon, and the distance from Earth to the Moon, and the Moon to the Sun. However, they consistently vastly underestimated distance and, although they developed theoretical models of planetary motion, in all of them the planets circled Earth, a belief that survived until the Renaissance.

There were many scientific giants, culminating with Claudius Ptolemy (c.100–c.170 CE), who summarized classical astronomy and categorized the star-pictures of the ancients into forty-eight constellations (today there are eighty-eight), giving them names that still dominate many languages. Aquarius, Pegasus, Taurus, Hercules, Capricorn, etc., were all written down in Ptolemy’s book, which he called The Mathematical Collection but is known to the world by its Arabic name – the Almagest. Yet Ptolemy was hamstrung by the same thought process as his predecessors: that Earth was the centre of the universe, and the planets circled it.

It was based on what they knew and what their logic told them, and this model held for more than 1,500 years. We know of one early exception to this orthodox view. Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 BCE) argued that Earth revolved around the Sun – the heliocentric universe model. The scholars disagreed.

Aristarchus and others had correctly worked out the distance to the Moon. However, they put the Sun only about twenty times further away than that – a massive underestimation, but still an enormous distance. The Greeks erred on the side of caution. To accept some of the equations would be to accept a cosmos of such magnitude that it required a leap of imagination they could not make. Proxima Centauri, our closest star apart from the Sun, is almost 40 trillion kilometres away. The fastest-travelling spaceship so far built would take 18,000 years to get there. Even in the twenty-first century we struggle to understand these distances. The things the Greeks worked out, using what they had, are among the greatest intellectual and scientific achievements in humanity’s long history.

As Greek power faded, the Romans had the opportunity to advance the science of astronomy. However, they never embraced maths with quite the same passion. The Greeks were interested in astrology, but the Romans were obsessed with it, especially after the founding of the Roman Empire in 27 BCE. Never mind the distance from Earth to the Sun, what was Mars doing in relation to Venus? The life of the emperor might depend on it! The Romans continued to use astrology to make political predictions all the way up until the collapse of the Western Empire in the fifth century, an event they might not have seen coming.

During this period the Chinese had been developing their astronomical skills and finding ways to divide time for practical uses. The mathematician Zu Chongzhi (429–500 CE) devised the ‘Calendar of Great Brightness’ based on 365 days a year over a 391-year cycle, with an extra month inserted in to 144 of the years. Zu wrote that his findings did not derive ‘from spirits or from ghosts, but from careful observations and accurate mathematical calculations’.

Behind Zu’s methods was the same ethos that drove the Greeks – the study of empirical facts to explain the world. But the gods and ghosts still dominated thinking in most parts of the world. It would take an explosion of brilliance in the Islamic realm to make great leaps in our understanding.

From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, across a vast region stretching from what are now the Central Asian Republics to Portugal and Spain, Islamic culture first mastered Greek astronomy and then took it forward during the period known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Islamic learning. In 900, Al-Battani reduced the length of a year by just a few minutes, and by doing so suggested that Earth’s distance from the Sun varied. That in turn suggested that perhaps the planets did not move in perfectly circular orbits. Some scholars began to question the idea that Earth did not move, and it became accepted that it rotates. A brilliant polymath named Nasir al-Tusi challenged parts of the Ptolemaic system that were not based on the principle of uniform circular motion. However, again the leap was not made to the model of Earth moving around the Sun.

As Islam’s ‘Golden Age’ blazed bright, Europe was in what used to be called the ‘Dark Ages’. Historians now prefer the less pejorative ‘Early Middle Ages’, meaning roughly between the fifth and tenth centuries, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of a return to urban life in Europe. It was a time when there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. All celestial bodies circled Earth, which was the centre of the universe. Above this was God; on Earth there were kings, bishops, barons and serfs; and everyone should be content with their lot. As serfs tended to be unable to write, it isn’t easy to know if they agreed. The term ‘Dark Ages’ comes from the Italian scholar Petrarch (1304–74), who felt that Europeans were living in darkness compared to the brilliance of the Greeks and Romans. In his epic work Africa he wrote: ‘This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.’ Petrarch lived on the cusp of the Renaissance – a time he might well have thought of as ‘pure radiance’. It certainly was for astronomy and its role in progressing humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe.

None of the great scientific texts on astronomy were available to Europeans during the Early Middle Ages. This began to change with the work of Gerard of Cremona (1114–87) and others who translated them from Arabic. Gerard went to Toledo, to learn Arabic well enough to translate Ptolemy’s Almagest into Latin (the original Greek edition had been lost for years). It was the first of eighty works transcribed by the Toledo School of Translators. The revival of learning was one of the foundations of the Renaissance, opening the doors to knowledge, and the facts flowed in as generation after generation built on what came before and contributed to what is known as the Scientific Revolution, starting in the sixteenth century. It was hard going. The Earth-centred views of cosmology had been adopted by the Catholic Church, and woe betide the heretic who sought to disprove them.

European astronomy took centuries to match the expertise of the ancient Greeks and the Islamic Golden Age. It wasn’t until 1543 that it broke serious new ground. That year, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs, which suggested that an Earth-centred universe was wrong.

Copernicus was careful with his phrasing, writing, ‘if the Earth were in motion’. At first criticism was mostly muted. He was a loyal member of the Church and had written ‘if’. He also helpfully died two months after the books came out. However, Catholic and Protestant clergy were keen to undermine his claims, and science was put on notice that the teachings of the Church could not be challenged.

In 1584, the Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno published On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, in which he defended Copernicus and argued that the universe is infinite, with infinite worlds, inhabited by intelligent beings. He was put on trial, and after nearly eight years behind bars he refused to renounce his views, was declared a heretic and burned at the stake – although it’s likely his questioning of more fundamental Catholic doctrine such as transubstantiation played a bigger role in his demise than his views on cosmology.

Next up was Galileo Galilei, the first person to use the newly invented telescope to systematically record observations of the night sky. In 1610 he published The Starry Messenger, which made his name and, thanks to its challenge to the idea of an Earth-centred universe, almost cost him his life.

Galileo’s studies of the movements of the other planets in the solar system appeared to be in line with Copernicus’s theory that Earth did move around the Sun. It wasn’t long before the Church condemned this view as heresy. It said that such beliefs contradicted the Bible – specifically Joshua 10:12–13, in which a call is made for the Sun to stop moving – ‘And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’ If Scripture said the Sun moved, who was to say it did not?

The pope ordered the theory to be banned. The Church knew that these dangerous new ideas could cause an earthquake undermining the hierarchical model of society, their legitimacy and ultimately their power. If Earth was not the centre of the universe – indeed, if there was no known centre – then were humans so important? The French theologian and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62) realized the implications: ‘Engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified.’

Galileo stepped away from the controversy for a while, but in 1623 a new pope, Urban VIII, was elected, who encouraged Galileo to write on the topic, essentially asking him to show his support for the geocentric view. Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican in 1632. It was a nuanced book but came down in favour of the probability that Earth was moving. The pope was not amused, and a two-month-long trial began.

Galileo’s defence was that his intent hadn’t been to support the Copernican view, that his work was only a means of discussing the view. To no avail – he was found guilty of ‘having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) . . . that the earth does move, and is not the centre of the world’. He was sentenced to house arrest, under which he remained until his death in 1642, and was told, ‘Thou shalt recite once a week the Seven Penitential Psalms.’

It could have been worse. Had Galileo not been the most famous scientist in the world he might well have suffered the same painful death as Giordano Bruno. In 1992, 359 years after his trial, the Vatican finally admitted it was wrong.

Despite the wrath of the pope (but probably not God), the tide of knowledge was flowing in the wrong direction for the priests. Our study of the skies had overturned centuries of accepted wisdom and led to a completely new view of the world. The old gods were being challenged – whether that was the intention or not.

A year after Galileo’s death, Isaac Newton was born. He went on to invent a new telescope allowing a deeper view into space than had been previously possible. His Principia (1687) announced to the world the laws of motion and gravity, and ushered in a new age in physics and astronomy.

Newton came not to bury God but to praise him. The more he discovered about the universe, the more convinced he was that its magnificent design must have had a designer: ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.’

Newton agreed that Earth orbited around the Sun. Galileo had conducted experiments on what we now call gravity (supposedly dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa), but Newton’s great leap forward was his theory that the laws of gravity applied to all objects, and that this was as true in space as it was on Earth. As with the giants before him, he arrived at a revolutionary moment in history by a combination of empirical work and just sitting down and thinking.

Why did the apple fall in a straight line to the ground? Why did a cannonball fall in a curve as it lost speed? What strange force pulled them down? Newton’s law of universal gravitation stated that all objects attract each other, with the force exerted depending on the mass of the objects and the distance between them. So even if the apple was thrown forward from the highest mountain, at such a speed that it just kept going, it would not head out into space in a straight line but ‘fall’ around the world in a never-ending curve, held close to Earth by this strange force called gravity, from the Latin gravitas, meaning weight. And gravity, he said, explained why planets constantly revolved round the Sun instead of just wandering off into space. The closer a greater object is to a smaller one, the stronger is its gravitational pull.

There was some limited resistance to his ideas by a few scientists on the grounds that Newton’s gravity was akin to primitive superstitions about a supernatural power. He was content to prove his ideas rationally, and to believe in his God.

There was more, so much more. Newton’s work is considered by some to have made the greatest contributions to the history of science. When he died in 1727 his body lay in state in Westminster Abbey for a week. The great English poet Alexander Pope wrote, ‘God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.’

This was an exciting time for science, akin to that of the ancient Greeks and the Islamic world’s Golden Age, but different in that knowledge advanced more quickly than in any period before. Each discovery created another chink in the armour of organized religion and its claim to power. In the Age of Reason, it became unreasonable to tell a scientist to recite Penitential Psalms for contradicting Scripture.

Staring up at the sky had led to a complete revolution in the way we thought and lived our lives, opening up the road to further scientific endeavour. Gradually, but not entirely, organized religion in the technologically advanced countries retreated to its temples, and science occupied the temporal sphere.

It was an age of miracles and wonders. Since then we have learned a huge amount more, and there’s a majesty to our science which now allows us to see so much when we gaze up at the stars. A modern space telescope can look back in time and detect light that has been travelling for more than 13 billion years.

In 1931 Georges Lemaître suggested that the universe began with the explosion of a single tiny particle, which he called the ‘primeval atom’. This idea was supported by observations Edwin Hubble made in the 1920s through the massive Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson in California, which appeared to show that all observable galaxies were moving away from Earth in every direction at rapid speed. It was logical to conclude from this that they must have originated from a single place at a specific point in time. This theory would become known as the ‘Big Bang’. At the time, conventional wisdom mostly supported the Steady State theory – that the universe had always existed, and always would. But in the 1950s new measurements of the speed of movement of the galaxies suggested its birthday was 13.7 billion years ago. This was an extraordinary revolution in our understanding of the universe.

In 1990 the 12-tonne Hubble Space Telescope was put into orbit. Free from the limiting and distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere, the telescope began to bring the cosmos into sharper focus and to look further and further into its past, to within microseconds of its, and our, birth. Now, infrared telescopes can detect light from radiation that can pass through cosmic dust but cannot be seen by the human eye or visible light telescopes such as the Hubble. Measuring the wavelengths and composition gives the data to tell the story of the universe.

All of these discoveries have been driven by the need to answer the questions ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ Science is brilliant at answering the first, but even when it finds the answer, it often throws up yet another ‘Why?’ Despite our advancing knowledge, we have still not taken the wonder out of the universe. In many ways, the theories and discoveries of the twentieth century only added to it, posing questions that might only be answered as we begin to explore the physical realities of space.

During the first two decades of the last century the world was introduced to the strangeness of quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity and space-time. Quantum theory suggests that the mysterious subatomic world of tiny particles is governed by total randomness, an idea that conflicted with Einstein’s (and Newton’s) view that there are universal laws. The debate is worth touching on briefly. Briefly because most of us are in good company with some of the best brains ever to have existed in that we, and they, don’t really understand quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it, Einstein’s response, and his discoveries tell us something about why our destiny is in space.

Quantum entanglement theory suggests that particles can be connected to and instantly influence one another even if they are hundreds of millions of kilometres apart. The key word here is instantly. But this simply doesn’t fit with the accepted idea that there are universal laws of science. For example, as Einstein showed, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

That is why he rejected quantum entanglement as ‘spooky action at a distance’ and scientists continue to argue about its validity. Nevertheless, it leaves open the possibility that laws are not universal. If so, perhaps something can travel faster than the speed of light, implausible though this sounds. One of Einstein’s most famous quotes was in response to this dilemma: ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’

Einstein agreed with Newton that space has three dimensions – height, width and length. But Newton thought that the objects in space did not affect these dimensions. Einstein said they did. His General Theory of Relativity had added a fourth dimension, time, and he called this combination of four dimensions space-time. This new fourth dimension could be warped by large masses even to the extent of speeding it up or slowing it down. Think of space as a foam mattress. You step on it. Your weight (or mass) causes a depression in space. According to Einstein, gravity is a distortion in the shape of space-time.

Our ancestors looked up and saw a universe they could not understand, but used its apparent order to make sense of their world. We now know so much more, and yet still confront an infinite universe full of mystery containing dark matter, black holes, warps in the fabric of space-time, and challenges to the very concept of order and law. This is what Newton meant when he said, ‘What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.’

The implications of quantum mechanics and space-time on what will, and will not, be possible in space travel are unknown but will potentially open new avenues in the distant future. Because after all these millennia of discovery, there are still more questions than answers, and more questions to be asked that we don’t even know of yet. Some of those questions and answers will only be found the further away from Earth we go. And the desire to find out, to know more – and even to go there ourselves – has proved irresistible.

CHAPTER 2

THE ROAD TO THE HEAVENS

‘I see Earth! It is so beautiful!’

Yuri Gagarin

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin on the Moon beside the US flag, 21 July 1969.

WE FIRST CROSSED THE BORDER WITH SPACE LESS THAN A century ago. It had taken thousands of years of slow development, followed by an amazing sprint during those decades of miracles and wonders in the twentieth century. But it was conflict on Earth that finally got us there. The technology that took us to the heavens came from the arms race of the Cold War.