Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [131]
These mysterious properties of the Jovian decameter emission are reminiscent of the properties of pulsars. Typical pulsars have magnetic fields a trillion times larger than Jupiter’s; they rotate 100,000 times faster; they are a thousandth as old; they are a thousand times more massive. The boundary of the Jovian magneto-sphere moves at less than one thousandth of the speed of the light cone of a pulsar. Nevertheless, it is possible that Jupiter is a kind of pulsar that failed, a local and quite unprepossessing model of the rapidly rotating neutron stars, which are one end product of stellar evolution. Major insights into the still baffling problems of pulsar emission mechanisms and magnetosphere geometries may follow from close-up spacecraft observation of Jovian decameter emission—for example, by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions.
EXPERIMENTAL ASTROPHYSICS is developing rapidly. In another few decades at the very latest, we should see direct experimental investigation of the interstellar medium: the heliopause—the boundary between the region dominated by the solar wind and that dominated by the interstellar plasma—is estimated to lie at not much more than 100 astronomical units (9.3 billion miles) from the Earth. (Now, if there were only a local solar system quasar and a backyard black hole—nothing fancy, you understand, just little baby ones—we might with in situ spacecraft measurements check out the greater body of modern astrophysical speculation.)
If we can judge by past experience, each future venture in experimental spacecraft astrophysics will find that (a) a major school of astrophysicists was entirely right; (b) no one agreed on which school it was that was right until the spacecraft results were in; and (c) an entire new corpus of still more fascinating and fundamental problems was unveiled by the space vehicle results.
* With the sole exception of the meteorites (see Chapter 15).
* I have discussed these successful inferences and their spacecraft confirmations in Chapters 12, 16 and 17 of The Cosmic Connection.
CHAPTER 20
IN DEFENSE OF
ROBOTS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee …
Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4
THE WORD “ROBOT,” first introduced by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, is derived from the Slavic root for “worker.” But it signifies a machine rather than a human worker. Robots, especially robots in space, have often received derogatory notices in the press. We read that a human being was necessary to make the terminal landing adjustments on Apollo 11, without which the first manned lunar landing would have ended in disaster; that a mobile robot on the Martian surface could never be as clever as astronauts in selecting samples to be returned to Earth-bound geologists; and that machines could never have repaired, as men did, the Skylab sunshade, so vital for the continuance of the Skylab mission.
But all these comparisons turn out, naturally enough, to have been written by humans. I wonder a small self-congratulatory element, a whiff of human chauvinism, has not crept into these judgments. Just as whites can sometimes detect racism and men can occasionally discern sexism, I wonder whether we cannot here glimpse some comparable affliction of the human spirit—a disease that as yet has no name. The word “anthropocentrism” does not mean quite the same thing. The word “humanism” has been pre-empted by other and more benign activities of our kind. From the analogy with sexism and racism I suppose the name for this malady is “speciesism”—the prejudice that there are no beings so fine, so capable, so reliable as human beings.
This is a prejudice because it is, at the very least, a prejudgment, a conclusion drawn before all the facts are in. Such comparisons of men and machines in space are comparisons of smart men and dumb machines. We have not asked what sorts of machines could have been built for the $30-or-so billion that the Apollo and Skylab missions cost.
Each human being is a superbly constructed, astonishingly