South Florida inside a cylindrical-conical spaceship named Columbia, and reached
the Moon in four days. One hundred years later, NASA designed capsules of the
same shape to host a crew of three astronauts, to be launched from Cape Canaveral
in South Florida. It took them three days to land on lunar soil. Verne also realistically described the condition of weightlessness in spaceflight and even the return
to Earth, with a water landing in the ocean. Overall, all technical details in the
book were quite precise. He was wrong about the launch system, which he imagined would be a 1,000-foot cannon filled with gunpowder instead of a rocket. But
apart from this last detail, who knows how many future NASA engineers and
technologies Verne inspired?
Other forward-looking minds included the 20
th
century writers Nicholas
Negroponte and Howard Rheingold.
Negroponte, Professor at MIT and founder of MediaLab, wrote Being Digital
2
in 1995, in which he imagined the epochal transition from atoms to bits. He foresaw the current digital society and its consequences on the international economy,
whose evolution had to be studied on two opposing tracks: globalization and
localism.
Psychologist and sociologist Howard Rheingold understood how the use of the
phone modem in the eighties would pave the way for today’s social networks:
Since 1985 I’m used to connecting my computer to the telephone network
and every day, I get in touch with people from all over the world; I use a
teleconferencing system that allows you to participate in public debates or
exchange private messages by e-mail. At first, the idea of a virtual community accessible only through the computer screen gave me a sense of coldness, but soon I realized that all of this could also turn into a vehicle for
passions. Virtual community users exchange kind words through the screen,
they argue, they make transactions, they exchange knowledge, they do basically everything that happens in real life, but without a real physical body.
You cannot kiss anyone, nor get a punch on the nose, but within these limits,
all sorts of stuff can happen.
3
Studying human history can help grasp how entire populations evolve over
time. On the other hand, sticking too much to a retrospective analysis of the past
can tie us too stubbornly to classic ways of thinking. Not surprisingly, in history,
there have been disruptive events or discoveries that have unexpectedly changed
the course of human history. To imagine how space exploration might look like
throughout the twenty-first century, it is essential to understand what it represented in the twentieth, which was discussed in the first part of the book; to banish
the shadows of prejudices, myths, ideologies and illusions; and then to look to the
future with the right touch of realism and geopolitical vision.
2
Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
3
Rheingold, Howard. 1994. Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
Harper Collins.
68 Technopolitics of Space Between History and Realpolitik
the Moon in four days. One hundred years later, NASA designed capsules of the
same shape to host a crew of three astronauts, to be launched from Cape Canaveral
in South Florida. It took them three days to land on lunar soil. Verne also realistically described the condition of weightlessness in spaceflight and even the return
to Earth, with a water landing in the ocean. Overall, all technical details in the
book were quite precise. He was wrong about the launch system, which he imagined would be a 1,000-foot cannon filled with gunpowder instead of a rocket. But
apart from this last detail, who knows how many future NASA engineers and
technologies Verne inspired?
Other forward-looking minds included the 20
th
century writers Nicholas
Negroponte and Howard Rheingold.
Negroponte, Professor at MIT and founder of MediaLab, wrote Being Digital
2
in 1995, in which he imagined the epochal transition from atoms to bits. He foresaw the current digital society and its consequences on the international economy,
whose evolution had to be studied on two opposing tracks: globalization and
localism.
Psychologist and sociologist Howard Rheingold understood how the use of the
phone modem in the eighties would pave the way for today’s social networks:
Since 1985 I’m used to connecting my computer to the telephone network
and every day, I get in touch with people from all over the world; I use a
teleconferencing system that allows you to participate in public debates or
exchange private messages by e-mail. At first, the idea of a virtual community accessible only through the computer screen gave me a sense of coldness, but soon I realized that all of this could also turn into a vehicle for
passions. Virtual community users exchange kind words through the screen,
they argue, they make transactions, they exchange knowledge, they do basically everything that happens in real life, but without a real physical body.
You cannot kiss anyone, nor get a punch on the nose, but within these limits,
all sorts of stuff can happen.
3
Studying human history can help grasp how entire populations evolve over
time. On the other hand, sticking too much to a retrospective analysis of the past
can tie us too stubbornly to classic ways of thinking. Not surprisingly, in history,
there have been disruptive events or discoveries that have unexpectedly changed
the course of human history. To imagine how space exploration might look like
throughout the twenty-first century, it is essential to understand what it represented in the twentieth, which was discussed in the first part of the book; to banish
the shadows of prejudices, myths, ideologies and illusions; and then to look to the
future with the right touch of realism and geopolitical vision.
2
Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
3
Rheingold, Howard. 1994. Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
Harper Collins.
68 Technopolitics of Space Between History and Realpolitik