The place of humans
In 1610, having received from Galileo a copy of Starry Messenger, Johannes Kepler gave his response in his Conversation with the Starry Messenger: “There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight. Who would have g
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J. Arnould, Icarus' Second Chance © Springer-Verlag/Wien 2011
The place of humans
10 The place of humans In 1610, having received from Galileo a copy of Starry Messenger, Johannes Kepler gave his response in his Conversation with the Starry Messenger: “There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight. Who would have guessed that navigation across the vast ocean is less dangerous and quieter than in the narrow, threatening gulfs of the Adriatic, or the Baltic, or the British straits? Let us create vessels and sails appropriate for the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies – I shall do it for the Moon and you, Galileo, for Jupiter”.75 At the start of the 17th century, following in the footsteps of Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler and Tycho Brahe were not content therefore with smashing the invisible spheres on which their predecessors had comfortably installed stars and planets. Not only did they expel Earth from the centre of the cosmos to set it in motion and launch it into a universe that would otherwise become, if not infinite, at least unlimited, but they had also already imagined that human beings could be set in motion too and would one day leave this planet. Four centuries later, Konstantin Tsiolkowsky outlined the basics of space navigation and astronautics. Astronomy, the first modern revolution, often qualified as Copernican, was followed by the biological and psychological revolutions, successively triggered by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and their colleagues, fellows and successors. These three revolutions challenged the understanding that humanity has of the world and itself.
10.1 Human nomadism Although modern sciences and technologies have not (yet?) allowed us to control time (apart from the observation of the universe as it was in a past that goes back billions of years), they have made clear progress in the control of space, not only through the invention of new tools that prolong and make some of our members more efficient, but also, and above all, by procuring the means to travel through space at increasingly fast speeds. Human nomadism at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century has primarily been that of space conquest. In his study Lespace critique, Paul Virilio talks about “the emergence of a space-time technology”, characterised according to him by the fact that, now, “using instan181
Chapter 10
taneous communication means (satellite, TV, fibre optic cables, telematics, etc.) arrival supplants departure”, but also that “the direct observation of visible phenomena gives rise to a tele-observation in which the observer has no immediate contact with the observed reality”.76 Keeping perspective, the human being who occupies this new space (and it may effectively be better to talk, like Virilio, about space-time?) is as free as he his deprived of movement, as the arrival supplants th
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