In the wake of one the most magnificent sunsets I have ever witnessed, bright Venus was drawn toward the horizon by a crescent Moon — the barque of Sinbad. Mars and Jupiter were in conjunction in the vicinity of the constellation of Orion. Although it was by no means the first time I had observed the stately passage of these celestial bodies from east to west, I was spellbound. Then, suddenly, everything assumed another dimension. As I watched the planets move majestically from the zenith down toward the horizon, it struck me most forcibly that not only was I seeing the phenomenon in the way I was used to — that is, from the geocentric aspect — but that I could also visualise the imaginary disc which keeps the planetary orbits at their predetermined distances from the sun. This flexible disc containing the solar system was tilted at about a forty-five-degree angle to the horizon and projected outward over the ocean. Thus for the first time I found myself able simultaneously to envisage both the geocentric and the heliocentric models of the universe. And as if this were not wonder enough, I was granted a second vision. I imagined the dark and just barely visible outline of the rest of the Moon (in reality the reflection of Earth’s own reflected light) to be the centre of a gigantic dome, a natural Saint Peter’s cathedral in the terrestrial sky. It seemed that there was an intense light on the outside of this dome, and that the subdued shimmer which showed within it was so faint because it was the only bigger opening in the vault of heaven letting light into our sublunary world.
I found myself calculating that if with an immensely long ladder I could climb to the Moon herself, I would be able to look through the hole and see the bright light of the lunar day, which my eyes had already dimly observed from the Earth. And from the Moon an even longer ladder would convey me up along the vault and orbit of Venus to an observation point of the lunar dome. The Moon’s steady and intense light adumbrated an enormous dark vault around her, within which Venus emitted a faint light, as from the far end of a tunnel. The ladder reaching up to this level would have to be many, many times longer than the one that led up to the Moon. And once I had reached Venus there would be another endless climb to Mars, and from thence yet another to Jupiter and Saturn, with corresponding levels pertaining to the tower of vaults. Beyond the last planetary dome I would, a million years hence, finally gaze straight out at the fixed stars, and would be delivered at last from planetary forces and the laws governing human destiny. As my gaze became lost, penetrating further and further into the uttermost void, I lost all faculty of orientation and fell like a parachutist into a swarm of diamonds spiralling in the trough of galactic space.
In commemoration of this extraordinary experience I spent most of the following afternoon building a kind of Babylonian ziggurat in the sand, with a road running spirally round it from base to top. The children playing on the beach became interested, inciting their youngest siblings to walk the spiral stairway up to heaven. The thought of their reaching for the stars was a beautiful one, but all the same their game threatened to ruin my creation. I had placed a white conch lined with pink mother of pearl at its apex to suggest the continuation of the spiral ad infinitum. But the shell was of course ‘stolen’ as soon as I turned my back to it. I then replaced the conch with a beer can, and since the beer’s brand name was Modelo, I named my ziggurat ‘Model of the Universe’. But in inverse ratio to my own philosophical subtlety, the compulsion grew among the kids to destroy the tower. They could hardly wait until dark to attack it without incurring the wrath and vengeance of its architect. Next morning the once so proud structure had been reduced to a formless heap of sand, crowned by a dog’s turd.
It was the last day of the year. Hotel del Pacifico cruised on its daily tour with the sun over the ocean. The sea pelicans had gathered for their evening meal; the wife of Ricardo, the hotel owner, hung clothes over the balcony, from which the Sierra Madre could be seen in the distance, clothed in a froth of white cumulus clouds blown towards her by the sea. It was about four o’clock, the time of the day when the heat culminates, shadows lengthen and colours become deeper. The sun still shone white over the clouds, the palm trees rattled gently, and the sand away from the water’s edge was still terribly hot. In short, it was the writer’s idle hour. I could see him sitting on the terrace of the hotel, waiting for the sun to seek him out from under his tin roof and summon him to duty. Soon the small bars and restaurants would shrink to lonely points of light glimmering here and there among the dark palm trees, while the beach was metamorphosed into the bridge of a dark ship, infinity-bound.
When the sun set, mercifully, as it always will at the end of a labouring day, I went below decks and lit up a good pipeful of the local herb. Feeling inspiration gradually seize me I went out to the beach to witness nature’s incomparable evening performance. The colours of dusk were of a particular subtlety. Not only were there nuances of tones, but nuances of nuances, and then fractional nuances of them in turn. The Moon’s foetus had grown noticeably since the previous evening, and had moved closer to Venus. The juxtaposition of the two heavenly bodies, further and further descending, was a spectacle beyond words. The waves were illumined, and began to assume whatever shape the inspired fantasist wished. A black cloud came sailing from over the horizon; the planets donned their darkest clothes.
Like the poet who, (unfortunately disturbed), forgot much of the poem that came to him in his dream, and remembered only fragments — the stately pleasure dome, the caves of ice, the Abyssinian maid singing of Mount Abora — I can recall little of that wonderful transformation today. But I do remember that the recurring theme of these hypnagogic visions was a huge wolf, one of whose eyes, (the Moon), was large and mild, and the other, (Venus), was no more than a small glistening point of evil portent. It was completely dark when I finally summoned the energy to fetch myself another beer from under the canopy which, served as the roof of both home and restaurant as I met the former marine warplane technician Jerry.
He was in his seventies, and had come down to Playa Azul for no particular reason that I could discern. He had served on aircraft carriers most of his life. On demobilisation he decided to seek out some place of retirement other than his native Oklahoma. Although he had money enough to live practically anywhere in the world that he wished, he had come to Playa Azul, more or less by chance, just like me. He had stayed in the Hotel del Pacifico for five weeks before finding a villa to rent.
He explained to me how a jet engine with an afterburner works, and said, in a tone that made me believe him completely, that if someone were to take a helicopter to pieces and spread it out arbitrarily on the floor, he could ‘Goddam put the whole sucker back together’. One reason I believed him without question was that he was meticulous to the point of obsession about his Cuba Libres. Once — we were firm friends by this time — he fetched from his home a cooler full of good (as opposed to bad) ice, cans of Coca-Cola and a bottle of rum. He asked the bartender for a glass for me. When the right (eight-ounce) glass proved to be unavailable, he became annoyed because it simply wasn’t it. I said it didn’t matter, but he wouldn’t have any of that and was very much put out that there weren’t the right glasses in this ‘godforsaken place’.
Eventually Jerry gave up trying to find me the right glass, and taking the cooler with us, we moved up to two chairs closer to the sea and poured ourselves a few tall ones. After a while conversation between Jerry and myself, initially punctuated with crude jokes, turned more philosophical, hence more to my liking. I found myself delivering a lecture on the impossibility of ever making physical contact with other planetary systems within our universe. My argument, which I hoped would stimulate his technical curiosity, was based on comparisons of size and distance.
If we think of the sun as a balloon one metre in diametre, then the Earth, proportionately, is a pepper corn at a distance of more than a 100 metres from it. A nearby star to us, on the other hand, may be represented by a second balloon some 350,000 kilometres away, just about the real Moon’s dista
nce from Earth. ‘The first thing that amazes me’, I said, ‘is that a glowing balloon can be seen at all at such a distance.’ It gives us an idea of how intensely luminous these objects really are if we consider that there are other balloons ten, or a hundred, or a thousand times farther away from us than the sun, which are still visible to the naked eye. ‘This is a verifiable fact’, I added, with a wide gesture towards the stars above us. ‘Add to this that the rays from these luminous balloons travel at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second. How would it ever be possible for an infinitely small object on the sphere the size of a pepper corn to attain a velocity sufficient to convey it to the Moon and beyond? A travelling air bubble in a piece of solid glass would be a lightning compared to the fastest rocket man could devise.’
I had the feeling that Jerry was inclined to agree with me. Who, if not an aircraft technician, would know how much fuel/energy it would take to accelerate a material object to the speed of light, or very near it? It was, and he knew it, unimaginable. It would probably take more fuel than the totality consumed in the history of aviation. Billions and billions of tons of fuel! And this was just the beginning; a mere prerequisite!
In addition, nobody knows whether or not material objects can be accelerated to velocities approaching that of the speed of light and still remain material objects. Nobody knows what happens to time encapsulated inside an object moving that fast through space. It has never been seen, and never experienced by humans; the great Einstein himself hypothesised that material objects would put up an ever increasing resistance to further acceleration as they approach the speed of light and thus behave as though they possessed infinite mass.
The speeds of material objects (as opposed to the light they might emit) within a galaxy or our own star system can be measured using the same parameters that apply to the measurement of rocket velocity, that is, they can be expressed conveniently in thousands of kilometres per hour. The Earth, for example, moves through space in its orbit around the sun at approximately 108, 000 kilometres per hour; the solar system itself moves through space and around the centre of the galaxy at an estimated speed of 720,000 kilometres per hour. At present our fastest space-probes are capable of speeds up to 80,000 kilometres per hour, and can reach even the outer planets in a matter of years. But even if we were to succeed in accelerating a spacecraft up to say 100,000 kilometres per hour, it would still be more than 10, 000 times slower than light, travelling at a speed of 300, 000 km per second (1,79 billion kilometres per hour!). It would consequently (and provided that my mathematic extrapolations are accurate!) take that probe 10,000 years (roughly the time that has elapsed since the latest ice age drew to a close) to reach only one light year out into space, and more than 40, 000 years to make contact with our very nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri. A one way trip to Sirius A, the brightest star in the night heavens and like Centauri another star in our immediate ‘vicinity’, could be reached in just little more than 80,000 years — ‘Welcome on board!’
Even if it were technically possible to build a spaceship with an enormous self-supplying nuclear power plant aboard capable of bringing about an even higher acceleration; even if man learns how to more efficiently use the gravitational pull of our solar system’s planets to maximise centripetal acceleration, yes, even if man could survive travelling at speeds close to that of light (at the speed of light it would theoretically take a spaceship just slightly more than a second to get from the Earth to the Moon), he would thus have to travel for decades to reach stars in our neighbourhood. And these stars don’t even have planetary systems and so would not provide conditions suitable for life as we know it.
Unless someone in the future were to invent a technique of transmitting human beings by telekinesis, any exchange of ideas between us and the ‘intelligent’ inhabitants of planets in other solar systems than our own would require decades to centuries to millennia to make a single round trip — and I deliberately abstain from here referencing the highly hypothetical discussion of so-called ‘worm holes’, allegedly capable of creating short cuts in the space-time continuum. If we thus remain within the framework of a more conventional and empirically verifiable understanding of the physical universe and organic life, the spaceship itself would have to resemble a planet, capable of producing all the prerequisites of biological survival — including artificial starlight — because although it crosses the universe at the speed of light, it would be very dark and empty around it. And so it would be for many, many years…
What passes through the minds of human beings who know that they will never be able to return to Earth? Can we even begin to imagine their nostalgia for a paradise forever lost? It would not take many years before the generation that remembered life on Earth becomes extinct. If there were any survivors — clones of the ship’s original population, perhaps — they would never themselves know what sunsets were like, because they have never seen that glorious celestial light. O, melancholy of men lost in absolute nothingness. O, inconceivable melancholy of sitting at a window throughout a lifetime with nothing to do but to watch the eternal, immutable cosmic night.
But all this is, of course, science fiction. ‘The truth is,’ I said, ‘that it is never, ever, going to happen. The only way to reach other worlds, other life-forms, will be to invent telekinetic means of transportation. If we could transport our souls to other stars and other galaxies, and then come back, then we would really have achieved something.’
Perhaps this is exactly what human beings at a level of technical expertise supposedly lower than our own have already done. Perhaps the gods and monsters of ancient mythologies were in reality images, if not actual creatures, from another world? And perhaps primitive human beings were completely in the right to identify planetary bodies with men’s faces and destinies. The modern obsession with the technical and material aspects of the problem may have eclipsed the fundamental concordance between travel in space and the ancient cult of the dead. Perhaps our ‘science’ is just another myth propagated and maintained as a more credible attempt to solve the problem of death, and is in reality no more and no less efficacious than the work of the past?
The cult of, and passionate interest in, the realm of death was revived in the 19th century with the birth of Theosophy. Although its claim to objective truth is ridiculous, the longings and the desire that sustain it are as old and as real as the human soul itself — we should remember that one of the most fervent admirers of Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott was the technological pioneer and ingenious inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who gave us among so many other things the light bulb. The man who conquered the night was also intent on finding ways to communicate with and to record visitors from the spirit world. The light bulb worked all right, the phonograph as well, but the spiritual Dictaphone wouldn’t say ‘Mary had a little lamb’, like the early recording, because it was made of solid matter, and the spirits are lighter and as such perhaps even faster than light itself.
If it were simply a matter of statistical probability, life would abound in the universe in the same way as certain nuclear particles in the sun constantly collide with each other, thereby feeding the nuclear process transforming hydrogen into helium, although the statistical chances that any two such particles should collide is a phenomenon occurring on average once in four billion years. However, the amount of these elementary particles within the sun is so enormous that billions upon billions of such collisions occur every fraction of a second. In other words, if we had evidence of life on one other planet in the universe, life must exist everywhere, and in such abundance that we couldn’t even begin to estimate how many inhabited planets there may be in only those parts of the universe explored by our telescopes. Just try to let the following sink in for moment: in the now visible universe there are at least as many stars as there are grains of sand on every beach and desert of the Earth. Just try to imagine: our sun as a single grain of sand in the Sahara. For comparison: take
just a handful of sand in your palm and try to count the amount of grains contained therein...
In the extremely unlikely event that life is not a statistical probability, and that countless planets in countless galaxies meet the requirements to support organic life, without actually doing it, then our predicament here on Earth in theory takes on a new aspect. Suppose that life could not exist anywhere other than on our planet. If we could be sure that life exists here and here only, we would also find it impossible to escape the religious paranoia which singles us out as unique and chosen by the Creator. It would be impossible for us to accept that life is the product of chance. Its uniqueness forces a metaphysical significance upon us. Everything we do is observed by the mute overseer responsible for this unique biological experiment. The notion of God’s existence then becomes axiomatic, and the eternal question remains invariable. ‘Why the spark out of nowhere that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?’ He for whom God is dead in such a universe is lonely beyond all imagination. Perhaps God himself is this person; or perhaps, insofar as we have assumed the responsibility for his creation: we are?
So long as we keep looking outward, into space containing the most dilute disposition of matter and light, we will never know. We will never be able to communicate effectively through deep space, unless the messages we send or, per chance receive (I must insist on the distinction), will be transported telekinetically. We might just as well turn inwardly to find the questions to our unavoidable answer. In physical terms, the universe is sealed off and is for all eternity inaccessible. The Earth’s spiritually-awakened inhabitants are condemned to live on their planet as Robinson Crusoe lived on his desert island, with the difference that Robinson stood a reasonable chance of discovery and rescue, whereas Man on planet Earth probably has none.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 33