The practical benefits of being in space are now clear, and in Britain alone
the government spends ÂŁ200 million a year on civilian spaceflight. But
government money is just the start. Private companies spend more than three
times as much in the quest for practical and financial gains. The largest
economic impact of space involves the broad population—people watching
television, phoning home, or riding in a taxi managed by satellite
navigation.

This leaves the future of the space effort pointing in two opposing
technological directions. The first is the trend for small, affordable
satellites to meet specific needs. The second is the demand for much bigger
satellites, carrying ever more complex equipment—telecommunications
satellites with more channels, for example, or comprehensive science packages
such as the Cassini mission that NASA recently launched to Saturn.

ESA already had these diverging trends in mind when it drew up specifications
for its Ariane 5 rocket. It can now launch several small satellites in a
constellation, or a large package such as a planetary exploration mission. But
some observers have suggested that as well as pursuing Earth-centred projects,
ESA should be exploiting a capacity to launch large vehicles to look further
afield. Is there a “space option” that will move from the International Space
Station towards the Moon and Mars?

New technologies for interplanetary transportation include reusable launch
vehicles, fission rockets and sailing systems blown along by solar radiation.
Such developments might enable a few astronauts to explore Mars and the Moon,
but what do they offer the rest of us ? So far, there are few indications that
Mars or the Moon have resources of any economic value.

One proposal is to mine helium-3, an ingredient of the solar atmosphere,
blown by the solar wind into holes in the surface rocks of the Moon. The idea is
to bring it back to Earth for use as a fusion fuel, providing “clean” power. But
this proposal, even if it is ever feasible, ignores the side reactions that
produce radioactive tritium and contaminate the container vessel with
radioactive by-products. Another suggestion is to set up arrays of photovoltaic
panels on the Moon, and to beam the energy back to Earth in microwave beams. But
whether such an energy source will ever be economically competitive remains
doubtful.

Planetary exploration must surely offer Europe huge scientific opportunities
in areas such as the promise of finding signs of life beyond our own planet. In
2003, ESA’s Mars Express and Beagle Lander will examine the Red Planet for signs
of biological activity, present or past. The agency’s Huygens probe to Titan in
2007 will study whether a primitive planetary atmosphere, fed by comets, has
life, or the potential for it. And ESA’s Rosetta mission to Comet Wirtanen in
2013 will investigate whether organic molecules such as amino acids are made on
comets. The opportunity to contrast exobiologic with terrestrial material could
be hugely important for biochemical research, food production and medicine.

A commitment to scientific investigation is the best way to extract the
maximum economic value from any future space research. And scientific knowledge
will always be much easier to transport from space to Earth than minerals.

In an eloquent book, Roslynn Haynes identifies six stereotypical representations of fictional scientists in Western literature, linking them to the public perception of science. The book is also comprehensive – Haynes supplies a hundred pages of notes.

She begins with the alchemist in pursuit of an arcane, ideologically suspect goal. This, the oldest image of knowledge, can be traced to biblical texts (the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis), but in scientific form to Arabic learning, which the medieval Christian church regarded with such suspicion. The archetype is Marlowe’s Faustus who does not seek knowledge for its own sake, but: “Unlawful things/ Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits/ To practise more than heavenly power permits.”

This image is not entirely false, as indicated by Enrico Fermi’s remark about work on the atomic bomb: “Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples – after all, the thing is beautiful physics.” There lurks a public suspicion that a similar stigma should attach to genetic engineering.

Unlike the alchemist, who is feared, Haynes’s next type, the stupid virtuoso, is ridiculed. He – and it is always he – is the absent-minded professor, as played by Jerry Lewis. Haynes traces this stereotype to the enthusiasts who supported recognised scientists when the Royal Society was founded, but derided the coining of the word “scientist” in 1834 as having utterly distasteful connotations of professionalism.

Historical virtuosi formed indiscriminate, overvalued collections, or cabinets. Today, we would recognise them as train spotters: amateur and obsessive. They carried out obvious experiments, such as depriving a bird of air until it fell from its perch, as in Joseph Wright’s painting, or they blundered in interpretation, mistaking a mouse inside a telescope for an elephant on the Moon, as in Samuel Butler’s satire. The essence of satire is that the ridiculous exists, with Robert Hooke’s diaries, which chronicled his flatulence in conjunction with barometric pressure, evidence that Baconian data-gathering could be carried to extremes, still seen in beta grant applications.

Perhaps the most favourable image of the scientist in fiction is the dedicated idealist, whose discoveries hold out the prospect of Utopia. This image originated from the iconography, bordering on hagiography, of Isaac Newton. By a large extrapolation, Newton’s work held out the prospect of arranging life in an optimum way, if only the predictive mathematics proved tractable.

This ideal was challenged scientifically by quantum mechanics, as expressed in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and by chaos theory, as discussed on stage in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. In the 18th century such scientific idealism was challenged by satire, and also by criticism, repeated in modern times by Brian Appleyard, that scientists propose a self-sufficient mechanistic system with no moral dimension. Astronomers typify scientists’ overemphasis on other worlds, to the exclusion of the spiritual condition of this world.

Haynes contrasts the partly positive image of the idealist with the entirely negative image of the cold, unfeeling scientist who “lived by measuring things/And died like a recurring decimal/Run off the page”. In history, she suggests that Luigi Galvani is a typical example of this particular archetype. He made dead frogs’ legs twitch by the application of electricity. (I noticed over Christmas that Susan Greenfield, or her TV producer, decided to sanitise this unpleasant experiment by performing it in cartoon form in the Royal Institution lectures.)

The cold scientist was the target of the English Romantics, such as William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Walt Whitman also turned his back on the charts of the “learn’d astronomer” in favour of the night air and the real stars. William Blake’s engraving of Newton, displayed lovingly on posters in laboratories the world over, is an ambiguous representation of the scientist as a perfect Greek youth who, from his designs on a scroll, is evidently an imaginative genius but, above all, a cold fish in the empty environment of space.

The most notorious stereotype is the scientist who has lost control of his discovery, Frankenstein. Public perceptions of Frankenstein come mainly from the Boris Karloff film (1931), in which the scientist is the almost innocent victim of an experimental mistake – the film is set in a highly moralistic framework of natural order. This reworking of the original story arose in a time of uncritical trust in technology. In Mary Shelley’s secular, unredeemed version, Frankenstein is an emotionally crippled scientist who creates a monster representing his own unconscious desires, both good and evil, which runs amok. Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, and the atomic scientists of the Second World War became the heirs of the Frankenstein image, futilely attempting to make amends by doing good deeds after their inventions had “escaped”. Nowadays, “escaped science” is blamed for environmental disasters.

Finally, those of us who are scientists can fantasise that we are heroic adventurers, modelling ourselves on fictional characters ranging from Jules Verne’s oceanographers and geologists, Arthur Conan Doyle’s biologist Professor Challenger, to archaeologist Indiana Jones. But even these idealised scientists pursue their goals ruthlessly, with disregard for moral niceties.

Haynes concludes that literature holds up a mirror to nature, and explores what is not overtly stated. These images of scientists express deep-rooted fears of science – a legitimate public fear of depersonalised knowledge. Yet by contrast to the fictional imagery, science can be optimistic. For example, the Internet and the personal computer are enabling technologies that free creative endeavour. So the scientist can be both a perpetrator of environmental destruction and an ally for environmental solutions. Whether feared for its potential for evil, or welcomed because of its necessity as a means for good, science grips the imagination because it is powerful.