The celestial test: Does space expansion reflect humanity's coming of age or old ambitions?

“ And the next generation Internet will operate at speeds up to a thousand times faster than today.
Even as we explore this inner space, in the new millennium we're going to open new frontiers in outer space.
Throughout all history, human kind has had only one place to call home: our planet Earth. Beginning this year, 1998, men and women from 16 countries will build a foothold in the heavens--the International Space Station. With its vast expanses, scientists and engineers will actually set sail on an uncharted sea of limitless mystery and unlimited potential. ”

“ We're going forward with our shuttle flights, we're going forward to build our space station, and we are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours. ”

“ The human species is an organic whole, the leading edge of the evolutionary process. That human consciousness necessarily operates through an infinite diversity of individual minds and motivations detracts in no way from its essential unity. Indeed, it is precisely an inhering diversity that distinguishes unity from homogeneity or uniformity. What the peoples of the world are today experiencing, Bahá’u’lláh said, is their collective coming- of-age, and it is through this emerging maturity of the race that the principle of unity in diversity will find full expression. ”

“ The entrance of the United States and other important industrial nations upon a policy of commercial expansion, the growth of imperialism and the prevalence of the desire to exploit the less industrially progressive nations, mark the beginning of a new epoch in our national life. Specialization of industry and subdivision of labor now assume new aspects. Capital becomes international; while labor still remains upon a national basis. ”

“ The distinguishing feature of humanity’s coming of age is that, for the first time in its history, the entire human race is consciously involved, however dimly, in the awareness of its own oneness and of the earth as a single homeland. This awakening opens the way to a new relationship between God and humankind. As the peoples of the world embrace the spiritual authority inherent in the guidance of the Revelation of God for this age, Bahá’u’lláh said, they will find in themselves a moral empowerment which human effort alone has proven incapable of generating. ”

“ In His later writings Bahá’u’lláh made explicit the implications of this principle for the age of humanity’s maturity. “Women and men have been and will always be equal in the sight of God,”67 He asserts, and the advancement of civilization requires that society so organize its affairs as to give full expression to this fact. The earth’s resources are the property of all humanity, not of any one people. ”

“ His words evoked for His hearers the vision of a new age in the evolution of civilization:
This is a new cycle of human power. All the horizons of the world are luminous, and the world will become indeed as a garden and a paradise.... You are loosed from ancient superstitions which have kept men ignorant, destroying the foundation of true humanity.
The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of the oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion. War shall cease between nations, and by the will of God the Most Great Peace shall come ”

“ But suppose that the same insatiable thirst for conquest enters into the new form of wealth—what follows? Boundless ambition, which till then had spread out the coming of its gains over indefinite time, since each one of them would be worth only a definite portion of space, will now leap all at once to an object boundless as itself. Rights will be set up on every point of the globe where raw material for industry, refitting stations for ships, concessions for capitalists, or outlets for production are seen to exist. ”

“ The outflowings of Chinese emigrants and produce, which have gone towards the East, will now move to the West; the commercial enterprise of Australia and New Zealand has acquired a new field of exercise and encouragement; the markets which Chili and Peru have found in Europe only, will be opened nearer to their doors; the north-west shore of America will obtain all the personal and material means of organization; the Islands of the Pacific will take the place in the career of civilization for which the labours of the missionary have prepared them ”

“ The mere recurrence to a map will at once show, that the isthmus of Panama is destined to become a great commercial thoroughfare, and, at a moderate expense, might be made the seat of an extensive trade. By the facilities of communication across, new wants would be created; and, as fresh markets open to European enterprise, a proportionate share of the supplies would fall to our lot. In the present depressed state of our commercial relations, some effort must be made to apply the industry of the country to a larger range of objects. ”

“ First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it replaces 360the old meaningful and far-ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. ”

“ "No, Miller, I don't myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn't given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. ”

“ And shall not these rounded and perfect powers serve us as our ideal of what it is to be a finished human being?
We live for our own age—an age like Shakespeare’s, when an old world is passing away, a new world coming in—an age of new speculation and every new adventure of the mind; a full stage, an intricate plot, a universal play of passion, an outcome no man can foresee. It is to this world, this sweep of action, that our understandings must be stretched and fitted; it is in this age we must show our human quality. ”

“ II Justice is the one power that can translate the dawning consciousness of humanity’s oneness into a collective will through which the necessary structures of global community life can be confidently erected. An age that sees the people of the world increasingly gaining access to information of every kind and to a diversity of ideas will find justice asserting itself as the ruling principle of successful social organization. With ever greater frequency, proposals aiming at the development of the planet will have to submit to the candid light of the standards it requires. ”

“ The classical economic models of impersonal markets in which human beings act as autonomous makers of self-regarding choices will not serve the needs of a world motivated by ideals of unity and justice. Society will find itself increasingly challenged to develop new economic models shaped by insights that arise from a sympathetic understanding of shared experience, from viewing human beings in relation to others, and from a recognition of the centrality to social well-being of the role of the family and the community. ”

“ To the extent that work is consciously undertaken in a spirit of service to humanity, Bahá’u’lláh says, it is a form of prayer, a means of worshiping God. Every individual has the capacity to see himself or herself in this light, and it is to this inalienable capacity of the self that development strategy must appeal, whatever the nature of the plans being pursued, whatever the rewards they promise. No narrower a perspective will ever call up from the people of the world the magnitude of effort and commitment that the economic tasks ahead will require. ”

“ Is this secular progress we have described, this evolution of man to the highest powers, only to give him sensibility, and not to bring duties with it? Is he not to make his knowledge practical? to stand and to withstand? Is not civilization heroic also? Is it not for action? has it not a will? “There are periods,” said Niebuhr, “when something much better than happiness and security of life is attainable.” We live in a new and exceptionable age. America is another word for Opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race ”

“ Discouragement, worry, and indolence are positive evidence of moral im- maturity. Human society is confronted with two problems: attainment of the maturity of the individual and attainment of the maturity of the race. The ma- ture human being soon begins to look upon all other mortals with feelings of tenderness and with emotions of tolerance. Mature men view immature folks with the love and consideration that parents bear their children.
Successful living is nothing more or less than the art of the mastery of dependable techniques for solving common problems. ”

“ And thus to transfer one’s goal from time to eternity, from earth to Paradise, from the human to the divine, requires that man shall become regenerated, converted, be born again; that he shall become the re-created child of the divine spirit; that he shall gain entrance into the brotherhood of the kingdom of heaven. All philosophies and religions which fall short of these ideals are immature. The philosophy which I teach, linked with the gospel which you preach, represents the new religion of maturity, the ideal of all future generations. ”

“ In the little desert town of Bootstrap stands a huge metal shed. In the shed men are building an object that can change the history of mankind. It is a Space Platform. Propelled to an orbit 4000 miles from Earth this platform will serve as the starting place for man’s exploration of mysterious outer space.
Space Platform tells the exciting story of a young man helping to build this first station. With scientific accuracy and imagination Murray Leinster, one of the world’s top science-fiction writers, describes the building and launching of the platform. ”

“ The platform, of course, was that artificial satellite of Earth which was four thousand miles out and went around the planet in a little over four hours, traveling from west to east. It had been made because to break the bonds of Earth's gravity was terribly costly in fuel—when a ship had to accelerate slowly to avoid harm to human cargo. The space platform was a filling station in emptiness, at which the moon-rocket would refuel for its next and longer and much less difficult journey of two hundred thirty-odd thousand miles. ”

“ Any kind of steady growth across the years leads to centralization, to bigness. And that bigness becomes time-hallowed and magnified out of all proportion to its original significance. The Space Station is no exception. It started with the primitive Earth satellites and branched out into fifty-seven larger stations. Now it's tremendous, a single central station that can impose its influence in ship clearance matters with an almost unanswerable finality. ”

“ Nowhere do we so effectively demonstrate our technological leadership and ability to make life better on Earth. The Space Age is barely a quarter of a century old. But already we've pushed civilization forward with our advances in science and technology. Opportunities and jobs will multiply as we cross new thresholds of knowledge and reach deeper into the unknown.
Our progress in space--taking giant steps for all mankind--is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. Our finest minds in government, industry, and academia have all pulled together. ”

“ In this sense the culture of the Old World threatens at a thousand points to become crassly materialistic, and not least of all just where it most loudly boasts of intellectual wealth and looks down with contempt on everything which is material. And in this sense the culture of the New World is growing to the very purest idealism, and by no means least where it is busy with problems of the natural world of matter, and where it is heaping up economic wealth. ”

“ The stupid opinion of our time is all for "Progress" as an inevitable succession from worse to better—Wednesday better than Tuesday, and Tuesday, than Monday. This illusion, bred of Pride and Ignorance, appears (it may be said) in our official instruction, because it happens to be the fashion. Let the mood change, let some succession of catastrophes awaken in men a sense of decline, and vulgar opinion will renounce the illusion of Progress, will praise the past at the expense of the present, and the new mood will reflect itself in all institutions, including that of the educational bureau. ”

“ Progress depends not on effort but on the proper direction of the effort. We are supposed, however, to represent one phase and that at the front rank of an inevitable advance in things human, pushed forward, as it were, by the wheel of evolution in its ceaseless progress, and bound {5} therefore to make advancement. ”

“ What are more interesting than any supposed progress in mankind, are the curious ups and downs of interest in particular subjects which follow one another with almost definite regularity in history as we know it. Men become occupied with some phase of the expression of life, literature, architecture, government, sometimes in two or three of these at the same time, and then there comes a wonderful period of development. ”

“ What an interesting reflection on the notion of supposed progress is the fact pointed out by Ambassador Bryce in his address on Progress (Atlantic July, 1907) , that while out of 40,000,000 of people there were so many genius men and women accomplishing work that the world will never willingly let die, we with a population ten times as great cannot show anything like as many. Most of the great names that are most familiar to the modern mind come in a single century,--the sixteenth. At the present time the western civilization then represented by 40,000,000 has near to 500,000,000 of people. ”

“ The farther back we go in history, then, the lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human achievement at its best. It is now well understood that the generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come earlier in the world's history, they could not have the advantages that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in human progress than ours. ”

“ Men and women have not changed in all the period of human history that we know, and their modes and ways of life often have a startling similarity if we but find the key for the significance of customs that seem to be very different. These temples of the gods of health and of disease, then, were places where patients congregated and men studied diseases for generations, and passed on their knowledge from one to another, and accumulated information, and elaborated theories, and came to conclusions, often on insufficient premises, and did many other things that we are doing at the present time. ”

“ These late conquests of the mind in the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space, its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human welfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing from unsuspected and illimitable resources,—all this has made us forgetful of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. ”

“ We now live in an infinite universe. We know that the sun is a million times larger than our earth, and we know that there are other great luminaries millions of times larger than our sun. We know that there are planets so far away that light, traveling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles a second, requires fifteen thousand years to reach this grain of sand, this tear, we call the earth—and we now know that all the fields of space are sown thick with constellations. If that statute had been enforced, that science would not now be the property of the human mind. ”

“ It is a genial image, of men we love--an image of men warm and true of heart, direct and unhesitating in courage, generous, magnanimous, faithful, steadfast, capable of a deep devotion and self-forgetfulness. But the age changes, and with it must change our ideals of human quality. Not that we would give up what we have loved: we would add what a new life demands. In a new age men must acquire a new capacity, must be men upon a new scale, and with added qualities. ”

“ Cheap printing has made knowledge a vulgar commodity. Our eyes look, almost without choice, upon the very world itself, and the word "human" is filled with new meaning. Our ideals broaden to suit the wide day in which we live. We crave, not cloistered virtue--it is impossible any longer to keep the cloister--but a robust spirit that shall take the air in the great world, know men in all their kinds, choose its way amid the bustle with all self-possession, with wise genuineness, in calmness, and yet with the quick eye of interest and the quick pulse of power. ”

“ I see nothing insuperable in the way, except for those who are hopelessly lacking in a sense of humor. It depends upon the range and scale of your observation whether you can strike the balance of genuineness or not. If you live in a small and petty world, you will be subject to its standards; but if you live in a large world, you will see that standards are innumerable--some old, some new, some made by the noble-minded and made to last, some made by the weak-minded and destined to perish, some lasting from age to age, some only from day to day--and that a choice must be made among them. ”

“ But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as we come to realize these changes, to strong men and women there is challenge and inspiration in them too. In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race ”

“ To see the futurity of the species has always been the privilege of the intellectual élite, or of those who have learnt from them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer élite. Institutions, books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming. ”

“ The physical universe had undergone a wonderful transformation for man. Our nineteenth century has often been looked upon as a period of extraordinary discoveries; but no discoveries have ever so revolutionized the human mind as those enumerated above as “the external causes of the fall of the society of the Middle Ages.” Think how new that old world must have seemed to the common people who had supposed it to be flat, as well as to the scientists who had hypothetically supposed it to be solid—how new it must have seemed when they found that it had been actually circumnavigated! ”

“ Do you not see that simply to set forth such a state of affairs is to explain, to demonstrate, and to solve everything? Do you not feel that the old world had an aged soul, tyranny, and that into the new world is about to descend, necessarily, irresistibly, and divinely, a youthful soul, liberty? ”

“ The object of a religion or a philosophy is not to make men wealthy or powerful, but to make them, in the last issue, happy: that is, to fulfill their being. If such happiness is to be found by an immortal race it must not be sought in a transitory and mortal but in a final and immortal happiness. ”