The Betrayal of Carl Sagan and the Rebirth of Cecil Rhodes
“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” — Cecil Rhodes, from his last will and testament
One of my heroes growing up was Carl Sagan. Like a lot of young boys it was, for a time, space and dinosaurs. I read New Scientist and books by Stephen Hawking, and it was the awe and optimism radiated by Hawking and Sagan, and the respect and admiration they had for the cosmos that drove my imagination.
The scale of space was staggering to me. The way we can only imagine through math what its distant frontiers would look like to our mortal eyes.
What really endeared me to Carl Sagan, though, was his genuine love for humanity. There were only a few people of that era who gave vibes of being pure good, like he never made a single choice in his life that wasn’t the correct choice and you couldn’t find anything to disrespect about him. There was Mr Rogers, and there was Carl Sagan. And they say you should never idolise a human being because even the angels will let you down, but you want to believe just this once.
One of the best things about Sagan was that he loved nature and the cosmos without being in any way misanthropic about it. He knew our species could do better but he was rooting for us completely. While nations and peoples fought each other for dominance and supremacy, Sagan alone humbled us. All of our conflicts and strife, everything that has ever happened to a person or by a person has taken place somewhere on this barely visible pale blue dot.
He rejected anthropocentrism the same as he rejected racism, but he did not reject humanity. He did not see human beings as a plague, just as part of the bigger story.
Sagan promised us that we would one day venture to the stars. Human curiosity and ingenuity would make it inevitable that one day we would outgrow ridiculous imagined difference like racism in the spirit of recognising what makes us the same. We are, he thought, in our infancy, and we were going to make it, and we were going to wade out into that cosmic ocean. He did not live to see it, but I was so excited to imagine that I might.
Then human interest in space travel kind of died off for a couple of generations. We got caught up again in our squabbles and it started to look like we weren’t going to make it after all. But just in the last few years there seems a renewed spark. The interest in exploring beyond our blue dot is starting to reawaken. For the first time in many years, major technological advances have accomplished feats that bring the cosmos back into our reach, and the space program is booting back up, sputtering and coming to life like a long dormant engine.
I can’t muster the excitement I thought I would feel. It just isn’t there. If you know me by now then you know why.
On Sunday the 13th of October, as America entered the final three weeks of a generationally consequential election cycle, citizens of not just the United States but the world paused politics for just a few moments as they witnessed a spectacular milestone in human technological evolution and a miracle of human ingenuity.
Starship, the largest spacecraft ever built, and the first conventional rocket designed to be completely reusable, successfully launched, flew, achieved orbit, and landed intact, with no crew on board. It’s the first major triumph in the new fledgling era of space exploration. The so-called Artemis project, the successor to Apollo, plans to put people back on the moon, and then beyond.
“A still more glorious dawn awaits,” Sagan declared in an episode of his documentary series Cosmos, “Not a sunrise, but a galaxyrise. A morning filled with four hundred billion suns. The dawning of the Milky Way.”
So why am I alone being such a grinch about it, just because the owner of the company that designed and built Starship is Elon Musk?
I could be an adult in the room like Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder and Chief Writing Officer (a title I think they made up because there can only be one CEO and he didn’t draw that straw), who has been increasingly open in recent weeks about his disdain for the billionaire who crippled Substack by blocking links to it on Twitter and has shown no interest in ever softening his stance despite the olive branches held out by the actual CEO, Chris Best.
McKenzie, who’s been taking pot-shots at Musk for weeks since Musk’s aggressive censorship of Substack journalist Ken Klippenstein, was nevertheless prepared to put politics aside and unreservedly praise Elon Musk for contributions to humanity that dwarf the negative.
Do you, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to” Elon Musk? Does it betray a lack of maturity that I cannot hold my nose and cheer for this despicable human being’s technological victories and focus on what they can usher in for the rest of us?
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