macmillan space centre

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #1: Space Tourism
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

I’ve spent several decades rebutting silly complaints about “money wasted in space.” Dollars have been spent getting there—but every single buck stopped here, on the ground, in the pocket of some smart person. Furthermore, every dollar NASA spent earned thirteen dollars back. Look what it got them: a manned space program that barely exists and has little future.

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #2: Sustaining the Planet
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

Sustaining the planet means widely different things to all of us—so let’s try and define our aim. The phrase surely isn’t meant literally. Terra was sustaining herself just fine for millions of years before the first oxygen-producing lifeforms infested her and wrecked her nice methane ecosystem, dooming entire phyla to extinction. Mother Gaia’s not alarmed by “global warming”: she’s survived vastly greater environmental changes more than once, and will again.

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #3: Spirituality of Space
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

The spiritual impulse can be a dangerous thing when it goes public. Ask anyone who was in New York five years ago, or anyone still alive in Baghdad today...It’s hard to talk about spirituality without talking about religion, and most of the world’s religions are, whether they admit it or not, mutually exclusive. That’s the only way I can explain the odd fact that spirituality is one of the least-known attractions of space travel.

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #4: Militarization of Space
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

To my surprise, not even the wonderful Wizard Of Google can pin down exactly when the militarization of space became unstoppable. In the first place, China’s finally sussed out the secret to the Information Age: smother it with so much contradictory information nobody can say for sure just what you said, or when...much less why. And they’ve always known what to do about military information: lie.

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #5: Space Art
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

It’s probably apocryphal—the best ones usually are—but one of my favorite quotations is what Mahatma Ghandi is supposed to have responded when asked what he thought of Western Civilization. They say he replied gently, “That would be very nice.”

A lot of people will give you some variant of that same response if you ask them about space art. “Great idea. Somebody should try that.” “What space art?” I draw blanks with the idea all the time at social gatherings. Nobody seems to realize there is any.

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #6: Space Law
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

Ask Elliot Ness. The power of a law—its meaning—depends on who’s committed to enforcing it, and how far they’re prepared to go. In David Milch’s HBO series Deadwood, nobody seems prepared to enforce much of anything, and perhaps you’ve seen the dire consequences of such anarchy: the rights of prostitutes were not respected, men were sometimes cheated, wealth and power and information lay in the hands of a few, undertaking was handled by voracious swine, and foul language was heard in public. Nothing like the shining civilization of laws we enjoy today.

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #7: Space Society
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

“Space Society” is an ambiguous topic, just as “Space Art” was. There’s more than one way to interpret it.

The easy way out would be to discuss some of the largest of the many organizations that exist to support the study of astronomy, cosmology, planetology and other space-related disciplines, or to encourage manned and/or unmanned spaceflight, or to promote orbital science, industry and/or tourism, or to call for demilitarization of space, or…

Thrillin' at the MacMillan #8: Space Generation
© 2007 by Spider Robinson

The first thing “space generation” makes me think of is the quantum ramjet, a hypothetical star drive I chose as the motive force for the starship Charles Sheffield in VARIABLE STAR, my new collaboration with Robert A. Heinlein. It would make use of quantum fluctuations in the energy of the cosmic vacuum to propel a ship up to relativistic speeds quickly, without burning any fuel. No such engine has been built yet—but the engineer who proposed it, David Froning, mentioned parenthetically that if a quantum ramjet were ever built, it might very well create new universes, every second it was in operation, as a side effect. It’s kind of hard to top that for space generation.