I put up a post the other day about an early 20th century SF story from 1901, in which Jesus Christ is raised on Mars and sent to Earth by the Martians to enlighten us. They rescue Him from the crucifixion, and bring Him back to Mars. It struck me that the story may have been an influence or at least prefigured the idea that later arose among UFO contactees and researcher that Christ was an alien. The best-known of the various UFO religions that believe this is the Aetherius Society, founded in the 1950s by former taxi driver George King. King was into eastern mysticism, and became aware of his mission as spokesman for the Space Brothers when he heard a voice in his kitchen one day telling him to prepare to be the voice of interplanetary parliament. The Aetherius Society believes that King was the recipient of spiritual messages from Aetherius, an alien on Venus, and that Jesus is also there on the planet. Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Israel, also claimed that he’d been taken aboard a UFO and shown how Jesus and his predecessor as head of the religion, W.D. Fard, were also on Venus. Both Christ and Fard were Black, and Fard was directing and preparing for the coming apocalyptic war against the Whites that would free Black America.
Looking through the SF collection Born of the Sun again today, I found another early SF story with a religious or supernatural dimension. This was John Jacob Astor’s 1894 A Journey in Other Worlds, in which Saturn is inhabited by the spirits of the dead. I think this was influenced by contemporary spiritualism and trends in psychic research. The followers of the 18th century Swedish scientist and mystic, Immanuel Swedenborg, believed that he had travelled in spirit across the Solar System and that the various planets were inhabited, including by the spirits of the departed. This was also the same time, I think, that mediums like Helene Smith believed that they were receiving telepathic messages from Mars. The Surrealists were fascinated by these mediumistic accounts, and one collection of Surrealist writings contains a drawing, done automatically, of Mozart’s house on either Jupiter or Saturn. There’s definitely a religious element in much Spiritualist speculation about space and early Science Fiction, and I’m very sure that this has had an influence on the UFO phenomenon and its accounts of contacts with spiritually advanced, benevolent alien beings.
This might appeal to readers of this blog, who aren’t fans of the late astronomer, Sceptic and presenter of the blockbusting TV science series, Cosmos. I put up a drawing I’d done of Sagan a week or so ago along with a piece explaining why I thought he was a great TV personality. While Sagan was a brilliant astronomer and space scientist, some of the readers of this blog were less impressed by his attitude towards the UFO crowd. Sagan was a fervent rationalist, who saw it as his mission to attack ideas he thought were irrational, and particularly the paranormal. He was one of the founders of the Sceptical organisation, CSICOP, or the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, along with the stage magician James Randi and the mathematician Martin Gardner. One of Sagan’s last works was The Demon-Haunted World in which he worried about the tide of irrationality creeping over America and the world and foresaw a time in which the New Age would have taken over completely, leading to a new Dark Age and people earnestly consulting their horoscopes each morning.
Some commenters remembered how Sagan had been wheeled on TV in the 1960s to debunk UFO encounters. They didn’t like his superior and condescending attitude towards the experiencers. Now I’ll admit that I don’t regard UFOs as nuts and bolts alien spacecraft. Much of the imagery and the basic plot of UFO encounters seems to come from science fiction and supernatural encounters with gods, demons and fairies before then. One of the alternative views of the UFO phenomenon is the psycho-social hypothesis, which sees it as an internal psychological experience which uses the imagery of contemporary culture. In previous centuries this was of fairies. Now, as belief in the supernatural has declined in the West, the imagery is from science fiction. But both the imagery of fairies and alien spacecraft represent the same theme of encounter with a cosmic other. Some UFO writers and researchers like John Keel and Jacques Vallee believe that there is a genuine paranormal phenomenon at work, and that the force that was previously responsible for encounters with fairies and so on has simply now changed to using that of space craft as society has changed. See Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse, for example. Many UFO encounters can be explained as misidentification, hoaxes, and sightings of top secret military aircraft. I’m also convinced that some are due to the intelligence community deliberately messing with people for their own purposes. In one of his books, Vallee suggests that the Cergy-Pontoise abduction in France may have been faked by French intelligence as an experiment to see how people would react to a real alien encounter. And then there’s the case of Paul Bennewitz, a defence contractor in the US who was driven out of his mind by a pair of intelligence agents at a nearby USAF base. Bennewitz thought he had got in touch with an alien held captive at the base. The pair claimed to be whistleblowers and fed Bennewitz a whole load of spurious documents apparently confirming it, and then told him that it was all fake. It’s a tactic apparently known as the ‘double-bubble’ used by the intelligence services to destabilise their enemies. It worked on Bennewitz, who I think was driven to a nervous breakdown.
Even with the hoaxers, the top secret aircraft and the misidentified objects, there are still some UFO encounters that are very difficult to explain. I think the best explanations are probably the paranormal and psycho-social rather than the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any the less puzzling nor that genuine people, who have had a truly inexplicable experience, should be sneered or condescended to.
But back to Sagan. One of Sagan’s achievements was to suggest a way Venus could be terraformed. This involved planting genetically-engineered bacteria in the Venusian atmosphere. These would consume the carbon dioxide and exhale breathable oxygen. But Sagan wasn’t the first person to suggest ways of terraforming the planet, and he didn’t invent the concept of terraforming. You can find the idea, but not the name, in the Martian books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which the Martians have built giant machines to replenish the atmosphere on their dying world. The great SF writer Poul Anderson wrote a story in which a similar technology is used to terraform the Venusian atmosphere.
This is mentioned by Mike Ashley, the editor of the anthology of classic SF stories about the worlds of the solar system, Born of the Sun, published by the British Library. In the introduction to the story about Venus, Ashley writes
‘The 1950s saw some authors taking note of recent research which suggested Venus was far from a watery world. Leading the way was Poul Anderson. In ‘The Big Rain’ (1954) he describes a harsh, sweltering Venus that, when it does rain, rains formaldehyde. The story considers how Venus might be terraformed, using the formaldehyde locked in Venus’ clouds. Airmaker machines, spread all over Venus, accelerate a reaction with the formaldehyde, ammonia and methane to produce hydrocarbons and oxygen, whilst bombs reinvigorate volcanos so that in time it starts to rain – and rains for over a hundred years, by which time Venus starts to be more Earth–like’. (p. 93).
To me, this is an example of one the instances where informed Science Fiction, even if wrong in the details, has advanced scientific thinking. And there are plenty of other examples in some of the other stories Ashley discusses in some of the other books in the same series.
Sagan, for all his faults, was a brilliant scientist and he did much to make people aware of the environmental crisis and opposed the threat of nuclear war and the New Cold War Reagan and Thatcher started ramping up in the 1980s. But in this case, while his ideas about terraforming Venus are most likely to be correct, he wasn’t the first to invent the idea.
I’m sorry I haven’t been posting much over the last few days. Our boiler here packed in last Friday, and we’ve spent the past few days trying to get it fixed. Part of the problem has been trying to get through to the gas company that installed it. We were on the phone for three hours the other day trying to get through to someone. But we’ve managed to sort things out and hopefully it’ll all be fixed before too long.
I’ve started reading a few Science Fiction books I ordered a few months ago, but have only just got around to reading. They’re collections of early, classic SF short stories edited by Mike Ashley and published by the British Library. Each collection is devoted to a different theme. There’s one on the Menace of the Machine, which traces the idea of robots rebelling and taking over from the 19th century to 60s predictions of the rise of the internet. Born of the Sun is an anthology of SF stories set on the various worlds of our solar system, from Mercury out to Pluto, including the false planet Vulcan.. This was a planet a 19th century astronomer believed he had seen inside the orbit of Venus. It’s existence has since been disproved, but as the book says, it lives on in the name for Mr. Spock’s home planet in Star Trek. Each of the stories is prefaced by a brief history of these worlds in Science Fiction. And these are often fascinating.
The introduction to the short story about Mars in Born of the Sun notes the way the planet has also been used to explore theological and religious issues, such as in C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. This was one of a trilogy of books, the others being Perelandra, or Voyage to Venus and That Hideous Strength, all with a very strong theological dimension. The other planets of the solar system, in Lewis’ SF, are unfallen and ruled by angels, and there is a war going on with the demonic forces on Earth. In Out of the Silent Planet a philologist, Ransom, is kidnapped by an evil scientist and his commercial partner, and taken to Mars. Ransom manages to escape and at last makes contact with the indigenous Martians. Meeting the Oyarsa, the angel ruling the planet, he is told of its Edenic state and that neither he nor his captors can remain there, and they are sent back to Earth.
But SF stories about Mars with Christian theological dimension predate Lewis’ by some years. The book states that in 1901 Charles Cole published a story, Visitors from Mars, in which Jesus is raised on the Red Planet. He is sent to Earth to help us, and rescued by the Martians at the Crucifixion, who return Him to Mars. This is very similar to some of the beliefs among the UFO fraternity about Christ. The Aetherius Society, set up in the 1950s by ‘Sir’ George King, knight of the Byzantine Empire (self-awarded) teaches that Christ is alive and well and on Venus, along with Aetherius, an ascended being who sends messages of spiritual improvement to us via King. It also reminds me of Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, about a human raised by Martians who has great spiritual and psychic powers, and who founds a religion back on Earth. This was one of the influences on the emerging New Age movement back in the 1960s. One of the first neo-pagan religions was the Church of All Worlds, which was an attempt to put the religion founded by the book’s hero into practice. Heinlein himself wasn’t impressed with it, not least because he didn’t believe psychic powers existed. It might be that Cole’s book and other SF stories of the period in which the peoples of Venus and Mars were depicted as angels started that line of mystical speculation which eventually produced the New Age idea that Jesus was an alien. Or it could just be that it prefigured them when they arose later in the century with the emergence of the UFO phenomenon.
I’ve put up this sketch of Carl Sagan began he was one of the major figures in space research as well as a committed Humanist and political activist. He was also a major populariser of astronomy and science, most notably through his blockbusting TV series and its accompanying book, Cosmos. This was also notable for its soundtrack, composed by Vangelis, who also composed the music for Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner and 1492: The Conquest of Paradise. According to the blurb on Cosmos’ back cover, Sagan was
‘(t)he director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies and David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking and Voyager expeditions to the planets, for which he received the NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and for Distinguished Public Service, and the international astronautics prize, the Prix Galabert. He has served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, as chairman of the astronomy section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as a President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union. For twelve years, he was Editor-in-Chief of Icarus, the leading professional journal devoted to planetary research. In addition to 400 published scientific and popular articles, Dr. Sagan (was) the author, co-author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Intelligent Life in the Universe, The Cosmic Connection, The Dragons of Eden, Murmurs of Earth and Broca’s Brain. In 1975 he received the Joseph Priestly Award “for distinguished contributions to the welfare of mankind,” and in 1978 the Pulitzer Prize for literature.’
It was Sagan who suggested that Black Holes could be used as interstellar subways so that spaceships from one part of the universe could use them to travel faster than light to another part of the cosmos connected by the wormhole passing between the Black Hole and its White Hole. He also suggested that Venus could be terraformed into a living, habitable world through the introduction of genetically engineered bacteria that would consume its toxic carbon dioxide atmosphere and replace it with breathable oxygen. He also noted that Mars had a large instability in its rotation, and that this could have resulted in its current, millions-year long period of lifelessness. But it was possible that in time its rotation would return to a more hospitable position and the planet would once more bloom into life. He was also a staunch advocate of the view that the universe was inhabited by intelligent alien civilisations and that one day we would contact them. He also wrote a later book, Pale Blue Dot, after the view of the Earth from space.
He was also a fierce opponent of what he considered to be superstition. He was one of the founders of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal along with the stage magician James Randi. They were formed in response to the publication of Gauqelin’s research suggesting there really was a link between the star sign under which people were born and their later careers. He was alarmed by the rise of Creationism and the New Age, and expressed his fears about them in his book, The Demon Haunted World. He was afraid that this would lead to a new Dark Age in which people would wake up every morning to anxiously look through their horoscopes.
He was also greatly concerned with the environment and global warming and the threat of nuclear war. In the 1980s he also proposed the idea of nuclear winter. This was the idea that a nuclear war would send millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, blocking out the sunlight and causing temperatures to plunge. This has since been rejected by scientists, but I have seen it suggested as one of the causes for the extinction of the dinosaurs. In this case it was the dust thrown up by the asteroid’s impact 65 million years ago that blocked out the sun’s light, after the initial holocaust caused by its impact.
During the inquiry following the Challenger disaster, Sagan claimed that it had occurred because the Shuttle was poorly designed, the result of a compromise between NASA and the military. The Shuttle was originally intended to be fully reusable and smaller. However, the armed forces insisted on it becoming larger so that it could carry military satellites into space. The result was that it was larger, and only partially reusable as it required an external tank to carry the extra fuel it needed to reach orbit. This was jettisoned after its fuel was consumed to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
He also wrote the SF novel, Contact, later filmed with Jodie Foster playing the lead. This was about a female astronomer, who makes contact radio contact with aliens, a method Sagan himself strongly advocated. Following their instructions, she constructs an artificial wormhole portal that transports her across space so she can finally meet them. I remember coming across the book in the Cheltenham branch of Waterstones in the 1980s and was rather put off by its blurb. This boasted about it challenging and refuting racism, sexism and so on. All good stuff, of course, but a bit too PC for me.
Many of these themes appear in Cosmos. This was his personal view of the history of science, and while I loved it at the time, I have serious issues with some of the claims now. One of the problems is that he accepts what we were all told at school, that the Greek philosophers were scientists. He believed that if Greek science had progressed, we would have had space travel by now. The ancient Greeks were certainly responsible for laying the foundations of western science, but they were not quite scientists in the modern sense. They used deduction rather than the scientific method of induction. Deduction meant that they observed a phenomenon and then invented an explanation. In induction, devised by Francis Bacon in the 16th/17th century, the scientist observes a phenomenon, comes up with an explanation, and then devises an experiment to disprove it. If the explanation passes the test, it is tentatively accepted as true until a later observation or experiment disproves it. The ancient Greeks didn’t do much practical experimentation.
Sagan also followed the popular explanation of the evolution of the brain, in which there is a lower, animal brain with the higher faculties evolving later, so there’s a primitive reptile brain and a more advanced mammal brain. But Victorian scientists found that both types of brain structure were present in the earliest, most primitive animals. He also followed the standard, accepted narrative that the Roman Catholic church had suppressed scientific knowledge and experimentation during the Middle Ages. This has since been rejected by historians of science. To many such historians now, the Middle Ages after the 8/9th centuries were an age of innovation and discovery. Jean Gimpel’s book proposing the idea was called The Medieval Machine, after the invention of the clock, to symbolise the period’s belief in a universe governed by law, discoverable by human reason under the light of the divine. And rather than the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance leading to a new enlightened, rational order, it had the potential to do the opposite. The medieval philosophers and theologians were Aristotelians but were very aware of the flaws in Aristotelian science and had modified it over the centuries in order to conform more closely to observed reality. But the Renaissance Humanists would have dumped all this, and so we would have been back to square one with no further scientific advances than what was permitted through a rigid adherence to Aristotle’s thought.
There’s also an anti-Christian element in Cosmos too. He describes how Hypatia, the late Neoplatonist female philosopher was murdered by a group of Christian monks in the 4th century. Hypatia has symbolised for a long time to radical atheists the fundamentally anti-science, and to feminists, the misogyny in Christianity. But by this time Neoplatonism was a mixture of science and mystical speculation, forming what has been called ‘the mind’s road to God’. The real motives for her murder weren’t that she was some kind of pagan threat, but more from a power struggle between the authorities in that part of the Roman world.
Sagan is also critical of western imperialism and describes the horrors the Conquistadors inflicted on the Aztecs and other peoples of the New World. He’s right and this section is clearly a product of its time, with the rise of anti-colonial movements among the world’s indigenous peoples, the Black Civil Rights movement in the US and the horrors of the Vietnam War, as well as Reagan’s new Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust. But looking at this 40 years later, it’s also one-sided. Europe wasn’t the only expansionist, brutal, imperialist culture. Islam was also militaristic and expansionist, and at the time the Spaniards conquered South America, the Turkish empire was expanding and subjugating parts of Europe, while Muslim pirates were raiding the continent as far as Iceland for slaves.
It’s also dated from an archaeological standpoint. At one point Sagan discusses the Bronze Age collapse of the societies of the Ancient Near East, showing how it was characterised by a series of crises, similar to the process of the fall of other, later civilisations into Dark Ages, but that these aren’t causes in themselves. It’s Systems Analysis, which was popular at the time, but which I think has also become subsequently passe.
All that said, Sagan was right about global warming, whose devastating effects he illustrated with the example of the planet Venus. This has also suffered catastrophic heating due to its greater nearness to the Sun. This released massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, creating a runaway greenhouse effect so that it is now a hell planet of burning temperatures and sulphuric acid rain. He also wasn’t wrong about the threat of renewed militarism and nuclear war and was a welcome voice against Reagan’s strident belligerence.
As a science populariser, his influence has also been immense. Cosmos was a bestseller, and I think it prepared the way for other bestselling works by astronomers and scientists like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. And I certainly was not surprised when Brian Cox, the scientist, not the actor, said in an interview in the Radio Times that he was a massive admirer of Sagan. That came across to me very strongly from his numerous TV series about space and the planets.
Moore was for many years the face of astronomy on television in the UK, thanks to him presenting The Sky at Night from the 1950s almost to his death. He was known as much for his eccentric appearance as his subject, so there were plenty of jokes about him wearing the same rumpled suit down the decades. He was sent up on programmes from The Two Ronnies to Dead Ringers, who spoofed him as ‘Old Moore’, a fairground fortune teller. But he remained dedicated to his subject, publishing a plethora of popular books on the subject. This included a series of Sky at Night books, one of which I found in the school library when I was a lad, as well as editing the annual Yearbooks of Astronomy. He also collaborated with the amazing British space and science fiction artist David A. Hardy on books such as The Challenge of the Stars. He also wrote at least two books on Mars. I found one in the central library in Bristol in the 1980s. A decade later, during the excitement about the series of probes NASA and other countries were sending to the Red Planet, he published Patrick Moore on Mars. Its title invites all manner of jokes along the lines of ‘best place for him.’ He also wrote a series of children’s science fiction books about a boy space explorer, Scott Summers. These were hard SF based on the science of the time and what was expected to develop later. They’re now obviously very dated. In one of these, Wanderer in Space, Summers flew to intercept an antimatter asteroid that was threatening Earth aboard an ion driven rocket, clearly anticipating developments in such propulsion that haven’t materialised. Ion drives exist, but they aren’t being used for manned space missions. Another of these was about a human colony on Mars, living in a glass dome. This ends with the colonists looking forward to one day emerging and living free on its surface. This one has been superseded by Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy of books about the settlement and terraforming of Mars. As well as these books, he also contributed to a string of popular science and astronomy magazines like Astronomy Now, New Voyager and Focus.
I think he was one of those scientists, with Arthur C. Clarke, who worked on radar during the War but I’m not sure. He never had a formal qualification in astronomy but was always strictly amateur. He was, however, granted an amateur doctorate by one of the universities. I’m sure, however, that at the level he was active in astronomy he would have probably easily passed a university degree in the subject. His maps of the Moon were so good that they were used by NASA in selecting landing sites for the Apollo missions. He never married because his sweetheart was killed during the War in an air raid. In his personal politics he was extremely right-wing, founding the One Country party, which was later merged with another small, extreme right-wing group. I can also remember him appearing on one of the chat shows and remarking that we’d be ‘in the cart’ without Maggie Thatcher. Like many people who have genuinely been through a war, he was deeply critical of it. In one of the chapters in The New Challenge of the Stars, about a possible hostile encounter between an asteroid ark and the inhabitants of an alien planet in whose system it has appeared, Moore makes a sharp comment about man’s folly of war entering a new battleground in space. He was also a staunch opponent of fox hunting. Back in the 90s he was a guest on the comedy programme Room 101, in which guests compete to have various useless and irritating objects or people consigned to the room made famous by Orwell’s 1984. In the vast majority cases, this is just light-hearted fun. But Moore was absolutely serious about sending fox hunting there and talked about how he’d written to various authorities to get it banned. Away from astronomy he also taught himself to play the xylophone and composed numerous pieces for the instrument. One of these was published in a classical music magazine. This did not translate into a career in music, however. He got very annoyed when his planned concert at the Hippodrome was cancelled due to lack of interest.
As well as serious, professional and amateur astronomers Moore talked to during his long career, he also met and talked to various eccentrics, including UFO contactees. One of those he interviewed on the Sky at Night was a man who believed he was in contact with peaceful aliens, and could speak four of their languages, including Venusian and Plutonian. This gentleman demonstrated it by saying the greeting, ‘Hello, space brothers’, in one of them. And although Moore persistently denied it, it seems he was one of the hands behind a hoax book by ‘Cedric Allingham’ about how he encountered an alien spacecraft and its inhabitants during a walking tour of the Scottish Highlands. This was during the first wave of UFO encounters in the late 40s and 50s. When people wrote to the publisher hoping to contact Allingham, he could not be traced. One excuse was that he was off walking in Switzerland. Computer analysis of the text reveals that it was probably written by Moore and revised by someone else in order to disguise his authorship. Moore remained very willing to meet ordinary members of the public and talk to them about his subject even in his retirement. He publicly gave out the address of his home in Herstmonceux, Sussex and said if people had questions or wanted to talk to him, they could drop in, shrugging off the obvious dangers of theft, burglary and so on.
Moore belonged to an age when popular science broadcasters could be real characters, often with eccentric mannerism. There was Magnus Pike, who was famous for waving his arms around while speaking, and the bearded dynamo of Botanic Man himself, David Bellamy, sent up in impressions by Lenny Henry. Since then, popular science programmes have been presented by people who are younger and/or a bit more hip. One BBC programme on astronomy a few years ago was presented by Queen guitarist Brian May, who had studied astrophysics at university before getting caught up in his career as an awesome global rock star. May had just handed in his astrophysics thesis after decades of touring the world with Mercury, Deacon et al. His co-presenter was the comedian Dara O’Brien, who had tried to study maths at university but had dropped out because of its difficulty. The Sky at Night is now presented by about three different hosts, including Black woman Maggie Aderin-Pocock. And I think the face of astronomy and cosmology now is probably Brian Cox after all his series on the subject. But for all this, I prefer the science presenters of a previous generation with all their quirks and foibles. These people were enthusiastic about their subject and were able to communicate their enthusiasm without trying to be too slick to connect with a mass audience. And they succeeded.
The 1984 Yearbook of Astronomy and What’s New in Space, just two of the books edited and written by Moore.
The online encyclopedia states that she was encouraged in her career after writing a letter to Patrick Moore about it when she was 16. He replied, ‘Being a girl is no problem’. She studied astronomy and physics at Leicester University in 1973, where she met her long-term collaborator, fellow astronomy student Nigel Henbest. The two formed a working partnership, Hencoup enterprises, devoted to popularising astronomy. She then carried out postgraduate research as a student of Linacre College, Oxford, in the university’s Astrophysics department. She became the senior lecturer at the Caird Planetarium at Greenwich. In 1984 she was elected president of the British Astronomical Association. She was the first female president and second youngest. I can remember her appearing on Wogan and playing down the fact that she was the first woman to become president, far preferring to be noted as the youngest. She also served as the President of the Junior Astronomical Society, now the Society for Popular Astronomy. In 1988 the London Planetarium invited her to write and present its major new show, Starburst. In 1993 she was appointed professor of astronomy at Gresham college. She was the first woman to hold the position in 400 years and remained professor until her death.
She wrote and co-wrote with Henbest over 40 books, as well as writing articles for a range of magazines such as BBC Sky at Night, BBC Focus and Astronomy. She also presented a lecture on the solar eclipse in Guernsey in 1999, and led expedition to view other eclipses in Sumatra, Hawaii, Aruba, Egypt, China and Tahiti. She also made numerous public appearances and talks about the cruise liners Arcadia, Queen Mary 2, and Queen Victoria. She was aboard Concorde when it made its first flight from London to Auckland. She also appeared and spoke at various science festivals, including Brighton, Cheltenham, and Oxford. She also spoke at corporate events for British Gas, Axa Sun Life and IBM.
She also presented a number of programmes and series on astronomy on the radio. These included Starwatch and The Modern Magi on Radio 4. She also presented an Archive Hour programme on the same channel on Britain’s Space Race, for which she received an Arthur C. Clarke award. She also appeared on Radio 2, and Radio 5Live, as well as making other appearances on Radio 4. She also presented a series of thirty 15-minute episodes on the history of astronomy. Her shows for the BBC World Service included A Brief History of Infinity, The Essential Guide to the 21st Century, and Seeing Stars, which was co-hosted by Henbest.
She made frequent appearances as the guest expert on various TV programmes, mostly on Channel 4. She made her first TV appearance on The Sky at Night, In 1981 she presented the children’s TV programme, Heaven’s Above, on ITV with Terence Murtagh. I think I remember watching this when I was about 14 or so. She then presented the series The Planets for Channel 4, which was followed by The Stars. She also presented the ITV show Neptune Encounter, the Horizon episode ‘A Close Encounter of the Second Kind’, and Stephen Hawking: A Profile on BBC 4.
Couper, Henbest and the director of her series, The Stars, founded a production company, Pioneer Productions. The Neptune Encounter, which covered Voyager 2’s flyby of the planet, was its first programme. She was also the producer for the Channel 4 shows Black Holes, Electric Skies and Beyond the Millennium. She later left the company to concentrate on more general radio and TV appearances.
In 1993 she was appointed a member of the Millennium Commission. Of the nine commissioners appointed, only she and Michael Heseltine continued until it was wound up.
Outside her work on astronomy, she was also a guest presenter on Woman’s Hour, as well as the John Dunn programme and Start the Week on the radio. She was also interested in local history and literature, and so appeared on Radio 4’s With Great Pleasure and Down Your Way. She also appeared on Radio 3’s In Tune selecting her ‘pick of the proms.’ She was also the narrator on a number of other factual programmes, including Channel 4’s Ekranoplan: The Caspian Sea Monster, and Raging Planet on the Discovery Channel.
So, a huge science populariser, but probably one whose achievements are obscured by other, more prominent, celebrities.
As well as the children’s astronomy programme, I also once saw her speaking on about Mars and the question of life on the Red Planet at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. She had a rather mischievous sense of humour. There’s a real possibility that life in some form has existed on Mars and may exist now, but if it does, it’s almost certainly at the level of microbes. At the time, however, various individuals who had spent too long looking at photos of the planet claimed to have seen much larger lifeforms on the planet. There was a programme on Channel 4 in which a Hungarian astronomer appeared to describe how he believed there were massive mushrooms growing there. People also thought the saw giant ‘sand whales’ crawling about its surface, like the sandworms in Dune. These were, in fact, geological features left by some of the dune’s slumping, which created a trail that looked like the segmented body of a worm. One of the peeps taken in by this was the late Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke rang her up from Sri Lanka, asking her if she’d seen them and telling her that he really didn’t know what to make of it. She commented that for a moment she thought he’d gone mad, then covered her mouth like a naughty child caught saying something she shouldn’t.
For all that she played down her importance as a female pioneer in astronomy, I think she did prepare the say for more women to enter it and become television presenters. There’s now a drive for more women in the hard sciences, and we’ve science had a Black woman presenter, Aderin-Pocock, on the Sky At Night, and female astrophysicists and mathematicians appearing on the radio and TV.
This may amuse you. They are any number of dodgy videos out there on YouTube purporting to show the space secrets NASA are covering up. One Russian channel a few years ago claimed to show the 12 species of aliens visiting Earth. These were, however, all stills taken from SF films and TV shows, ’cause I recognised some of them. One of them was Zhaan from the American-Australian SF series Farscape. Now the scammers are at it again. There was a series of shorts on YouTube this week claiming to show the remains of a village on Mars, then the remains of a city and finally standing liquid water. This would all be really impressive. The atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet is 5 millibars, so any liquid water would boil off very quickly. There have been respectable NASA reports of liquid water there, but I think it’s locked below ground in artesian wells. The site proudly showed a puddle in a reddish-brown desert, much like the surface of Mars. This was quite convincing, until you saw the metal pipe rising out of the puddle gushing water into it. Yeah, I know the Martians built canals, according to Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell, but I don’t think the left metal standpipes. As for the village and city, they look like abandoned desert settlements on Earth to me, though I couldn’t tell you where. Mars did once have a habitable climate, but that was so many millions of years ago that all trace of it has vanished and any ruins left over from a civilisation simply wouldn’t have survived the long aeons. It looks like whoever’s behind the videos got hold of pictures of deserts ruins and altered the colours so that it resembled the Marian surface. Convincing to some, no doubt, until they see the standpipe.
I hope I’m not boring you with all this, but I thought I should post this video by James Lindsay up as well. It follows his first video attacking Queer Theory and its deliberate grooming of schoolchildren through pornography and grossly inappropriate topics being taught in sex education. Lindsay argued, citing the postmodernists and Marxist writers themselves, that Queen Theory really isn’t about genuinely helping gay, bi and trans children and adults come to terms with their sexuality and find acceptance in society, so that they can lead normal, functioning, happy lives alongside straight people. Rather, it is all about increasing their alienation and making them even more angry and transgressive in order to turn them into a revolutionary mass which will overthrow capitalism instead of the working class. This follows closely Georg Lukacz’s sex education programme in Hungary, which was explicitly designed to use sexual liberation to alienate children from their parents and conventional capitalist society. This was then taken up by the Frankfurt school and played a very strong role in the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s. Lindsay backs up the arguments in his previous video by going through a Queer Theory paper, written by Hanna Dyer, a woman at Carlton University in Canada, that explicitly states this.
Queer Theory’s Rejection of Gay Rights
Early on in the paper, Dyer denounces the recent legislation granting gay people equal rights. Lindsay is not homophobic, even though his attacks on Queer and Critical Theory and calls for those promoting it to be put in gaol make him sound like a very right-wing Conservative. I don’t know what his political views are. He may be a man of the right, but he makes it clear that all parents should come together to combat what is being taught in schools in Social Emotional Learning and Comprehensive Sex Education regardless of politics, race, sexuality and religion. All that should matter is the class ‘parent’. Lindsay states that gay acceptance has been of immense benefit to society. But Dyer attacks it because such liberal legislation will help reconcile gays with the capitalist society they wish to overthrow. This continues throughout her wretched article. Later on she attacks Dan Savage’s video on YouTube, ‘It Gets Better’. Savage is gay, and with another man, produced a video to reassure gay children that even though they’re bullied and have an awful time at school, it gets better when you grow up. People are more accepting. I think this often depends on your particular place in society. Working class culture could be traditionally extremely homophobic, and there is a vicious homophobia prevalent in some parts of Black culture. But in general middle class culture has become very accepting to the point where one YouTuber described how a Conservative friend had completely accepted gay equality. Savage produced his video in response to the high rate of suicide amongst gay kids. He wanted to stop it by showing that ‘It Gets Better’. He released the video on YouTube because he felt schools would resist its message. According to Lindsay, Savage is actually ‘super liberal’. But to Dyer he’s an evil White man – she doesn’t call him a scholar or researcher, just ‘White man’ in order to show how evil he is. Apart from his race, she sees him as a servant of capitalism, trying to stop the revolutionary potential of the gay masses by incorporating them into neoliberalism and promoting upward mobility.
Now I strongly believe that the sooner we dump neoliberalism the better. It is doing immense damage to ordinary working people of whatever, race, creed, sexuality or religion. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to reassure vulnerable gay children that they can still a place as an accepted member of society, who should be able to look forward to the same job opportunities as the rest of us and have the same aspirations to social advancement. And I’d say that attacking a video that genuinely tries to stop gay kids committing suicide is actually evil.
The Attack on Childhood Innocence in orderto Promote Radically Alienated Gay Identities
The paper goes on to attack the whole notion of childhood innocence. She hates the idea that children are asexual and proto-heterosexual. Lindsay states that here she comes into conflict with biological fact. Most people across society all over the world are heterosexual. Only a minority are gay. This is aside from any moral considerations that see heterosexuality as more moral than homosexuality. He makes it clear that he supports the teaching that ‘Some people are gay. Get over it’, as Stonewall once said in an advertising programme. Lindsay has said in his previous video that Queer Theorists really don’t like that common sense attitude. Moreover, they see gender and sexuality as identities without essence, social roles people perform rather than are. Therefore they seek to groom children for their role as queer revolutionaries by breaking down barriers and having them sexually experiment. This include the binary oppositions male/female, adult/child. And around the 1hr 14 minute mark, Dyer says this explicitly. Which clearly opens the way to grooming by paedophiles. Lindsay states that children have a very strong belief in these opposition and that he believes them to be biologically innate. He also makes the point that paedophile relationships massively damage the young victims psychologically. A very high number schizoid people have the condition due to childhood abuse. But Dyer seems also to be offended by the biological fact that most people are heterosexual. She wants to changes that, and queer not just gay children, but children as a whole. This is very much how the attacks on heteronormativity have seemed to me, and I’m glad that Lindsay has come to the same conclusion I have.
Later on, she attacks the whole notion of reproductive sex because gay people, who naturally cannot have children through gay sex, cannot achieve the same level of privilege as straight ‘breeders’ in a society that privileges heterosexual reproduction. But this is a revolt against biology, as it is through heterosexual reproductive sex that the human race is perpetuated. Ah, but so too are the mechanisms of capitalist control and repression. Instead the goal should be hedonistic, non-reproductive sex, which she explicitly connects with the death urge through Marcuse and other Marxist thinkers. This is just plain nihilism. Thinking about it, it makes me wonder if Pope John Paul II had a point when he described Enlightenment society as a ‘cult of death’. I think he was wrong about the Enlightenment, but certainly right about these pernicious postmodernist ideologies.
Childhood Innocence Blamed for Racismand Genocide
Naturally, race gets drawn into it in order to produce the broad, intersectional coalition of races and sexualities that postmodernists hope to create as an oppositional front against capitalism. Childhood innocence should be challenged, because it chiefly affects White children. Black children are less innocent, and stereotypically more streetwise. Lindsay says it’s rubbish. Here I think he’s wrong. I think the stereotype is that Black children are tougher, more worldly-wise, and more ‘street’. but that doesn’t mean that their parents don’t want to preserve and guard their innocence just as much as Whites. And apparently childhood innocence is also genocidal. Whites want to preserve their kids more than those of other races, and this is somehow ties in with one of the genuine mass-murderers of the US Indian Wars. This was the general responsible for the Sand Creek massacre, who wanted not only adult indigenous Americans killed, but also to be physically mutilated and their children murdered as well in order ‘to stop lice breeding’. It’s an absolutely horrific attitude and atrocity, but as Lindsay points out, just ’cause someone was an idiot in the past doesn’t mean that everybody who believes in childhood innocence is. She also brings social class into her argument about gay acceptance and queer children, although Lindsay states these are actually non-issues. He also points out that at the centre of all this is are repeated attacks on conventional ideas of childhood development, which stresses that children go through certain stages and that the material they’re given should be age appropriate. Like the books in school libraries that are graded according to suitability for different ages of reader. Dyer talks about getting Queer Theory to influence ideas of childhood pedagogy along with Critical Race Theory. But this isn’t about helping gay children. It’s all about destabilising children’s personalities, to make them angry and disaffected, to make them Marxist revolutionaries determined to destroy western civilisation.
Alex Jones Right about Queer Theory and Transhumanism
At times Lindsay sounds like the mad conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He says at one point that if he goes on reading it, he’ll end up screaming about Satan like the bonkers Texan libertarian. Well, Jones talked a lot of conspiracist nonsense about ‘the globalists’, which is very close to the wretched anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He also falsely accused decent people of being child abusers for the Democrat party, claimed Barack Obama was the antichrist, Hillary Clinton of being possessed by alien demons, a practicing witch and a robot from the waist down, and other nonsense. Like NASA was running a child slave labour based on Mars. Which nobody knew about, least of all NASA, as they took the time to deny it, not least because it would cost $16 billion just to send six people to Mars let alone the legions of kids Jones, or rather, one of his guests, claimed.
But it seems Jones had a point. I’ll admit I had a laugh when Jones ranted about feminism and gay rights being a transhumanist cult to turn us all into sexless cyborgs. But Lindsay says that transhumanism is one offshoot of Critical Theory. The World Economic Forum is made up of transhumanists, who all want to link us to the Net through biological implants so that we will live at least part of the time in Virtual reality. We will own nothing and we will be happy.
This sounds like Star Trek’s Borg to me. In ‘Q Who?’, the Star Trek The Next Generation episode which introduced them, Q transports the Enterprise to system J17, where they encounter and are attacked by a Borg cube that has just finished assimilating a planet. As one of them beams aboard, Q says to Picard, ‘Look at it, Jean-Luc. It’s not a he, it’s not a she… it’s an augmented humanoid.’ But one of the heads of the big American tech corporations is a transwoman and transhumanist, and wrote a paper promoting transhumanism as a feminist project to go beyond gender. And there certainly was a lot of talk about genderless future cyborgs when transhumanism was being discussed back in the ’90s. ‘We are Postmodern Borg. Resistance to Critical Theory is futile. You will be assimilated’.
Destroying State Education Not the Solution
Throughout the video, Lindsay angrily stops his analysis of the text to remind his readers that this is being done by groomers in the sex education now being taught in American schools. This means your children. And this is primarily state schools though some private schools are also involved. He loudly urges people to take their children out of these schools. I see his point. There’s a video by anti-trans ideology activists Kellie-Jay Minshull, in which she goes through some of the material recommended for schools by Stonewall. And it is about sexualising children. One of these is a game in which children put together various body parts and have to guess what sex act may be possible with them. This really is inappropriate. Yes, children should be taught about the changes happening to their bodies and their emerging sexuality in adolescence. And I quite agree that at an appropriate age, children should be taught that some people are gay but should be accepted like anybody else. But this doesn’t do that. It is about breaking down barriers, barriers which are there for a reason. There is an organisation, the Safe Schools Alliance, for parents worried about this form of indoctrination. He also points out that the ideas are very similar to Herbert Marcuse’s proposals for Marxism to take over university education.
But the solution isn’t to pull kids out of state education, as the Conservative right wants. I think the American public school system was founded by Thomas Jefferson, who realised that for America to work as a functioning democracy it needed an educated public. Absolutely. If you destroy public education, you get back to the conditions of 19th century Britain before it was made compulsory. Education was definitely not free, and only the rich could afford to send their children to the public (elite private) and the grammar schools. Working class children could go instead to dame schools, usually run by an elderly woman, hence their name, where educational standards could be very low. Many children couldn’t send their children to school, and so illiteracy rates were much, much higher. Proper state education has made the British public much more educated and informed, though sometimes you wonder.
What needs to be done is for parents instead to fight this indoctrination as hard as they can, so that their children get a proper education and not just indoctrination, whether from the extreme left or the extreme right.
The Independent has published a piece by Adam Smith reporting that scientists at Cardiff University, MIT and Cambridge University have modelled a series of chemical reactions based on a ammonia, which would neutralise sulfuric acid droplets. Venus has a lethal atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide, where it rains sulfuric acid, and an atmospheric pressure and temperature much higher than Earth. Probes sent to the planet have lasted only a few minutes after landing because of the immensely harsh conditions. However, as the article states, ammonia has also been detected in its atmosphere, that might indicate that it has life. The article states that this would be ‘unlike anything we’ve seen’, which sounds like there could be large creatures moving around in the planet’s cloud layer. Unfortunately, as the article goes on to say, if life exists it’s going to be microbes, but microbes of a very different biochemistry. The article begins:
‘Researchers believe that there could be potential lifeforms producing ammonia in the clouds of Venus that are “very unlike anything we’ve seen”.
The colourless gas, a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, could be indicative of chemical reactions that would make the planet – 47.34 million kilometres from Earth – more habitable to alien life.
On our planet, ammonia is a common left-over waste from aquatic organisms. Its presence in Venus’ upper atmosphere has been puzzling astronomers since the 1970s – with scientists believing that it should not be produced by any known force on the world.
Venus itself is so hot that it is inconceivable to have life forms, and if there is life in the clouds it is likely to be microbes like Earth bacteria – albeit with a chemical composition unlike that we have seen on our planet, or even neighbouring planets like Mars.
In a new study, researchers from Cardiff University, MIT and Cambridge University modelled a set of chemical processes to show that – if ammonia is indeed present – it would set off a cascade of chemical reactions that would neutralize surrounding droplets of sulfuric acid.’
This is interesting, and Venus certainly has the organic chemistry necessary for life, and I think the temperature and pressure in the cloud layer is roughly suitable. But I’m pessimistic about there being life on Venus. We haven’t found it elsewhere in the solar system yet, although it could be preserved in refugia deep in the rocks and artesian wells on Mars or in the subterranean oceans believed to be under Jupiter’s moon Europa. But I’m not confident of its existence there, either. We were disappointed when the Mariner probe got to Mars in the 1960s, and found that instead of being roughly like Earth, it was more like the Moon. Before then, astronomers had observed seasonal changes of colour on the planet, and suggested it was due to changes in vegetation, possibly mosses and lichens. And then, of course, there was speculation about Martian canals in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There may yet be life in the solar system. I hope so, but I’m not confident. And the only way to find out is to go there. Until then, we’ll have to wait and see, whatever planet it’s on it.
This short video comes from the TedEd channel on YouTube, presumably connected to the TED talks in which leading intellectuals and academics explain their ideas. In this case, its about space elevators. These are long cables that would carry materials and passengers up to Earth orbit. The idea was first proposed by Russian space pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in 1895, after the deaf school teacher saw the tallest building in the world at the time. If one could be built, it would massively reduce the costs of transporting people and material to orbit. These would be taken aloft in special capsules called ‘Climbers’, which would have to be shielded against radiation to protect human passengers. At the moment, it costs SpaceX $7,600 per kilo. It’s estimated that space elevators, their immense power needs supplied either by solar energy or nuclear power, could reduce this by 95 per cent. The problem is that that at the moment there is no material strong enough to support such a building. It has been suggested that carbon monofilaments and nanotubes could provide the solution, but only tiny amounts of these have been manufactured at the moment. There is also the problem that the gravitational stresses and hence the thickness of the cable would vary with height. One solution to this problem would be to extend the cable to counterweight, either a satellite or captured asteroid in geostationary orbit 36,000 km above the Earth. The problem of keeping the tether rigid would be solved by using centrifugal force from the Earth’s spin. The station back on Terra would be best situated at the equator, and possibly a ship at sea. This would allow it mobility to avoid storms and terrible weather. It is immensely difficult to build such an elevator on Earth, but they could be built on the Moon and Mars using current technology and materials. But they’d be far more of an advantage built here on Earth. Another problem is that if the cable was cut, the effects as it fell to Earth would be catastrophic. Despite the difficulties of construction, there are companies in China and Japan planning to build them by 2050.
The idea of the space elevator has been around for some time. Arthur C. Clarke thought for a while that he had invented the idea in his book about the building of such a tower in his adopted home of Sri Lanka in his 1970s novel, The Fountains of Paradise. This lasted until he looked the idea up in the scientific literature, and found it went all the back to the Russians. It would truly be a giant leap in space exploitation and colonisation if we could build a space elevator, but I think building one by 2050 is extremely optimistic. Way back in the 1990s or the early part of this century I remember an American firm announcing they were going to develop the idea. Unfortunately one of the problems at the time is that, according to the techniques being proposed, the station back on Earth would have to be anchored by an entire mountain range. So, not really possible and that was the end anyone heard of the idea.
It’s great that research into space elevators is continuing, but I think it will be a long time before they become reality, whether built by Americans, Chinese, Japanese or whoever.
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