A Dialogue from the Late 1990's

Set in a small, progressive university mountain town in the northwest. 

It’s surrounded by mountains – local university geologists claim that a glacial lake hundreds of miles away burst its banks more than once, sending a flood of water into the town’s valley. A local brewery named one if its beers “Glacial Lake”.

We are in a renovated sugar beet mill, with original brickwork inside, air ducting and water pipes in the ceiling exposed and brightly painted yellow and orange and blue. The building is surrounded on three sides by a parking lot, full to the brim with cars.

The renovated sugar beet mill houses a software company with about 200 employees. Any company that size is big in this part of the country. For a software company, it’s huge.

We zoom into the second floor of the building, and back to the extreme of the northern wing of the building. We zoom in closer to cubicles, a square pod with the desks on the inside of the square.

There are three male software testers, talking. They find lots of bugs in the industrial strength GIS software of their company. They respectfully point out to the programmers what doesn’t work, or what works but not the way the customers want it to work. 

They joke a lot.

One – W – is looking at his monitor, his back turned to the other two – D and C.

W: Astronauts detected what they take to be the most distant object in the universe – it’s 31 billion light years away.

D: We’re going to have to figure out some other way to travel in this universe if we really want to get anywhere – anywhere beyond the moon.

C: I think we need to start with launching beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

W: At light speed the round trip would take…

N: 62 billion years

W: [still reading off his monitor] The ship would take 3 months to accelerate to the speed of light without whiplashing the astronauts.

D: I think we’re going to have to find some other way to travel.

C: You mean like through wormholes?

D: Yes. Something other than packing a body into a can, shoving the can through a vacuum, and opening the can at the other end of the journey. In fact, the trip to the moon didn’t even achieve that – the can opened, but the body was still inside a smaller can of the suit and helmet.

C: The astronaut was still there, seeing through the visor, and could lift up a rock and get a feel for the rock’s texture.

D: But he’s not touching the rock with his skin. Nor is he seeing it except through the visor of his helmet, however insignificant the separation may be.

C: But in that case, you would have to say that my feet are in socks, inside shoes, on the carpet, on the floor, above the ground. I’m not really touching the ground.

D: I agree – you aren’t touching the ground. But you can take – and have taken – off the shoes and socks, stepped outside, and walked on the grass in your bare feet, grass and skin touching.

To date, we can’t do that outside of earth’s atmosphere, not even in theory. Do you notice how, except for the aliens, our science fiction doesn’t even portray an intelligible story of humans traveling through space without ships or suits?

Anyway, our knowledge of space is wholly by inference, because we have, and can’t have, any direct contact via our five senses with anything outside the Earth’s biosphere.

The space probes go out, and we see pictures of Jupiter’s moons, of Neptune, and as a result we have the mistaken impression that a human can float in space and look all around at this vista of planets and moons and nebulae and galaxies. Not only that a human can, but that we have in fact done so, having seen the pictures from the probe. When really we’ve only seen representations of what a mere electronic instrument on the probe detected when directed at an infinitesimal portion of the whole view.

In the case of the moon, we can’t hear, taste, feel, see or smell anything directly, even if the only thing between us and the moon is a thin suit and gold-plated glass visor. In the case of the probe, we are profoundly more removed.

And here’s where it gets weird: When we say that something is real, we mean that we can experience it with our five senses. By that definition, space is not real.

[J, the boss, a young woman straight from Palm in Silicon Valley, where she managed testing for the Palm Pilot. Smart, sober, observant.]

J: But those radio signals from the probe are then interpreted into a visual image that we can see.

D: I agree. But we’re seeing a visual representation constructed from radio waves – we are not seeing the moons of Jupiter. We are inferring from the waves what the moons of Jupiter look like.

C: If that’s true, you’d have to say the same thing about deep sea exploration, is that right?

D: That’s exactly right. Have you seen maps of the bottom of all the oceans? Like in National Geographic? They show the entire ocean floor. But the maps extrapolate and infer. We infer from the sonar what the surface looks like. Then we extrapolate between data points.

But we haven’t seen, directly, the entire ocean floor.

J: But divers have seen the ocean floor.

D: Yes, but not the whole thing. They’ve only seen a tiny, tiny portion of the whole ocean floor, that is, they, collectively.

Most, anyway, are seeing through the glass of a mask, however irrelevant that may seem.

C: I was born by the ocean. When I was 3 days old I swam it it. I can see really well under water without a mask.

J: They’re feeling it with their skin.

D: Down to a certain depth, below which they’re in a can just like the astronauts.

C: Are you saying I’m seeing more of reality than most people because there’s no glass between me and the water?

D: No, it’s not a matter of quantity – like, you see more of reality than I do. It’s a matter of quality – you have immediate knowledge, I have inferred knowledge.

C: So with your glasses on right now, you’re not seeing reality? In fact, not only do I see more of reality than you, but lots more, because my eye sight is better.

D: Well, yeah, I guess there are quantitative differences in perception, but in those cases, we’re talking about immediate knowledge – experience – for both people. If I take off my glasses, you and I both have unmediated, direct perception, but yours takes in more detail.

C: So it’s just a matter of a more or less clear picture of reality. You have a muted perception of realitiy through your glasses.

D: I wouldn’t say muted, I would say inferred. It’s a difference in quality, not quantity. It’s a difference in the source of the knowledge – directly through the senses, or inferred from measurement.

C: On your view then, there is nothing left to explore – space exploration is pointless. We can only really experience what we’ve experienced for thousands of years: the Earth’s biosphere.

D: We can’t, or at least we haven’t yet, experienced anything beyond that, yes, in the sense I’m talking about: with our five senses.

J: You mean if I blindfold you, and put a glove on your hand, and cover your ears and nose and mouth, and put a drinking glass in your hand, that you can’t know that the cup is there?

D: No I can’t, directly, only inferentially.

J: But whether you think it’s there or not, doesn’t change the fact that it’s there.

D: But you’re imagining someone else corroborating your senses. If I’m the only one around, then I can’t know that it’s there and that it’s a cup.

J: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?

D: No, it doesn’t, not in the sense you’re suggesting.

J: You can’t just make things disappear depending on whether you sense them or not.

C: This is a really depressing view. Why explore space? There’s nothing new to see. It’s all been seen. If you stood up at a Republican convention and gave your speech, they’d give you a standing ovation. “No more money for NASA!”

D: Yeah, finally a philosophical basis for cutting NASA funding.

C: This is depressing.

D: There are at least two ways out of the depression, though.

C: Well, we’re not going to sprout some new sense beyond the five we have. Maybe we’ll be able to see more of the spectrum, but it’s still seeing – it’s not a new sense.

D: Well, maybe, but even if that’s true, I can think of one last chance to escape the gloom.

C: Are you going to tell me, or do I have to beg?

D: I’m going to let you stew for awhile.

C: World wrecker. Dream killer.