(But how my mind builds and destroys you over and over.)
On January 27, 1967, two years after his space walk, Edward White died in a fire on Launch Complex 34 at the Cape Canaveral Air Station. He had entered Apollo 1 for a simulated countdown along with Command Pilot Gus Grissom and Pilot Roger Chaffee when the fire broke out.
Years later White’s wife took her own life.
(How strange to see the Earth from the sky and then come back… to float in space like that, barely tethered, Earth a modest uncrowned thing. “So peaceful and so fragile,” one said of it. The size of a marble or a pearl “hanging delicately,” said another. And another: “But I did not see the Great Wall.”)
Still, there are many practicalities to be addressed “as you would have known even from your rudimentary laboratory). “It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize one’s safety factor’s been determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract,” the astronaut Alan Shepard pointed out.
And Neil Armstrong spoke of a feeling that was “complex, unforgiving.”
Lyndon Johnson said, “It’s too bad, but the way the American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it away.”
(But what would it mean to take advantage?)
(And what of how small, and of how fragile …)
(Over and over the word fragile describing this world that has taught me such resistance, the hard of it and brutal, and yet, still—)
Numerous inventions made for space have been adapted by private industry, resulting in studless snow tires, scratchproof eyeglasses (White needed to shield his eyes from the extreme glare of sunlight), the five-year flashlight and cordless power tools.
The U.S. Space Walk of Fame Foundation was formed in the 1990s as a “major component of a redevelopment master plan designed for Titusville’s urban waterfront.” There you can “visit the gift shop at the museum and treat yourself, a friend or a relative to a truly unique space-related gift.”
(When Leonov and White floated in space they didn’t want to come back. They couldn’t have known this beforehand. What is a footstep then, after that, and the feeling of Earth—so fragile, so small—beneath a shoe, or the thin tether of breath, or a name, or a day, a boundary, a theory, a bond—)
Notes on an Interview with Dr. Anne Foerst
Q. “What exactly do people do at this laboratory?”
A. “We are trying to build robots that are social and embodied.”
(As if I’m an abbreviation of something else, something I can’t know. I look out over this frozen sea and can’t tell where land begins, if there is land. Shore is a distant idea. In this frozen world I can’t know which step will take me from land to sea or back again. What appears as land is instead a floating ice shelf. I raise my arm, I open my eyes on so much whiteness, and cannot…)
Q. “Why is a theologian here in this particular laboratory?”
A. “When you build a humanoid you must think about the cultural and spiritual dimensions. What do you build into them? And what are the ethics here? Why should I treat someone else like a human, with dignity, when it is just a mechanistic thing? Yet I can benefit from doing just that.
One question we often discuss: What will happen when robots cross a threshold of development where you can’t switch them off anymore? When does a creature deserve to be treated as intrinsically valuable?”
(Those first weeks in the forest I lay on leaf-moist ground, my voice different from the birds’, and this difference confused me. I didn’t know what I was. Yet I’d glimpsed your hands before you fled, knew mine looked like yours. I couldn’t know then how you’d made me out of pieces of dead things, discarded things—only sensed I was something embodied whose one clear task was to continue to exist. Back then I had no words for what I felt and yet I felt that. What’s resemblance? What does it mean to belong or not belong? Isn’t resemblance or its lack often misleading, more complex, subtle, tricky, than we think? I look out on this stark sky, this white land the color of loneliness, or—)
Q. “When do you think a robot should be treated as intrinsically valuable?”
A. “Those who build it must decide, since they won’t be blinded by fears of the seemingly human qualities of the machines.