The Plutocrat Who Fell to Earth

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

There's been a bit of buzz, lately, on the intertubz, of what a prophet Carl Sagan was, especially in a certain passage of a book he'd published just before his untimely death. In The Demon-Haunted World, the star of Cosmos, the man who would share a rare position, that of being a physicist on a par with Stephen Hawking as the world's greatest living examples of the field, wrote,

     “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

    Actually, that had begun making the horrified nostalgia rounds since 2017, when Trump made his way into the White House like viscous saliva oozing down a bathroom sink drain. And what Sagan supposedly prophesied was true. Actually, by 1994-5, when Dr. Sagan had written his final book, much of what he'd written was already coming true. Ironically, the year Sagan had delivered the manuscript to his literary agent to deliver to his publisher, Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie were driving from New York to Seattle to launch a little bookselling startup called Amazon.

   Virtually everything Sagan had written in that oft-cherry-picked paragraph is true now and had already begun coming true. Humans are a silly, superstitious lot, always just a little less prone to accept science and more prone to read the tea leaves and throw the chicken bones. Do the Tarot cards say I should get the J&J vaccine or leave my fate in the hands of a sky wizard I've never seen? By 1995, billionaires already owned nearly the entire planet and everything on it and in it.

     And they wanted more.

    And into this sordid tale of misplaced and mistimed cynicism (which is the story of my life), briefly floats the little body of Jeff Bezos.

   But I'm not done with Dr. Sagan, just yet. Far from it. Because while trends in Sagan's lifetime certainly held and were ossified into history, they hardly rise to the level of Nostradamusian prophecy. It's one thing to anticipate Hitler almost by name several centuries in the past. It's another thing entirely to extrapolate probable futures from existing trends. This is what Sagan did in The Demon-Haunted World.

     Because what I think is a better example of Carl's clairvoyance was his anticipation of the aforementioned Jeff Bezos.

 

To Boldly Go Where 580 Have Gone Before

 

Richard Branson, of course, was number 580. He beat Jazzy Jeff to space by nine days. This resulted in a brief but still-puerile online pissing match between the battling billionaires' camps as to which standard actually defined the Kármán line. (Virtually every international space agency states 62 miles is the edge of the Kármán line, or the beginning of space, with the US being, typically, the world's holdout, claiming a mere 50 miles of elevation defines the edge of space. Both altitudes, however, result in zero g, or no gravity, so you be the judge.)

    Branson went up about 53 miles. Bezos, about 62. Ho hum. 580 people had reached similar or higher altitudes and others, starting six decades ago when Yuri Gargarin became the first man launched into space in 1961. In 11 years, we'd sent scores of astronauts, 12 a half a million miles to and back from the moon and, during the long space shuttle project and the ISS, scores more. These billionaires' rocket jockeying only served to show, as the Shuttle missions had, that the more time goes by, the more reluctant we are to leave earth's orbit. Humans have become the middle aged son who went out on his own for a while, didn't like it, and now never leaves Mom's house, the unblossomed basement dwellers of the Milky Way.

    Sending a couple of corporate cowboys proved absolutely nothing except confirm for the umpteenth time how much money they can blow in an astonishingly brief period of time with the least amount to show for it while a quarter of the human race has no access to potable water. But Branson, on his return, at least showed some humility and didn't make it a spectacle all about himself. Bezos, showing a smidgen of PR savvy if not that for optics, put on an ill-fitting cowboy hat and gave away $200,000,000 to prove he wasn't the plutocrat who fell to earth.

    But give Dr. Sagan credit for one thing, if nothing else. And that was in anticipating in his only novel, Contact, a billionaire, played in the film version by the late John Hurt, spending his twilight years in outer space while still pulling strings from high above. Sagan called it all the way down to the bald-head.

    The premise itself is fairly simple: Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jody Foster) and her fellow radio astronomers finally receive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. But the government lacks the funds, technology, guts and vision to send Ellie where she needs to go to get the answers she needs. Enter eccentric billionaire SR Hadden.

    Perhaps without realizing it (or perhaps doing it on purpose), Sagan produces what is literally a deus et machina in the form of a super sophisticated space ship built by a guy who's also really really super rich. Like, Jeff Bezos rich. This trope, of the billionaire who swoops in out of nowhere to save the day and the hapless human race had been done to death since Batman then Green Arrow then Iron Man then... Well, you get it.

   But the recent stunts by Branson and Bezos were just shameless chest piece wearing by a couple of senior citizens only timidly poking their noses into the very edge of the space already long since explored decades ago by far braver men and women who flew these vehicles that didn't benefit from 21st century aerospace technology and six decades of trial and error.

   One thing on which we can fault the good Doctor Sagan: While Bezos was allowed to reenter earth (perhaps because he had three innocent souls with him) so he could then hastily rig a charitable event by giving away $200,000,000, which is probably half his annual scalp wax budget, to grab a few more minutes of limelight, SR Hadden at least had the courtesy to die in space.