OPINION: Mars, Morals, and the War

That great technological strides often come from dark beginnings is a fact of history. It is well known that rocket technology, which can take humans to the Moon, Mars, and even further afield, had its moment of political awakening among the slave laborers who inhabited the dark tunnels of the Mittelwerk complex, fulfilling the intentions of their master, the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun.

Today, while Ukraine fights for its existence, advances continue to be made in space exploration. Starship, a superlative technical achievement of the company SpaceX, presages a new era when great quantities of material can be launched into space, eventually allowing for the permanent settlement of Mars.

Where does our morality sit within these stupendous developments?

Whatever our yearnings and aspirations for the future, surely we should never consider the dignity of human beings and their lives to be a dispensable sideshow, a compromise to be made, in the furtherance of our lofty plans. We cannot be starstruck by a future among the planets and yet find it difficult to obtain moral clarity on the fate of millions of Ukrainians.

Mars and morals

Von Braun is a case in point. He was a technologist extraordinaire with expansive and boundless visions of where society might go. I have a copy of his book, “The Mars Project” on my shelf at home. He imagined fleets of rocket ships landing on the Martian polar ice cap, the vanguard of an effort to settle the Red Planet. He did not only imagine things; he did the calculations and worked out the technicalities. That is what gave his designs an impressive cast.

Von Braun was so smitten with his ideas of space exploration that it seemed that any compromise on means was acceptable to reach his goals. He was a member of the Nazi party and the SS; he soon found himself with the opportunity to lead Germany’s efforts in rocket building. His V2 rocket, the first guided ballistic missile, was also the first artificial object to enter space.

Over 3,000 of the new Vergeltungswaffe (Vengeance Weapons) were built and launched, killing around 5,000 people, about half of them in London. The rockets were assembled by von Braun’s troglodyte army of thousands of slave laborers, transferred from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to the manufacturing dungeons of the Mittelwerk complex near Nordhausen after the Allies bombed Peenemünde, the Reich’s center for rocket and missile development. The rocket slaves of Mittelwerk were worked and tortured to death while von Braun dreamed of Mars.

After the war, von Braun was spirited away to the United States to work on the emerging rocket program there, now facing the growing might of Soviet interplanetary prowess. He was instrumental in the rapid acceleration of the US’s competence in rocket technology which led directly to the Apollo missions to the Moon. In light of the exigencies of the new world order and its threats, America’s pragmatic view of von Braun’s expertise is understandable. I haven’t come here to critique that.

However, the mixture of von Braun’s apparent ambivalence toward the fate of the people at the receiving end of his technological genius and the enormous potential of those same accomplishments is usually smothered in mealy-mouthed refrains. He was a ‘complicated’ person; he was an interesting but ‘controversial’ personality; he got ‘swept up’ in forces beyond his control.

Personally, I think there is nothing complicated at all, and I’ve never been impressed by the excuses.  In my view, Wernher lacked a moral compass and if a few thousand people had to be torn asunder in London so he could indulge his passion for rockets, then so be it. He seems to me the archetypal opportunist with a deficit of empathy.

Wernher was ready to bend to any regime that was necessary to achieve what he wanted, although undoubtedly there was an element of becoming ensnared in a developing set of circumstances in Nazi Germany from which deliberate escape could have cost him his life. One might be persuaded that he was merely naïve, but I think that would be generous. He understood that he would secure his place in the history of world civilization if he could accomplish what he had in mind. And indeed, he did.

Perhaps the most unintentionally egregious misapprehension of scientists and technologists is to believe that moral considerations have no place in their endeavors, that the uncertain and shifting sands of human values make them irrelevant to apparently ‘objective’ plans for human improvement. Therefore, they can be discarded.

The freedom and dignity of the individual is not more trivial than exploring the universe

Wernher von Braun is a lesson for today. It is tempting for both individuals and nations to get beguiled by grandiose panoramas at the expense of what may appear to be parochial concerns. The late Václav Havel, Czech President, poetic dissident, and subversive antagonist of the communist state once observed how a public outcry about the death of a woman caused by the collapse of badly maintained masonry was quashed because it distracted from the greater hopes of socialist progress.

Whether it is Soviet socialism, the exploration of Mars, or any other titanic design, it is all too easy for unified, powerful, and enticing utopias to lead us to look upon the fate of individuals, even entire nations and peoples, as distractions from those who seem to beckon us to greener and more promising fields. And it is not uncommon for those who do the leading to look with disdain upon those apparently petty demands for local care and attention, cries for help in day-to-day struggles.

On the contrary, it is the fleeting fights for freedom that determine the trajectory of humanity toward its most ambitious ends. They set the tone, establish what the thresholds are for the defense of our liberty, and provide the boundaries for how autocrats think they can wield their power. If we were to turn our backs on Ukrainians and others who fight for their freedom while pursuing our quest to build a civilization of space-faring pioneers, then none of us would be free, nor would the pioneers.

We cannot escape these truths by leaving Earth. People do not miraculously become angelic when they leave the gravitational bounds of the home world. Despite the optimistic expectation that looking back at oasis Earth in its diminutive form from afar will instill in people a benevolence, there is as much chance that it will encourage in some, especially the tyrannical, a nihilistic sense of humanity’s insignificance and irrelevance, an appreciation that no level of malevolence in the grander scale matters. The so-called ‘Overview Effect,’ as it is sometimes called, has seeds within that can sprout into a deeply careless maleficence.

In stretching out our arms to more closely embrace the vast inhuman violence of the universe, it is the freedom of the human spirit that is likely to become the first casualty. Leaving Earth may intensify our need to defend the individual, to protect the sanctity of the personal, not lessen it.

If we expand humanity to the stars, but in the process ignore the fate of those who battle for their dignity and freedom here, then we will have succeeded as visionaries and space settlers, but we will have failed as human beings.

Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.