On Saturday evening, 9 October 1948, Olaf Stapledon addressed the British Interplanetary Society at St Martin's School, 107 Charing Cross Road, London — Crossley's biography calls the venue "the Charing Cross Road Art School" — for two and a half hours of formal lecture and discussion. The occasion is documented at a depth unusual for this corpus. Robert Crossley (Speaking for the Future, pp. 363–65) records how the talk came about: Arthur C. Clarke, then thirty-one and in charge of the Society's speakers' programme, had never met Stapledon, but saw his boyhood idol's name on the membership list and asked whether he would address the Society on "anything you might care to say on the general subject of interplanetary travel"; Stapledon, hesitant before so technical an audience, accepted Clarke's assurance that the engineers needed a humanist's views and questions. He prepared with unusual care — a nine-page outline, two heavily revised longhand drafts, a forty-one-page typescript — and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (7:6, November 1948) printed both the address and the discussion Clarke formally opened. Within this project the lecture plays a singular role: it is the one lecture surviving as both manuscript notes and the speaker's own published text — the Rosetta stone against which the whole reconstruction method was calibrated (see the notes-beside-text edition, the deep analysis §7, and the lecture concordance). For that reason this adaptation departs from its siblings: it is adapted from Stapledon's published text of the address, not from notes, and no source-bounded reconstruction exists or is needed — the definitive treatment is his own prose, held in full in the project's reader edition. The essay below is an editorial condensation tracking the address's eight published sections; everything in quotation marks is verbatim from the published text; the JBIS discussion follows as a closing section. What is not known: how closely the spoken delivery followed the typescript, and anything of the audience beyond what the Journal and Crossley record.
An amateur among experts
It is with some hesitation that I address this very expert Society. "I feel much as a man might feel who, merely because he once wrote a children's story about a magic carpet, has undertaken to discourse to a society of aeroplane designers about the future of aviation." My training in science ended when I failed the "London Matric" in organic chemistry; I am a dabbler in many subjects, an expert in none. My only function tonight is to bring to bear on interplanetary travel light from other fields. For this is pre-eminently an age of experts, and the danger is that the race may come to consist wholly of experts, none of whom understands what his fellows are doing, all ignorant of the pattern of human life as a whole. Someone must attempt the correlating work; and unless these universal intruders combine intelligence with humility, they will make a mess of it, and be reviled by the experts in every field. So I come with humility, and with "the hardihood that leads fools to rush in where angels fear to tread" — to show how your bold and highly specialized venture fits into the total venture of man in this formidable universe.
I start with an assumption amply justified by the Society's work: that if all goes well with man, men will reach the other planets within a few decades. But all may not go well with man. "J. B. S. Haldane has suggested that it may be a law of nature that any species that gains atomic power before unifying its world-society must destroy itself. I should myself say, not merely 'before it unifies its world-society,' but 'before it disciplines itself to the true values.'"
There has probably never been so momentous a crisis as ours. Some twenty thousand generations have passed since Homo sapiens began; civilization occupies the last two hundred and forty of them, science the last twelve. We are the first generation of the atomic age. "The river of human life has reached a precipice. The cataract plunges — whither?" Three futures seem possible: speedy annihilation; a world-wide totalitarian ant-state, with every human individual reduced to a robot; or a new kind of human world in which the Aladdin's lamp of science is used wisely. And the promise of the third is not luxury and hoggish ease but a deepening and enriching of human experience — the more dangerous, more troubled, but ampler life of the species' adolescence.
If the planets are inhabited
Much depends on what man finds out there. If there are other intelligences in the solar system, there may be wars between the worlds — mankind unified, perhaps, only by the common danger, and victory followed by exploitation of the conquered races; or there may be interplanetary co-operation, which, in view of our sad inability even to unite mankind, seems extremely unlikely in our present state. Far more likely, the rival imperialisms and ideologies of this planet would extend their struggle into other worlds, tyrannizing over and ultimately destroying the native peoples.
But on the whole it is unlikely that any other world of the solar system carries a race approaching man in intelligence. The moon is almost wholly without atmosphere and water. Mercury is far too hot on one side and far too cold on the other. Venus apparently lacks oxygen. Mars, its feeble gravitation having already lost it most of its atmosphere and water, shows considerable evidence of vegetation of some sort, but certainly no convincing evidence of the artifacts of an intelligent race. The asteroids are much too small; Jupiter and Saturn too big, with quite the wrong kind of atmosphere. I cannot resist one digression into the wildest fantasy: might there not be, in the sun's turbulent outer layers, flame-like organisms living not by chemical action but on the energy of disintegrating atoms — some species of them equal or excelling man in intelligence? But man will never invade the sun in his space-ships; and within their reach, the betting is heavily against any highly developed life.
If they are empty
If mankind is still disunited when the planets open, there will no doubt be a race between rival imperialisms to annex those vast virgin territories. One of our vigorous but still culturally adolescent cousins across the Atlantic is already reported to have suggested annexing the moon as an industrial field. "Alas! Must the first flag to be planted beyond the earth's confines be the Stars and Stripes, and not the banner of a united Humanity?"
Suppose instead that mankind has become effectively united. The first task would be exploration — sheer scientific curiosity, and the lure that Darkest Africa, the poles and the unclimbed Himalayas offered the nineteenth century. The obvious further motive is economic — uranium, the rarer elements. But it would be far best for man to postpone the exploitation of alien planets until he has seriously improved terrestrial conditions: climates improved, deserts irrigated, Antarctica warmed and colonized — though, "since I am by nature something of a savage," I cannot help hoping that many regions will be preserved in their wild state.
Sooner or later, though, a united mankind will turn to the planets as possible homes. Mars is perhaps the most promising: human ingenuity with atomic power should be able to increase its atmosphere and water supply, produce a suitable vegetation, even raise the surface temperature. The moon might be rendered distressfully habitable, its artificial atmosphere forever leaking away. Venus poses a far more formidable problem — the atmosphere itself would have to be remade — but might in the long run rival and surpass the Earth as a home for intelligent beings. The greater planets offer man, as he is, no possibility at all.
Remaking man for the planets
If the mountain will not come to Mohamet, Mohamet must go to the mountain. If the planets cannot be wholly adapted to man, man might be adapted to the planets. Given sufficient biological knowledge and eugenical technique, new types of men might be bred to people them. For a part-improved Mars, the best human stock to start from might be the Tibetans, used to a cold, arid climate and a rarefied atmosphere. For Venus, the work might start with equatorial varieties of our species. On the outer planets the difficulties multiply toward absurdity: a human species small enough for that gravitation would risk losing the top-level nerve cells on which intelligence depends — unless, by very drastic eugenical operation, man were thrown into the quadruped position, his four legs strengthened, his head pushed far backward along the spine, and his nose elongated into a trunk equipped with delicate grasping instruments like fingers — two trunks, if not three; the eyes projected well forward, "otherwise Homo Jovianus would not be able to see where he was stepping."
The caution matters more than the fantasy. None of these ventures should be attempted without thorough knowledge of the probable indirect results of each proposed change, and very clear ideas as to which human characteristics might safely be sacrificed — teeth, cranial hair — and which are indispensable: good vision, high intelligence, co-operativeness, manual dexterity. "The result of thoughtless 'messing about' with human nature might be the psychological and spiritual ruin of man."
What is it all for?
This brings me to the real crux. Why not just stay put on our native planet and muck along as before? Three motives might control man's dealings with the planets. The first is luxury: use those worlds to give every human being the privileges that only millionaires have today — machines for slaves, and not only the "movies" but the "feelies" and "smellies" providing unending beatitude, in the manner foreseen by Aldous Huxley. Most of us would agree that beyond a point the increase of luxury leads to spiritual degradation. Man has risen by versatility and intelligence; in a stable paradise of perfect adaptation, intelligence would atrophy. "I conclude that if the fruit of all the devotion of the British Interplanetary Society is to be merely the debauching of mankind with the riches of other worlds, you had better all stop paying your subscriptions."
The second motive is power as an end in itself — the itch to leave a mark, any mark, so long as it is my mark. Human animals carve their initials on trees and school desks; adults, less innocently, build empires, and find some plausible excuse. It has been said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely: those who control the coming world-state — capitalist, communist or social-democratic — will be in danger of grave corruption unless they are imperturbably orientated to the true values. And if individuals can be corrupted by power, so can a whole species. Man may become obsessed with a passion merely to make a big mark on the solar system; in principle there is no difference between that aim and the urchin's who sets fire to the heath.
The third motive is to use the planets to make the "most" of man, the "best" of him. This is vague, but promising — and it forks on a question of philosophy. Is man an end in himself, or an instrument for the fulfilling of an end in some sense independent of his present nature? The questions cannot be answered with a plain yes or no. "In one sense man is an end, in another sense not an end but an instrument" — much as the physicist may say that an electron is in one sense a particle, and in another a train of waves.
Fundamental values
What is man, then? Astronomically, very small — "an inconceivably minute parasite on a minute planetary grain"; but size is in itself of no importance, and if in the minute human body the physical can be the vehicle of some degree of mind, "how great may be the mental and spiritual capacity of the whole cosmos of star-systems!" Biologically, the most developed of terrestrial organisms — he has specialized in being unspecialized — yet a very imperfect species: the bird is just about perfected for flight, but man, in his appropriate medium of intelligent action, abstract thought and creation, "is little better than a clumsy flying lizard." Psychologically, what distinguishes him is his power of discrimination and intelligence, and above all the power of standing outside himself — of being interested in things other than himself for their own sake. From that power come personality; and love — "When John really loves Jane, he does what no beast can do"; and the ideal of genuine community, which has haunted man for thousands of years.
For the highest reach of that power I use, for lack of a better term, the word "spirit" — meaning no thing or substance other than matter, still less a divine person. "I mean by 'spirit' simply a particular way of experiencing and behaving" — the life the Christians call the way of the Spirit, and the Chinese sages called simply "Tao," the Way. Strip from the saints, Western and Eastern, the intellectual trappings of their contemporary doctrines, and what confronted them in direct experience was a vision of the Way itself as supremely right. "Whatever the status of spirit in the universe, what matters is simply spirit." It is the way of life in which we strive towards full, comprehensive and true awareness of the objective universe, and toward appropriate feeling and appropriate creative action in relation to it — without prejudice in favour of oneself, one's family or nation, or even the human species. That experience needs no support from metaphysical argument or religious doctrine; and let us never forget that "if theism is a frail invention of the human intellect, so is materialism."
A commonwealth of worlds
Now I can say what, in my view, is the right use of the planets. "If any of them is inhabited by intelligent beings, then clearly man should do his utmost to adopt a relationship of genuine community with those non-human intelligences, seeking earnestly to enter into their point of view, and to co-operate with them for mutual enrichment, both economic and spiritual." And if, as is likely, the worlds are virgin, man should deal with them precisely as with his native world — neither for luxury alone, nor as a means to power for mere power's sake. "He should use them for the spirit." If new and specially adapted human or quasi-human races can be established on other worlds, each living in its appropriate way, they should develop new expressions of the spirit at present inconceivable to terrestrial man; and through the intercourse of these diverse worlds all should be spiritually enriched. The goal for the solar system is a "commonwealth of worlds": an interplanetary community of very diverse worlds, each inhabited by its characteristic "humanity," each contributing its characteristic view of the universe.
A homely analogy: the really satisfactory marriage is not one in which husband and wife are identical, but one in which each is as different as possible from the other, though each has imagination enough to enter into the other's interests. And mankind today is itself divided between two ideologies, centred on America and Russia; each, I believe, contains very important truth which the other ignores. I cannot help hoping that Western Europe, and particularly Britain — formerly champions of individual liberty, now forced by dire circumstances to plan — may yet "give the world an object lesson in planning for liberty." It is a solemn thought that our actions here and now, in this island, in this great city, may determine whether that dream of a commonwealth of worlds is to be made real or made for ever impossible.
Man and the cosmos
A postscript on a larger theme. What of the stars? Interstellar travel seems the wildest fantasy, but a far more advanced humanity might, through skilled use of atomic power, propel a planet itself on an interstellar voyage of thousands or millions of years, consuming the planet's own substance for propulsion, steering, heat and light. And in view of recent, spectacular but still very fragmentary discoveries in paranormal psychology, it is just possible that communication with remote worlds might one day be effected by a highly developed technique of telepathy — "a surmise of the wildest sort" — but today, when the very foundations of our knowledge are being transformed, not to be ignored. Wherever, in any age or any galaxy, beings exist developed up to or beyond the level precariously attained by man at his best, there the claim of the spirit, and the ideal of personality-in-community, will surely be recognized. The ultimate goal of all awakened beings must inevitably be — "how can one least misleadingly put it?" — "the fulfilment of the cosmos in cosmical awareness."
But the intelligent worlds of the cosmos may be for ever isolated from each other by the spatial immensities. Then either God himself — or the supra-temporal mind of the cosmos — embraces all the worlds in a single experience, or the goal of cosmical awareness is simply not attained. There may be no general purpose behind the cosmos at all, "which may very well be the case"; the cabbages in a garden are grown not that they may fulfil themselves in flower and fruit, but to be eaten. And if modern physics is correct, there awaits all worlds the cosmical night promised by the increase of entropy: "Thus there is a race between cosmical fulfilment and cosmical death, between the complete awakening of consciousness in the cosmos, and eternal sleep." Or perhaps all these speculations are beside the mark, conceived in ideas wholly inadequate to the cosmos — our conception of time itself is turning out to be incoherent. "So to speak, God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end." Such fantasies may have some kind of symbolic truth, just as the Bible story has symbolic truth; at the least they may help us to feel something of the mystery and immensity that surrounds our little human life. Whatever the immensities beyond our familiar sphere, the supreme concern must continue to be life here and now. "What we have to do is to make the best of this planet of ours, and perhaps of other worlds also."
The discussion
[Editorial note: the Journal printed the discussion that followed — the only known verbatim published record of Stapledon answering questions extempore. What follows condenses that record, which reports the exchanges in the third person; quoted phrases are verbatim from the published text.]
Mr R. A. Smith, proposing the vote of thanks, confessed it was hard to feel kinship with some of the weird types of "man" the speaker had invented for the colonisation of very large planets. Stapledon replied that he could accept any life-form, however alien, "if it was orientated to the fundamental values — which he considered must hold for all races at all times."
Arthur C. Clarke then formally opened the discussion, on technical points first. Life, he thought — though not intelligent life — might be more common and varied in the Solar System than generally imagined: ignoring the four giant planets, there were fourteen bodies of over a million square miles and at least two hundred asteroids of over ten thousand. "We had plenty of exploring to do!" As for telepathy: within the Solar System, clairvoyance would be required, there being no intelligence to "transmit" at the other end; Clarke had often been given vivid descriptions of Mars by mediumistic characters and hoped such reports could be collected before the first expedition — though "the Technical Committee would be most annoyed if, after it had worked for years on atomic spaceships, the clairvoyants got to Mars first." He thought the speaker had over-estimated the admittedly enormous difficulties of interstellar flight — efficient atomic step-rockets might reach over ninety per cent of the velocity of light, and the nearest stars in five or ten years, less to the crew by relativity — but did not think Man could ever take part in a Galactic culture: a solar civilisation of even a dozen worlds would strain the human mind to the utmost.
From the floor: might Venus be prepared by plant forms projected from Earth — and had terrestrial life itself come from Mars in a similar manner? A chemist decried loose talk of destroying the human race by atomic energy. What would happen if we met a race at about our own level of culture — "Which would pickle which?" Might communication fail entirely, as in Wells' Country of the Blind? Might it not be better to adapt non-human terrestrial life for the planets? And if we encountered inferior races, we must not put them in reservations, but educate them.
In reply, Stapledon said that though in this time of crisis we must put our own house in order, scientific endeavour must not be too utilitarian, but must always be opening up new frontiers. "We must also preserve a sense of humility and piety towards the unknown: of late, humanity had been guilty of hubris — pride in achievement." He had not exaggerated atomic energy: our present use of the heavy elements was only a beginning — later we might release power from the lighter ones, as the stars do. If we met a race that nearly matched us in culture, he hoped for co-operation, not the treatment we had given the aborigines; if it was superior and turned Earth into a reservation, "that would be the end of humanity, as it would lose the will to live." We should educate other races only if we were sure we were educating them up and not down to our level. Races with utterly different senses were impossible — sharing the physical universe, they must perceive and manipulate matter, and even senses outside our range we could comprehend. And non-human terrestrial species could not practicably be developed for the planets: according to Huxley, no other existing species could develop human intelligence — they were all too specialised in other directions.