Counting backwards to zero

Gather ’round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,

A man whose allegiance

Is ruled by expedience.

Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown,

“Ha, Nazi, Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,

Say rather that he’s apolitical.

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,

But some think our attitude

Should be one of gratitude,

Like the widows and cripples in old London town,

Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

You too may be a big hero,

Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero.

“In German oder English I know how to count down,

und I’m learning Chinese!” says Wernher von Braun.

— Tom Lehrer, Wernher von Braun

Earl Fowler

Mathematician and singer-songwriter-satirist extraordinaire Tom Lehrer, who will turn 97 on Wednesday, wrote one of the two most savagely accurate depictions of German-American aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun back in the Sixties.

You just read the lyrics, but check out Lehrer singing it while delicately playing the piano when you have the time. It’s on YouTube as well as The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel. Sublimely scathing scintillation.

Von Braun, who was 65 when he died in 1977, was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Adolf Hitler’s Germany as a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS. After opting to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets in 1945, he then became a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States.

Quick Wikipedia recap of Von Braun’s career:

He helped design and co-developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during World War II. The V-2 became the first artificial object to travel into space on 20 June 1944. Following the war, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip. He worked for the United States Arm on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the United States’ first space satellite, Explorer, in 1958. He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in the U.S. and beyond from 1955 to 1957.

In 1960, his group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon.

The “V” in V-2 stands for Vergeltungswaffe, which translates into English as Vengeance Weapon. It was used by the Wehrmacht to attack London and Antwerp and Liège, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel. A further 12,000 workers and concentration camp prisoners are believed to have died in forced labour on the rockets.

Hence Lehrer’s mention of the widows and cripples of old London town. Hence the enmity von Braun faced from many throughout his life in America, notwithstanding his induction into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1967 and the honour bestowed upon him in 1975 when he received the National Medal of Science.

When von Braun came out with an autobiography self-righteously titled I Aim for the Stars, Canadian-American satirist Mort Sahl suggested a delicious subtitle: Only Sometimes I Hit London.

Which brings us to the second savagely accurate depiction of von Braun, which resonates even more deeply than Lehrer’s brilliant song: Peter Sellers’s hilarious caricature of the original rocket man, in which he manoeuvres clumsily in an unnecessary wheelchair and is forever trying to repress spontaneous Elon Musk-style Nazi salutes, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. (Sellers’ satirical portrayal has also always struck me as an eerie precursor of Nixon-era Henry Kissinger avant la lettre, but that’s a topic for another day. “Mein Führer, I can walk!”)

What I didn’t realize about “the father of rocket science” and “the father of space travel,” as von Braun was alternately known by fawning admirers, is that the lifelong advocate of a mission to Mars had actually written a novel in 1949 focused on the idea titled Marsprojekt.

The German text remains unpublished so far as I can tell, but Project Mars: A Technical Tale was translated into English by Henry J. White and published in 2006 by Apogee Books (Canada). Here’s the plot synopsis glommed from Wikipedia:

Project Mars: A Technical Tale takes place in 1980, thirty years in the future (from when it was written). The world is governed by the United States of Earth, established after a devastating war in the 1970s between the Western Powers and the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its satellite states as well as Communist China and its satellites). The West won the conflict with the aid of Lunetta, an orbiting space station that dropped nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union.

Soon after peace is declared, a reflecting telescope on Lunetta confirms the existence of canals on Mars, vindicating Percival Lowell’s assertion that intelligent life exists on the planet. The President orders a mission to Mars to establish just how intelligent the Martians are and whether they pose a threat to Earth.

Lunetta is used as the base from which to launch a ten-spaceship flotilla to Mars. Materials and equipment are ferried from Earth to the space station where the spaceships are constructed and prepared. Von Braun describes in detail the ships’ life support systems and the problems caused by cosmic rays, weightlessness, and boredom. Technical details of the voyage are also given, including necessary mid-course manoeuvres. Once in orbit around Mars, three winged landing craft descend to the surface.

The explorers soon make contact with Martians, who are humanoid in appearance and live underground. They welcome the Earthlings, who quickly establish that Martians have an ancient and benevolent “super-civilization.” After establishing verbal communication, the humans learn about the Martians’ social structure and government, which is run by ten males under the leadership of “the Elon.”

Now where have we heard that name before? I think it’s gonna be Elon, long time till touchdown brings them ’round again to find he’s not the man they think he is at Mar-a-LagX. But back to Project Mars:

The visitors witness technology far superior to their own, including underground transport and organ transplants. They also learn Martian views on ethics, morality, and the responsible use of technology.

Earth, pleased with developments on Mars, decides to establish formal diplomatic relations with it. Earth invites three Martians to accompany the explorers on their trip home. After the humans convert their ships so they can return to their mother ships in orbit, the explorers and their three Martian guests head to Earth.

OK, so not a thrilling potboiler. So far as style and plot development go, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke could breathe easy. But to learn a little more about our pal Elon, who does his job five days a week knowing full well that Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your 14 kids (in fact, it’s cold as hell), take a quick dip into the novel itself:

The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.

In case you’re a little rusty on Tribe of Zebulun trivia from the Torah or the biblical Book of Judges, Elon served as a judge among the ancient Israelites for 10 years. Musk was named after him. Biblical scholars think “Elon” might have been the name of a clan rather than a person, but then, we’re not sure the current model is entirely human either.

Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for The Irish Times, picks up the von Braun thread in a recent piece (“From Comedy to Brutality”) in The New York Review of Books:

In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”

Ah, the Übermensch. The overman, the superman — in the current context, possibly melded with artificial intelligence. Because ordinary human beings are riffraff, undesirables, scum.

Übermenschness is the envisioned masturbatory destiny of superior human beings — the master race — in a Nerd Incel Rapture We Are The Borg Phantasia, as the private school gotch-pull targets of yesteryear slip into the surly bonds of Mars and touch the face of the Cybergod while the dregs of society — everybody else, but especially the gotch-pullers and those girls in Grade 7 who laughed at them — are left to flail and drown in the waters of an earthly oblivion. Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Vivian.

The modelling on Christian eschatology is indisputable, only this time the techno-nerds of Silicon Valley are the chosen elite at the End Times, the Last Judgment, zero hour, nine a.m. As historian of science James Gleick asked provocatively in an essay titled “The Prophet Business” in the previous issue of The NYRB, “Why worry about earthly problems like climate change and economic inequality when superhumans are about to achieve immortal transcendence?”

Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Whoever wrote 1 Thessalonians 4:17 said that.

And I’m floating in a most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today. Anyone who has ever done enough ketamine at night, as Musk does to treat his depression, has said that.

Take off, eh! A hoser said that. Cooo, loo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coooo!

“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss,” Nietzsche proclaimed to the libertarian making-model-airplanes-in-the-basement and plotting- revenge-on-their-enemies-for-not-recognizing-their-magnificence-funny-haircut-notwithstanding Ayn Rand demographic. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

Vanity of vanities vanity of vanities! All is vanity, said The Preacher.

What goes up must come down, said Isaac Newton.

These are the voyages of the Starship Despotize. I said that.

In his book A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present, which came out in December, historian Glenn Adamson described the “singularity” to which the world is hurtling in the wake of the frantic, damn-the-torpedoes competition between China and the West to come out ahead in the artificial intelligence sweepstakes.

Singularity, as popularized by sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge in the mid-1990s, “is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. … The passing of humankind from centre stage.” The point at which AI becomes self-aware and self-sustaining.

Explains Adamson, who is more skeptical of the inevitability of this eventuality than such early AI developers as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Geoffrey Hinton:

The Singularity is like an astronomical black hole, swallowing all possibility of future speculation into its gravitational field. When we are surpassed by AIs, the veil will descend … and the machines will sit in judgment over us, new Gods that we ourselves have enthroned.

Vinge, who died last year, forecast the Singularity to occur somewhere between 2005 and 2030.

In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil projected the date “representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability — as 2045.”

Kurzweil can’t wait to see humanity transcended, given that “we are far from optimal, especially with regard to thinking.”

Having totted up the odds and hearing the bugler in the distance practising taps, Hinton has warned repeatedly that there is a “10 to 20 per cent” chance that the rapid evolution of AI will lead to human extinction within the next three decades.

Knowing that he bears some of the responsibility for this potential armageddon, Hinton is one of the few people on the planet who knows in his bones how J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atomic bomb, must have felt when he quoted ominously from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

Forming my own primitive concept of the AI overman, I somehow can’t get past writer John Gregory Dunne’s bleak image of an approaching tornado in his novel Nothing Lost: “In the far distance, black and then milky when the sun caught it, moving like a huge reticulated vertical snake.”

Be still, our beating carbon-unit hearts. It’s lonely out in space on such a timeless flight. Place your seatbacks and tray tables in their upright positions and prepare to break on through to the other side. I’m going to be high as a kite by then.

But for now, as a chilling foretaste of what it will be like to answer to a querulous, serpentine man-child-machine overlord, we give you: Elon the Great and Powerful.

“He has no feelings, Jim, he’s a machine!” Bones said that. “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer.”

Elon Musk, the authorized biography on the world’s richest man written by Walter Isaacson and published in 2023, won’t be coming soon as a major motion picture starring Dr. Evil with appropriate hair grafts: Mr. Misdeeds Goes to Town on Washington. Tant pis. But the book itself is illuminating in a most peculiar way.

DeepMind is the artificial intelligence research lab owned by Google’s parent holding company, Alphabet Inc. Isaacson quotes DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis as saying that during a visit he made to Musk’s SpaceX factory after the two met in 2012, the man now in charge of dismantling the American government explained that “his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse.”

O’Toole again:

The preserved consciousness would, of course, be that of elite men like himself — as Strangelove explains of the underground world to which the U.S. president and his highest officials, along with civilians selected for their “necessary skills,” will escape when nuclear war begins. “Naturally, they would breed prodigiously,” aided by the provision of ten women (selected for their sexual attractiveness) for every man. As a bonus, “there would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!”

All of this may be insane, but it is a necessary insanity. How else is it possible for (U.S. President Donald) Trump and his followers to reconcile his seeming determination to speed up climate collapse with his declaration of a new golden age? In his inaugural address, Trump evoked climate-driven disasters in North Carolina and Los Angeles, showing special sympathy for members of the elite who had been victims of fires “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting.” Yet he simultaneously promised to extract “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth” and stop the transition to a carbon-free economy.

Nonetheless, “the future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.” The last time we heard this was in Boris Johnson’s inaugural speech as British prime minister in July 2019: “We will look back on this period, this extraordinary period, as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.” That prophecy has not worn well, and even at the time it seemed ludicrous. But it is an obligatory form of nonsense in contemporary reactionary discourse. It offers the escapist promise of a future that does not match any imaginable version of the burning world we actually inhabit.

It also explains why a scientific illiterate like Trump, who could give a toss about space travel or knowing anything at all with no obvious benefit to him, would have pledged in January that “we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

After all, if we don’t get there first, our enemies will. Do unto others before they do unto you. The same logic that led to the development of sharper stones and pointy sticks, bronze breastplates in ancient Greece, two-wheeled war chariots, gunpowder, floating gun platforms for mastery of the sea, Spitfires and Messerschmitts and nuclear weapons is now at work in artificial intelligence heedlessness and the retooled Space Race to put astronauts on Mars via a base on the moon.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. (Unless there is an end to humanity by 2045. In the next three decades, tops.) Amen.

If you go back and listen to Lehrer’s trenchant song about von Braun, which he performed a couple of years before Neil Armstrong plonked down that first momentous footprint on the moon, you’re bound to be struck by the irony of the intro:

And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know-how, that’s what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!

It makes me think about something novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote in an essay a week before the moon landing in The New York Times Magazine titled “Excelsior! We’re Going to the Moon! Excelsior!”

Oracular as ever.

The footprint could mean, if we let it, that Earthlings have done something unbelievably difficult and beautiful which the Creator, for Its own reasons, wanted Earthlings to do.

Footprint.

But that footprint will be profaned in America at once by advertising. Many profit-making corporations will congratulate themselves and their products in its name. It will come to represent, even to children, one more schlock merchandising scheme.

Merchandising scheme.

And it may be a better footprint, actually, than that. It might really be sacred. “Step by step,” the old proverb says, “one goes a long way.” Maybe the Creator really does want us to travel a lot more than we have travelled so far. And maybe It really does want our nervous systems to become fancier all the time. Excelsior.

Excelsior.

I prefer to think not, though, for this simple-minded reason: Earthlings who have felt that the Creator clearly wanted this or that have almost always been pigheaded and cruel. You bet.

Oracular.

This is how von Braun explained his decision to surrender to a private from the U.S. 44th Infantry Division 11 months after D-Day instead of the fast-approaching Soviet Army when it was obvious that Germany had lost the war:

I myself and everybody you see here decided to go west. And I think our decision was not one of expediency, but a moral decision. We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.

So not a matter of allegiance rhyming with expedience then. Rather, this is what the Creator would have wanted. Only a holy people guided by the Bible should have the capacity to blow their godless commie enemies to Kingdom Come. Some say our attitude should be one of gratitude.

You bet.

But even if von Braun had lived long enough to witness the end of the post-war Pax Americana here in the gloaming, as the United States loses touch with reality and the rest of planet Earth under the co-presidency of The (Nazi, Schmazi) Ketamine Kid and His (All the Science, I Don’t Understand) MAGA-sty, there’s no reason to believe that such a pious man would be burning up his fuse up there alone. Don’t say that he’s hypocritical. Say rather that he’s apolitical.

Ground Control to Lehrer, Tom:

Und I’m learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun.

Does prescient rhyme with expedient?

You bet.