starflight and the automobile

if you've been following my work recently, it should come as no surprise that i've been doing a lot of thinking lately about space and space travel, and the ways we view  that through a human lens. when working on projects which deal with space and worlds other than our own, i think it's useful to examine the unquestioned biases in science fiction. today i wrote a bit about one particular subtopic: space travel, and the subjectivity of some of the ways it's represented.

you can read the full text below, or if you prefer you can find a less cluttered, offsite version here.

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when trying to understand the universe around us, our first impulse is invariably to see it in our image. people do this whether they choose to or not. we are, after all, inhabitants of a particular planet, a specific culture, a body. we mold that which we perceive to fit our lived experiences. we create that which resolates with us emotionally, intellectually. one's own subjective compass, whether acknowledged or not, is a powerful guiding force.in conceptualizing space travel, humans are strongly influenced by this type of subjectivity.the process of space travel is one of congress with an inhuman frame of reference. the substrate is physically alien: radiation, vacuum, microgravity. human travelers face blindness from acceleration, radiation sickness, muscular atrophy, and a host of other physical challenges. the scales involved in space travel, too, are alien. imagine making a trip around the earth as a point of reference. this is not so far. it is a distance on a human scale. jupiter, however, is about 10 times as far around as the earth. though not an inconceivable distance, it would be a rather long walk. the sun, in turn, is about 10 times as far around as jupiter. this is verging on an inhuman distance. and if you wanted to travel to, let us say, the centauri system, you would need to go nearly 10 million times that distance. and this is but the very nearest star system.in these early days of chemical propulsion (i.e. the 20th century through the present), travelling distances like those between worlds is a complicated affair. to attain the necessary velocities, one must devise complicated, delicate paths through the gravitational system- often using close passes with the sun or other bodies to gravitationally borrow energy. for instance, in order to get to saturn the cassini spacecraft needed to first pass by venus (twice), then the earth, and then jupiter, borrowing energy from each in series. only then could it arrive at the velocity necessary to arrive at saturn. trajectories like this are not made, they are found. one must wait for the planets to reach the proper alignment. such launch windows occur only at intervals of months or years. space travel is a period of planning followed by a long fall down a delicate, preordained path.the topology of outer space bears little resemblance to that of the terrestrial spaces we are familiar with. in our efforts to imagine space travel, we ground it in the human frame of reference. in western science fiction, we often map the spacecraft to more familiar vehicles such as military aircraft or the automobile. the automobile is perhaps the more noteworthy. without the automobile, the topology of the human world resembles more closely that of the stars. it consists of loose constellations of towns and cities. travel is centralized, methodical, expensive, preplanned. in the united states particularly, the automobile rose in a way which supplanted other modes of transportation. as the new networks of high speed roads grew, they telescoped the distances between the formerly distant towns and cities, completely changing the topology of the country.trains and other centralized forms of public transit were deemphasized, replaced (if you had the money) with the car. having at one's personal disposal a machine capable of visiting far flung places became a point of pride, almost a cultural necessity. the new mode of transportation was equated with independence, power, adventure. it is little surprise that popular representations of spaceflight in the united states engage so enthusiastically in generalizing this individualistic compression of space from the terrestrial to the universal scale. the alien substrate is made more human. to engage with the alien, we must view it through a subjective, human lens. as space is subjectively distorted, so are spacecraft. instances of a particular sort of small, relatable spacecraft abound in popular culture in the west, particularly in the united states. prominent examples include buck rogers, UFO sightings, star wars. with little forethought, one climbs into such a spacecraft and travels to any nearby star system, arriving minutes or hours later. the vocabulary is in all ways familiar. though space themed, it is as a procedure not dissimilar to driving to the store to get some orange juice. it is a comfortable elision.to more specifically differentiate such vehicles from actual spacecraft, let us detail their typical physical construction. they are in all respects more like a car or an aeroplane than a rocket. they are self-contained, single stage vehicles. they are often streamlined (even those which never touch an atmosphere). their design language is often pointed, serrated, predatory. they are horizontal when at rest, with a defined front end which faces toward the horizon, not the stars. they have a driver's seat or a cockpit, with cushioned seats and often a recognizable steering wheel or aircraft-style joystick. they are decorated like familiar vehicles, with carlike paint jobs above, and an exposed, mechanical underside. these vehicles are often privately owned or at least controlled by individuals, and their operators are often portrayed in a way which closely parallels an account of a race car driver or fighter ace.one can weave fantastic explanations which justify this form factor. one can speculate about new technologies which render it reasonable, inevitable. but this is ex post facto. the underlying emotional truth is that the writer is a being on a particular planet, within a culture, within a body. that they are reaching for the alien through the familiar. the subjective is the motive force, and speaks loudly, often more so than any fiction built to edify it.i think the question to ask here is not how this portrayal of starflight is wrong, but what this means about us, and what choices recognizing the subjectivity of this view offers us. in art, to choose this particular portrayal is by no means a neutral act. it strongly emphasizes individuality, is non-neutrally tied to western individualism, to the mythos of the automobile, to exceptionalism, to military fetishism. if a creator decides to portray this type of starflight in a work, it should not be adopted lightly, without thought for its cultural trappings.