The Puget Sound Enterprise Journal is trying on the vivid aspect of issues. Sure, Seattle’s tech sector shrank not too lengthy after the pandemic ended (or, extra exactly, was normalized—it’s nonetheless with us, nonetheless killing a number of folks), however the house business, which has its roots in Boeing’s former domination of the area’s financial system, is increasing because of the investments by two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The previous, who runs SpaceX, “doubled [his] Puget Sound-area workforce to roughly 2,000 workers within the final yr.” The latter, Bezos’s Blue Origin, “noticed its Seattle-area workforce climb by greater than 300 workers over the previous yr.” Bezos additionally owns Undertaking Kuiper, a subsidiary of Amazon that plans to compete straight with Musk’s world-famous Starlink by launching a complete of “3,236 low-Earth orbit web satellites by mid-2029.” Starlink presently has 6,078 satellites in house.
And so that is what has grow to be of our stars: business initiatives that may ultimately obscure Earth-based scientific observations of actual stars, the galaxies they kind, and the universe they wander by way of from “distant eons to infinitely distant futures.”
Seattle’s 1962 Century 21 Exposition, which gave town its solely iconic constructing, the House Needle, promoted the area past our environment in phrases that owed their inspiration to a cultural motion we nonetheless confusedly name the Enlightenment. Recall JFK’s 1962 speech at Rice College. Additionally recall its most memorable second:
A few years in the past the good British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was requested why did he need to climb it. He mentioned, “As a result of it’s there.”
Effectively, house is there, and we’ll climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for information and peace are there. And, due to this fact, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on essentially the most hazardous and harmful and best journey on which man has ever embarked.
This enlightened feeling of surprise, which was with us as late as 1998, because the pattern on the opening of Gang Starr’s observe “Above the Clouds” attests, is gone in our post-neoliberal age of the billionaires. House is now about “market potential.” In actual fact, science as a globalizing cultural challenge has by no means been concerning the surprise expressed by sure religions and philosophies within the scattered historical past earlier than the seventeenth century. It started (and can finish) with funding alternatives whose returns required not solely the uniformity of time however its domination over house.
The interval wherein Kennedy delivered his well-known house speech, and through which the House Needle was constructed, the Chilly Struggle, obscured the financial basis of modernized technological and scientific improvement. It offered as an alternative a noble (or humanistic) race between the US and the USSR. One or the opposite was to grow to be, because the thinker Susan Buck-Morss put it in her 2000 e-book Dreamworld and Disaster, “the reputable inheritor” of the Enlightenment’s defining political second, the French Revolution. Which might be the perfect measure of “man”? The measure of progress, a social idea that obsessed the Victorians? The Eagle or the Bear?
In brief, would the dream of complete human emancipation be achieved by capitalism (in its state kind)? Or Socialism (additionally in its state kind—the world has but to experiment with anarcho-socialism)? The latter would lose this legitimacy race as a result of it was extra confused concerning the root and performance of the enlightenment than the previous. The identical confusion can also be present in Ellen Meiksins Wooden’s 2002 e-book The Origin of Capitalism. She incorrectly believed that “the Enlightenment challenge [was] distinctly non-capitalist” and that a lot of its options “had been [instead] rooted in non-capitalist social property relations.” And so, for Wooden, as with state socialism, rationalization (additionally known as modernization), existed earlier than each society was unified by Newtonian time, the time of labor, the time of paying payments, the time of holidays, the time training, the time of retirement, the time of studying wills, the time now organized by clocks synchronized by satellites to forestall the minute leakages described by Einsteinian relativity.
It’s no accident that Sir Issac Newton was additionally Grasp of the Royal Mint, the grasp of British cash, a proven fact that value numerous counterfeiters their lives. Neither is it an accident that the person who gave us essentially the most highly effective idea of time and house, particular relativity, spent a great a part of his life as a patent clerk. Nor should we discover it unusual and even absurd that essentially the most rewarding chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Ithaca,” strikes between the cosmic and the business with nice ease. The 2 can’t be separated. Measuring financial exercise and the space of stars are straight associated. The accounting depth (or mania) of the previous, made the latter inevitable. How a lot did you spend immediately? How vivid is the moon tonight? How lengthy does it take for a ship to cross the ocean; how lengthy does it take for gentle to reach from that galaxy? What are the belongings in your mom’s will? What’s the composition of water? That is the stuff of “Ithaca.”
All that house will ever be is all that the current mayor of Everett, Cassie Franklin, may say about it: “I’m thrilled to welcome Amazon’s new Undertaking Kuiper facility to Everett. This funding not solely strengthens our area’s repute as a hub for [space] innovation but in addition creates invaluable job alternatives for our residents.”
