In the salad days of the Mercury program, NASA launched a chimpanzee into space. His name was Ham and he made it back just fine and for a short while was a minor national celebrity – the First Ape in Space.
The First Man in Space was Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, whom history also remembers as the First Communist in Space.
Which is unfortunate.
But as we celebrate this year’s semiquincentennial, there is absolutely no arguing who had the first primate in space. Or that everyone up there, man and chimp, went off with large and rather rude rectal thermometers in place!
Why think of Ham?
Well, the Artemis mission was great. And NASA stories make me think of Tom Wolfe and The Right Stuff – which is where I first read about Ham and the thermometers.
But also Jim Banks.
When NASA scientists were training Ham, they conditioned him using Pavlovian methods. As a reward for good work, Ham received banana pellets. As punishment for bad work, electric shocks through his feet.
Senator Banks, naval reservist, looks into a camera on Day 96 of the Iran War and says, “We have all of the leverage and the power.”
Off camera, a sleeve of banana-flavored Pez is quietly added to his shiniest dispenser.
Todd Young, Annapolis graduate and Marine Corps officer, does not mention the Iran War in constituent emails. Or Medicaid cuts, or brute gerrymanders in a bottom-five voter suppression state.
Senator Young’s feet feel just fine.
Everybody is sealed up tight inside the capsule.
Thermometers are secure and all systems go, Sir!
***
About a year before the first trip to the moon, Stanley Kubrick released his bleak and wondrous 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film about many things but disturbingly soothsaying about man, machine and artificial intelligence.
Asked about his exquisite high-function, murderous supercomputer HAL 9000 explains, “No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information … I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
This was science fiction but also a foreseeable outcome – for Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke – in 1968.
The main human character in the movie, Dr. Dave Bowman, says of HAL: “Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of course, he’s programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him.”
OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently told a room full of tech speculators: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
Altman’s ChatGPT was trained on a universe of stolen creative works – including films like 2001 and books like The Right Stuff.
In the movie, Dave Bowman kills the machine. In Sam Altman’s story, the machine blows our brains out.
***
My son and I just finished reading Charlotte’s Web again – a favorite of his and my very favorite book from childhood. A story of friendship, love, loss and subterfuge.
And weird formalism!
Charlotte’s antique vocabulary and stiff cadences, first published in the early 1950s, evoke a one-room schoolmarm from a much earlier time. Perhaps the youth of author E.B. White, born 1899.
I grew up with people still in touch with that era, not far removed, and absorbed their grammar rules, their habits of reading and their interest in writers and in language as a medium of thought and expression.
As a source of freedom and transcendence.
I’m not remotely done with that. Maybe you aren’t either.
After all, what’s a life, anyway?
