Space travel equals the modern technological metanarrative, a big picture view of the universe, stories that give purpose and hope for our lives. From early modern times space travel was hailed as the destiny of humanity, usually located somewhere on the Moon.[1] Technology ends in space. In the stars we will transcend ourselves and become greater beings−immortal robot-gods or a cyborg; a creature designed to surmount biological limits space imposes on humanity. The modern view of space coopts the longing for immortality once provided by religion, myth and philosophy. It gives us a new mythology centered in the astronauts, the planets and the rocket. Images of space flight are meant to enthrall us with the promise of exploration. Space culture believes humanity’s future lies in the space travel and that the earth will self-destruct when the sun burns out; therefore it is imperative that we reach further out for survival’s sake. Hypothetically, the universe itself will die of a heath death making space exploration in the last analysis futile.
The metanarratives give an overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides an imperative or direction for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences. Traditional religions provide stories that deliver a metanarrative about how we should live our lives. Christianity moves toward the kingdom of God following a missionary imperative believing that the end will come when once the world is evangelized. Marxism ends in a class utopia at the end of history. The stories of these belief systems focus a round self-perpetuation. An imperative means something that we must absolutely accomplish in history. Americans must inherit the land as part of their Manifest Destiny. Rome must rule the world extending itself without limit throughout space and time. The Japanese and Chinese imperial imperative says, just as there is only one sun in the sky, so there can only be one emperor on earth, the Pax Britannia, the Roman Pax and the American Pax. The higher cause becomes a force of nature sweeping all in its path. This becomes the very purpose and guiding light to the future. Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset explained that “An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. Because to live means to have something definite to do−a mission to fulfill−and in the measure we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty . . . Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, to progress, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial . . . to live is to be directed toward something, to progress toward a goal . . . it is something to which I put my life and which consequentially is outside of it, beyond it.”[2]
The Red-Hot Chile Peppers sing, “Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement.”[3] These lyrics suggest the contemporary dream of infinite space exploration is a perceptual social construction programmed into the imagination via media magic. Star Trek (1966-Present) series reflect the present generation’s imagined future; its fears and hopes in a computer age, collective dreams or nightmares projected back to the future of the latter half of the twenty-first century. The Enterprise was host to a giant artificial intelligence that controlled the ship and provided life support to its members; other movies, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Terminator (1984-present) and The Matrix (1999-present) take a different tack through depicting computers that have evolved into consciousness and turned on their creator. The idea of progress always has a regressive side. Once it reaches a plateau, it can only recede. Freud and Jung taught us to think in images, pictures and archetypes. These movies, along with technocritical analysis, such as Ellul, Marcel and Baudrillard and the vision of Frankenstein’s Monster are a warning from the future; thus far and no further. Establish limits to technological growth, apply standards that restrict its complete expansion and inevitable dissolution. This may not even be a viable option, at this point in history, in which case, we must abolish nuclear weapons and space flight immediately. Stop the space race before actions become irretrievable and inevitable. We are already dependent on satellites, computers, infrastructure, shipping and the like to support our way of life. These are all delicate technologies, if anything were to go seriously wrong we will be reduced to the Stone Age. Already, before the ink is even dry on the paper, I just survived the worst IT Outage in history (July 19, 2024). My computer was taken over by an outside entity that refused to give me access. I inserted my security pin and it said pin not accepted. My system was down until I rebooted the whole thing and released the demon. Days later people are still experiencing outage and digital disruption. Was this a cyber-attack or a simple glitch in the system? In any case it proves how fragile things really are.
Fragility appears mild. I would say, “extinction!” Unfettered returns will lead to the burnout of the earth. Technology simply consumes us and becomes impossible to stop. The Machine has no mind of its own, unless it develops one, it does not know its own limits; it does not know when to stop. We must tell it to stop or face self-eradication. It will push beyond the breaking point, even when it produces more harm than good. Machines inherently run down until they run out of fuel. War may be supporting technology’s insatiable appetite for gasoline, resources, forest, water and people or at least, the war against nature, if not each other. War drives technological growth, or even if we say, growth feeds war, we are still left with inevitable progress, which does not end well. Technology and war have a symbiotic relationship. The one begets the other until exhaustion results. Earth reduced to a level of Slinky-Dink or total carbon freezing, unable to grow, like ants discovered in Baltic amber fossilized sixty million years ago. They remain unchanged, forever the same, dead! History will be frozen by the law of progress which says, acceleration must reach a highpoint before regressing. There is no such animal as unlimited technological returns. We find no final progress in limited systems. Acceleration has a stopping point, the faster we move the closer we get to it. Beyond that view it is impossible to see.
Today’s obsession with the future change started abruptly 200 years ago when the Industrial Revolution introduced an imaginative new awareness that the future will be better than the present by reason of technological innovation and progress that, “transformed the condition of human life throughout the planet. The everyday experiences of social change and industrial development has become so much part of our general thinking that we are apt to forget the extraordinary novelty seeking to discern the shape of things to come. The frequent projections of tomorrow’s world in films and television programs hide the fact that for most of human history the image of the future has been a blank.”[4]
Technological progress has allowed contemporary times to choose from any array of potential futures. Futurist John McHale explains that following the Industrial Revolution, there was “a growing realization that man’s future may be literally what he chooses to make it, and that the range of choice and degree of conscious control, which he may exercise in determining his future are unprecedented.”[5] Futurist Victor Ferkiss stated, “humanity is on the threshold of self-transfiguration, of attaining new powers over itself and its environment that can alter its nature fundamentally as walking upright or the use of tools . . . [through] modern technology . . . giving man almost infinite power to change his world and himself.”[6] Leading Futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel asserted that a major focus essential to human mastery of technological progress is having its choice of futures. We must take the initiative to create whatever we want, rather than resigning to inevitable fate. “Finding out what we want should become a major object of attention . . . there is a vast difference between letting things occur under the impact of technological advances and choosing the changes we want to bring about by our technological means.”[7] Emmanuel Mesthene , former Director of the Harvard Program in Science and Technology, affirmed similarly, that “We have now, or know how to acquire , the technical ability to do very nearly anything we want.”[8] Technology enables us to stagger the population growth, reduce pollution, stop ecological decay, find alternative energy sources, produce wealth, save endangered species, cure poverty and disease, eradicate inequality and end war, “and make the world a far better place in which to live,” and yet according to Professor Ferkiss, “we do not do so.”[9] Popular belief asserts that technology can solve most of the world’s problems if we have the will to do so. In the 1960’s President Kennedy committed to win the Space Race and cure poverty at the same time. The first promise was easy to fulfill, the world is still waiting for the second.
Next to putting nuclear weapons into space or not, the second great priority, for the twenty-first century concerns the existence of extraterrestrial life on Mars. This represents science’s holy-grail. This is what they are digging and looking for. Here we see how space exploration becomes its final solution. Life on Mars would mean the end of life on Earth. This proves that space is a death trap, a dead end. All that will be left is two massive computer systems one on Earth and the other on Mars and orbiting satellites. The discovery of life on Mars would mean severe restriction on contact with each other beyond radio waves. Those on Mars will not be able to come back to Earth and will probably die of plague or starvation and those on earth will never again go to Mars. Life separated by eons of time and light years of space would be lethal to each other. In the same way Europeans infected the native population with deadly diseases. The same principal of life in space would apply on Earth. The Andromeda Strain scenario of virus or bacteria brought to Earth that would destroy the planet is a serious risk because we would have no immunity to it. This was how the Martians died in H. G. Wells’ famous novel War of the Worlds (1898). We risk life and survival in order to bring a pathogen to earth. Curiously, we gamble with life on earth for the sake of discovering life on Mars. The Atom Bomb was set despite the fact there was a chance that the atmosphere catch fire and destroy the Earth. Enrico Fermi took bets. Ellul called this the “gamble of the century” meaning we are willing to risk life for the discovery of knowledge. Knowledge for knowledge sake is a dangerous combination when mixed with advanced industry. If knowledge does not serve life, it is cursed like the forbidden fruit or witchcraft and sorcery, its bad intelligence, corrupted data, a virus. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? How many lives will we save as opposed to destroy with new technology, since we must remember every new technology no matter how benign it may first appear, eventually it will be weaponized. The rocket, the computer, the internet, nuclear power, rail travel, daylight savings and superhighways were all born of war. They were from the start a military weapon, before it was converted to civilian use, which in effect militarizes the population, look at the growth of law enforcement agencies: the police, private security, rival gangs, local militias, universal surveillance, sale of Hummers an essentially military weapon adapted to life in the sub-burbs and the increase of gun sales. Arming for war reassures our security. Corporations assume a war like posture. Everything is a fight the death. Communication technology has not delivered its promise of world peace, but only given us another weapon in our arsenal: propaganda the highjack of media technology to produce a universal consciousness. A one world state that imposes an unlimited view of power.
The mystery of space is both the pull and the push into the unknown future. Professor Fred Polak discussed the dynamics of social change as a “push-pull process in which a society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind be its realized past.”[10] Present reality and a hoped for or imagined future represents a dual nature whose perpetual dialectical struggle to balance opposites moves history and provides the momentum for social change. “Man’s dualism is thus and indispensable prerequisite to the movement of events in time and to dynamics of historical change.”[11] By, “dualism” we mean, “the unity of opposites”[12] as in classical philosophy; for example, permanence and change, necessity and freedom, time and eternity, space and time, matter and spirit; in theology we have the Grace and Nature paradigm according to Saint Thomas Aquinas; in ethics the Is and the Ought, the Yes and the No! The visible tangible and temporal world serve a manifest symbol or connecting point for the invisible, spiritual and eternal. Symbolizing activity distinguishes the human soul from the rest of nature.
Metaphysics is the hallmark of humanity. Through maintaining balance and tension complimentary opposites, or correlatives, one cannot exist without the other, the left and the right, the subjective and the objective, the past and the present, the future remains open: free, spontaneous, serendipitous, unpredictable; most importantly New! The future is never fixed or certain, always becoming and subject to change, according to human and divine cooperative will. Conformity to God’s Will brings rebirth; disobedience leads to death. Balance is lost to uncontrollable extremes, as in a technolosecular world, when only half the complimentary struggle is emphasized. Synthesis transforms into ragging monism, the refusal to admit diversity, while embracing totalitarianism that will inevitably return us to a Pre-Christian view of humanity and society (All is One not the Three in One). Three in One has laden within the seeds of love. God is love. Only a family has the ability to love. A monad cannot love because there is no one to love outside itself. It locks itself away behind an impenetrable wall of inscrutable silence. It has no awareness or consciousness of itself. This means a dead universe. Only a triangle can share love with each other. God is Father, Spirit and Son which also includes the restoration of Adam’s Race. We recognize our own personhood in the acknowledgment of soul in others. When the material and spiritual are out of kilter, tyranny reigns in one form or the other.
The finite, the material, reason, money and technology usurp their better halves: the infinite, the ideal, faith, prayer and the sacraments. These elements are spiritual technologies that have a definite impact on the development of their secular counterpart. They serve as guiding light that will not let technology run out of control. In the absence of these limits complimentary opposites may regress into “irreconcilable opposites.”[13] Technical reason becomes the exclusive organ for knowledge vilifying faith. Matter exorcises spirit degrading the Temple of the body and denying the existence of the immortal soul. Secular replaces sacred and technological acceleration devours natural resources.
Philosophical Materialism and its ideological subsidiaries Atheism (God), Scientific Naturalism (Nature), Darwinism (Man), Marxism (Society) and Determinism (History) represents the collective world outlook in counterpoint to traditional Idealism (dualism) with its belief in two worlds, the ideal and the material. Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth put it this way, “Materialism . . . knows the one world only, the material world, and refuses to invent a second, imaginary, superior world. Materialism and Idealism are irreconcilably opposed.”[14] However, Princetonian Charles Hodge explained Materialism as a predominately-recent, “philosophical theory” that joined fatalism and atheism. “According to this system matter and motion are eternal: thought is an agitation of the nerves; the soul the result of our corporeal organization; the will the strongest sensation; the ground of morals a regard to our own happiness. There is no freedom, no morality, no future existence, no God. When these principals got a hold of the popular mind, then came the end.”[15] Family, God and religion turn into Atheism, pornography and robot sex. Technology becomes the prevailing influence over traditional religion; it becomes a new secular religion. Secularism, relativism and science resort to trick of the mind convincing us that only matter is real, or what can be measured by the senses. There is no immortal soul. We can see why Hodge said the end is near when these forces align. This represents the death of humanity, genocide.
Materialism accepts only one-half the traditional dialectic creating what Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev called, “ontological totalitarianism,”[16] or French Existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel said, “intellectual imperialism.”[17] Reason outs faith and matter rules over spirit. Berdyaev astutely observed that the origins of slavery are rooted in philosophical Monism, only one element, one dimension exists, therefore only the sensual organs are capable of receiving truth. We are slaves to the senses “The philosophical source from which the slavery of man derives is monism. The practical expression of monism is tyrannical. Personalism is most profoundly opposed to Monism. Monism is the domination of the ‘common,’ of the abstract universal, and the denial of personality and freedom.”[18] Spiritual despotism rules over our technosecluar world. This is an age in which spiritual life and traditional values have degenerated into crass materialism threatening the foundation of civilization with enslavement and ultimate collapse. Rather than, the amelioration of spiritual values along with material conditions, as legacy of technological progress, a relentless social determinism captures mass society in an irrevocable death grip represented by the Modernist Project’s equivocation of mankind with nature. Reality’s identification with matter dehumanizes us by loss of human distinction from the material world. Homo sapiens become one creature among many. There is nothing special about us. An apparent inevitability moves all under its spell to peaceful resignation. This is exemplified by the commonplace metaphysical redundancy: It-Is-What-Is! We may recall Alexander Pope’s dictum: “Whatever is, is right!” Change then becomes symptomatic of a downward spiral, such as terminal illness running its course, or diminishing returns from progressive investment.
Space mythology represents a teleological view that expresses human destiny as escape from Earth. This is a veritable eschatology. Famous science-fiction writer Ray Brabury stated spiritedly, “we’re heading back to the stars . . . Our children’s children will be immortal. That’s what space travel is all about.”[19] Arthur C. Clarke believes that space represents the mysterious that draws us to it, “only through space flight can mankind find a permanent outlet for its aggressive and pioneering instincts. The desire to reach the planets is only an extension of the desire to see what is over the next hill . . . Perhaps one day men will no longer be interested in the unknown, no longer tantalized by mystery. This is possible, but when man loses his curiosity, one feels he will have lost most of the other things that make him human.”[20] Let’s not forget that “curiosity killed the cat!” We probably should leave some things alone. But this is not possible for the technological imperative to limit itself. It must exploit all secrets and discover all mysteries, even if it means standing on a landmine to do so.
Historian of Technology Professor David Noble argued for corollaries between past belief in ascension of the saints and modern space flight. From the very beginning of the modern age the mystic Tommaso Campanella believed in a heavenly paradise on the Moon. His contemporary, astronomer Johannes Kepler believed traveling to the Moon was a way of escaping earthly turmoil. Founding father of the Royal Society Bishop John Wilkins similarly asserted that paradise exists on the Moon and as soon as science perfects the art of flying colonies will be established there. Jules Verne used allusion to, “Ascension” for space flight and was the great inspiration behind the twentieth century’s push to reach the Moon, the Space Race and the Cold War. Flight became associated with Christ’s Ascension and achieved the status of metaphor for spiritual ambitions.[21] As Historian Michael Sherry recognized, flight is a symbol of religious ascension, the realization of lofty goals. “Therefore . . . [air flight] was uniquely capable of stimulating fantasies of peacetime possibilities for lifting worldly burden, transforming man’s sense of time and space, transcending geography, knitting together nations and peoples, releasing humankind from its biological limits. Flight also resonated with the deepest impulses and symbols of religious and particularly Christian mythology−nothing less than Christ’s ascension. Its realization, then served as a powerful metaphor for heavenly aspirations and even, among the literal-minded, as palpable vehicle for achieving them.”[22] Historian Walter McDougall similarly commented on the symbolic meaning of Sputnik (1957) as herald of the Space Age and the coming transformation. In fact, the Russians were not the first to reach outer space. The Germans did it before them with the invention of the V-2 Rocket in 1942. Was it good fortune for the United States to win the Space Race or would the Nazi and Communist regimes fared any better? “To some it was the newest and most spectacular evidence of mankind’s irrepressible, questing nature.”[23] Others believed that the promise of space technology and its consequences for Earth would forever alter man’s nature by nurturing global consciousness through material abundance and perfect humankind. Star Fleet Command represents the end of human technology projected into space. Humanity cannot grow further than that. The only way to go from here is up. We will transcend ourselves as human beings and become a higher race united with the machine. Those left behind will be cannon fodder, grist for the mill. They will be harvesting us like cattle.
The former SS Officer and converted Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun also believed it is, “Man’s destiny” to reach the Moon and other planets in order to preserve the, “life spark.”[24]
Space flight operates as cultural myth for peace, a utopian new beginning for humanity, deliverance and immortality: meaning humanity’s survival depends on space exploration, our destiny resides in space not Earth. According to this cultural directive it is God’s will for humanity to spread throughout the universe and fill it just like we did on Earth as co-creators with God. As beings made in God’s image, we are expected to learn all we can of the creation.[25] Thus, “Teleology” as Lutheran theologian Carl Braatan declared, “may be seen as secularized eschatology.”[26]
Space exploration as a central theme in science-fiction provided the necessary imagination for technological expansion into infinity. The Copernican Revolution in the early modern period opened the heavens to dreams of exploration by means of other worldly flight. In the modern worldview eternity is no longer the domain of God above the levels of heaven as in pre-Copernican (Ptolemaic) system. Instead eternity resides in our earthly temporal space. Eternity, Earth and Space are now identical with the material universe. The Cosmos is eternal. Carl Sagan spoke for most that hold a materialist cosmology when he stated rather glibly, “THE COSMOS IS ALL THAT IS OR EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE.”[27] Heaven has been brought down to Earth and now it must be conquered and filled. Levels of heaven separating Earth and eternity no longer exist. Earth abides in eternity separated from the rest of infinite space by an atmosphere that can be surmounted through rocket technology.
The traditional notion of the eternal divine is transposed into temporal humanity, into transcendental subjectivity. The transcendent realm becomes mixed into immanent categories. The dream of space flight serves as an excellent example of modern transposing of Heaven and Earth. In the traditional model of the universe the heavens were the abode of angels, saints and immortal spirits attainable only by ascension. Ascension is the completeness of salvation in the Christian tradition. Space flight equals the new ascension to glory, mankind’s reach for immortality amongst the stars. Theologian Paul Tillich described how the classical archetypal symbol of space and time, the vertical line (transcendence) has collapsed into the horizontal line (immanence) so that the vertical no longer exists today as it did in the pre-modern world. Space exploration represents the preliminary last step of the horizontal line over the vertical that began in the Renaissance.[28]
The aim of the horizontal line or radical immanence is the control of nature by mathematics and calculating reason, projected into outer space fulfilling human destiny. Tillich said, “The heavenly utopia as traditionally imagined was transformed into an earthly one. ‘Utopia’ means something hoped for which so far has no place in reality. The hope now became, not fulfillment above, but in time and space. This lifted the importance of technology, compared with pure science, far above what was possible in classical Greece and intervening periods.”[29] The modern mind is essentially a transformation from world transcendence in the pre-Copernican system to world transforming in the post-Copernican world. “One of the most important transformations is the turn from Greek contemplative and medieval self-transcending ideals of life to the active, world-controlling and world-shaping ideal. This implied a high valuation of technical sciences and the beginning of that fertile interaction between pure and applied sciences which immensely contributed−and is still doing so−to the fast development of both of them.”[30] Transcendence, the vertical line, is found within the horizontal dimension giving religious relevance to all modern scientific and technological endeavors. This is especially prominent in space exploration a symbol for human destiny. The technological imperative is a form of religious transcendence or human ascendancy to divinity via technological progress; it has become, “the very measure of modern enlightenment . . . rooted in religious myths and ancient imaginings . . . the defining mark of modernity.”[31] Conquest of infinity as prime symbol encapsulates the essence of Western Soul according to Social Philosopher Oswald Spengler, “the outward and upward-straining life-felling−true decedent, therefore, of the Gothic−as expressed in Goethe’s Faust monologue when the steam-engine was yet young. The intoxicated soul wills to fly above Space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars.”[32] Time and space will be one, theoretically; technological acceleration is racing towards a final crescendo.
Marx’s “material-dialectic” expresses the goal of Communism. Through increasing the basic human condition materially, we all have equal shares, the movement will come to rest in a moderately wealthy, technologically sophisticated urban environment, where we all watch each other, classless utopia, the Omniopticon. It is possible for Luciferian forces to watch all people. And that we can spy on others. Hegelian Liberalism or “ideal-dialectic” through civil war and strife we will arrive at a universally agreed World Government or Constitutional Monarchy. Like Marx, Hegel foresees a one world state as the end of history and technological progress. This is its raison d’etra or reason for being. This is what it is inevitably moving toward. All the fanfare and hype of progress and space travel will give way to the stone cold reality that we are locked in a death grip of Machinehead, as I noted elsewhere. The technological imperative, whatever can be done should be done, will become the prevailing sentiment. When this happens an iron curtain descends on the masses and we discover that what we have created is not the New City, but the Panopticon where one sees all, the modern prison system, where the elite watch the many: oblivion.
For Marx tyranny, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, gives way to anarchy, the classless society where everyone is his own boss. For Hegel anarchy gives way to tyranny, much as democracy preceded tyranny, as in Plato’s Republic; however we get to the status quo we are still left with despotism whichever side we follow. The French and American Revolutions, modern liberalism, ends in world government at the end of history. This too is a deathtrap. We will have the power to freeze history into the image of the machine. We will more likely than not do so. People may embrace this movement as utopian, good for the planet and the human race. All opposition will be abolished and we will live out our perfect lives.
Space travel serves as an extension of the idea of progress. Humanity must win over the universe, as if it were a fight to the death. The former Nazi and later American rocket scientist Kraft Ehricke formulated the Extraterrestrial Imperative, believing humanity accepts no limitations on its expansion. The world belongs to us and we must exploit space for the furtherance of Mankind. This would include taking ownership of extraterrestrial life. Ehricke asserted three laws of Astronautics. First, Mankind accepts no limitations except those imposed on itself. Second, not only earth but the entire solar system, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are mankind’s rightful field of activity. Third law: by expanding through the universe, humanity fulfills its destiny as an element of life, endowed with power of reason and the wisdom of moral law within itself.
This sounds very much like Technological Colonialism. Through the sanctifying grace of space flight we have the right to control all things. The whole universe is ours to do as we like. The Prime Directive of non-interference does not exist. Was this not the prevailing sentiment for New World explorers? We are still weighing the consequence of their actions. Space will not be any different than earth. What we find we keep. What we steal we sell. We exploit new technology for the betterment of ourselves, not the good of humanity, and we are led to believe that through the invisible hand of providence all this acceleration will end with something better. What kind of pollution will lay waste to Mars?
[1] Lawrence J. Terlizzese Machinehead: Rise of the Technology God (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2019). https://www.christianpublishers.org/product-page/machinehead-rise-of-the-technology-god-by-lawrence-j-terlizzese-ph-d
[2] Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1932), 136, 141, 142.
[3] The Red-Hot Chili Peppers, “Californication,” (Warner Bros., 2000).
[4] I. F. Clark, The Pattern of Expectation: 1664-2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 2.
[5] John McHale, The Future of the Future (New York: G. Braziller, 1969), 7
[6] Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man: the Myth and the Reality (New York: Mentor, 1969), 28, 30.
[7] Bertrand de Jouvenel quoted in McHale, The Future of the Future, 9.
[8] Emmanuel Mesthene quoted in Ferkiss, Technological Man, 30.
[9] Ferkiss, Technological Man, 35.
[10] Fred Polak, The Image of the Future, trans., by Elise Boulding (San Francisco: Jossey-Base Inc., 1973), 1.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Maurice Cornforth, Materialism and the Dialectical Method, 4th Edition (New York: International Publishers , 1972), 23.
[15] Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. One (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985 [1871]), 247, 254.
[16] Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom trans., by R. M. French (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 51.
[17] Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society (South Bend, ID: Gateway, 1952), 155. Both Marcel and Berdyaev reflect the same macro-concept as The Ontology of Technology notion argued for by German Ontologist Martian Heidegger and French Sociologist Jacques Ellul’s idea of Automatism as the defining characteristic of technological acceleration.
[18] Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, 68.
[19] Ray Bradbury, quoted in Ferkiss, The Future of Technological Civilization, 277.
[20] Arthur C. Clarke, The Promise of Space (New York: Bantam, 1968), 292-293.
[21] David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: the Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997), 120.
[22] Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 2.
[23] Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Race (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 4.
[24] Wernher von Braun quoted in Noble, The Religion of Technology, 126.
[25] Noble, The Religion of Technology, 115-142.
[26] Carl E. Braaten, The Future of God: The Revolutionary Dynamics of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 29.
[27] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 4.
[28] Paul Tillich, “The Effects of Space Exploration on Man’s Condition and Stature” in The Future of Religions (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 29.
[29] Paul Tillich, The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1996), 29.
[30] Tillich, “The Effects of Space Exploration on Man’s Condition and Stature,” 40.
[31] Noble, The Religion of Technology, 3, 9.
[32] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. Two trans. By Charles Francis Atkins (New York: Knopf, 1938), 503.