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Opening Arguments

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Opening Arguments chapter 1 Opening Arguments Humankind exists on a planet in the infinite universe, and we have come to understand that this little planet is profoundly affected by events elsewhere in the vastness. The knowledge that the Moon rules the ocean tides is ancient. As a prisoner during the First World War, Milutan Milankovič theorized that secu- lar changes in the direction of Earth’s rotational axis and in the shape and ori- entation of its orbit around the Sun were responsible for the coming and going of ice ages.1 As soon as radio was developed as a means of communication, the effect of solar storms on Earth’s ionosphere was noticed; this also gave an explanation for the aurora.2 In the 1960s, scientists tuned their radios to listen to the birth cry of the universe, Big Bang.3 Also in the 1960s, the study of the ge- ography of the Moon led Eugene Shoemaker to alert the world to the danger of the “hail of bullets” through which humankind careened in blissful ignorance. His warning gained more acceptance as Walter and Luis Alvarez explained the impossibly high concentration of iridium in the geological boundary between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary sediment layers as being due to a massive as- teroid impact.4 Within a few years, the 65-million-year-old Chicxulub Crater was discovered in Yucatán, and it is now the widely accepted explanation for the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs, the most successful land animals on Earth, after a 100-million-year reign.5 The more that we have explored Earth, the more we have discovered our planet’s connections to the infinite void. But the human brain, not being infinite, best learns about the universe by drawing conceptual boundaries, by grouping similarities from differences. As the Sesame Street song goes, “Which one of these is not like the others?” And so, we draw lines of every conceivable type across infinite creation in the hope of better understanding its complexity and diversity. The lines which scientists 1 University of Indiana, Milankovitch cyles and Glaciation, http://www.indiana.edu/~geol105/ images/gaia_chapter_4/milankovitch.htm. 2 Stanford Solar Center, The Ionosphere, http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/ ionosphere.html. 3 Science Mission Directorate, The Big Bang, https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus- areas/what-powered-the-big-bang. 4 National Museum of Natural History, What is the K/Pg Boundary?, nmnh.typepad.com/ 100years/2013/12/what-is-the-kpg-boundary.html. 5 Lunar and Planetary Institute, Chicxulub Impact Event, www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/ Chicxulub/discovery/. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004366022_002 2 chapter 1 draw are often temporary; they bound a system in order to conceptually sim- plify its behavior, characterizing its interaction with the world beyond the boundary as input and output. As scientific concepts change based on new knowledge, so may definitions change and boundaries move. But the first lines to be drawn in the world were by political leaders. These boundaries may move as well, but it is usually a very bloody affair. Anticipating the approaching need to define the legal character of outer space, in April 1956 the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) set an agenda item for the upcoming meeting of its Assembly: Agreement on the use of outer space by the nations of the world will have to be reached soon, according to a report which will be put before the Assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization when it meets…. [T]here is good reason to believe that “mechanical contrivances” will travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in the near future. None of the rules which furnish legal guidance to states on problems of sovereignty apply to trips into outer space. The Convention on International Civil Aviation, which has been ratified or adhered to by all of ICAO’s 67 member nations, gives each of these nations complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory, but it makes no mention of whether this sovereignty extends upwards beyond the bound- ary of the air.6 In fact, the flight of mechanical contrivances into the fringes of outer space was already old news by more than a decade. “Do you realize what we ac- complished today? Today the spaceship was born,”7 said Walter Dornberger to Wernher von Braun after the first successful flight of the A-4 rocket on 3 October 1942, which reached an altitude of 84.5 kilometers (52.5 statute miles), an altitude above which a number of pilots would later earn their astro- naut wings. Subsequent A-4 flights reached altitudes at which satellites orbit today.8 The spaceship had indeed been born. The technology of this rocket as well as its engineers became the war prizes of the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of the Second World War in 1945, and from this technologi- cal base the new superpowers developed larger rockets which orbited their 6 International Civil Aviation Organization, Outer Space Sovereignty Agreement Needed, Press Release (4 April 1956), http://www.icao.int/icao/en/nr/1956/pio195606_e.pdf. 7 Walter Dornberger, V-2 (1954). 8 Mark Wade, V-2, Encyclopedia Astronautica, http://www.astronautix.com/v/v-2.htm..
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