Customer Reviews

Real Space: The fate of physical presence in the digital age, on and off planet

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This is a helpful handbook for advocates of human spaceflight. In the summer of 2004 esteemed space scientist James A. Van Allen, asked the poignant question, "Is human spaceflight obsolete?" He added: "Does human spaceflight continue to serve a compelling cultural purpose and/or our national interest?...Risk is high, cost is enormous, science is insignificant. Does anyone have a good rationale for sending humans into space?" Paul Levinson has an answer, one that should at least prove convincing to those wanting to believe even if it might not convince James Van Allen.

Levinson says essentially that while cyberspace made virtual exploration of almost anything possible it has also demonstrated an under-appreciated fact of the human existence, cyberspace is a pale comparison to reality. We continue to seek firsthand human experience to understand and experience the universe. He addresses the full range of rationales for spaceflight, suggesting that the human desire to experience and explore is what makes us fully human. This is a work of advocacy that is poignant and provocative, suggesting that our desire to fly in space is just as much spiritual and eternal as it is practical, political, economic, and military.

Cyberspace is part of daily living, with most people spending part or most of each day on the Internet. But what happens to reality when technology moves more and more into the virtual world? Realspace addresses a myriad of issues and concerns in the course of such a move; from the human need to explore and the lack of efforts to further space exploration to why humans need to constantly expand knowledge bases. Realspace is an essential, thought-provoking purchase for any science collection or reader.

I am sorry to say that with all the reading I do, this is the first time I have come across Paul Levinson. This is a gem of a book, and I will attend to anything else he write, and hope to hear him in person someday.

The author, the book, and by the authors account, California, converges four vectors:

- Cyberspace where its just information, not "real"
- Outer Space, where he believes we need to go
- Inner Space, with hightened spiritual awareness being important
- RealSpace, which only live beings with all their senses can engage

I found this gem to be absorbing and it rounded out my Sunday morning reading quite nicely. Some bullets I took away:

- No senses of smell, touch, taste in cyberspace
- Knowledge is not Experience
- Walking and talking are intertwined
- Cell phone is antidote to Interent, restores ability to work in the real world and not be chained to a computer or cubicle
- Makes care for business, not governments, to fund space exploration
- Discusses robots as useful for some things but no substitute for humans
- Discusses how much we missed in our evaluation of Mars until we actually had a real soil sample with traces of bacteria
- Wants a World Spaceport Center at WTC site in NYC, adds chapter on terrorism and sspace.

The selected bibliography, with annotation, is quite remarkable. I am only familiar with a third of what is catalogued there.

This book helped me understand Jeff Bezos better, and that is always useful.

The author buys into the myths of 9/11. This is disappointing.

Some other books that his is a complement to:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
The Lessons of History
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century

Here is a book that seems always on the verge of making a difference, or at least a point, but never gets there. Why did the U.S. space program progress so slowly after the Moon landings while communication technology grew by leaps and bounds? That's Levinson's central question and I'll be damned if I know what his answer is after reading this book. Chapter 4 ends with the promise that chapter 5 will discuss it, but instead there's a discourse on California culture during the Space Age, and how Natural philosophy has only recently eclipsed moral and intellectual philosophy. Huh? I would have appreciated something prescriptive to connect the dots. The closest thing to an intellectual risk Levinson takes is to say that humans will gain a better picture of their place in the universe if they explore space personally, not just with robots. Oh, and perhaps NASA (he sees no serious alternative to government space programs) is not packaging the experience right. Really? There's not even enough in here to tell whether Levinson is wrong. The book is a charming mind-screw littered with historical nuggets, such as how Diego Columbus's books about his father's voyages of discovery became best-sellers. But for $27.95 suggested retail, I expected something a lot more bold and relevant.