I want to tell you a story about stories
I want to tell you this story because I
think need to remember that sometimes
the stories we tell each other are more
than just tales or entertainment or
narratives
they’re also vehicles for sowing
inspiration and ideas across our
societies and across time storm I’m
about to tell you is about how one of
the most advanced technological
achievements of the modern era has its
roots in stories and how some of the
most important transformations yet to
come
might also story begins over 300 years
ago when Galileo Galilei first learned
of the recent Dutch invention that took
two pieces of shaped glass and put him
in a long tube and thereby extended
human sight farther than ever before
when Galileo turned his new telescope to
the heavens and to the moon in
particular he discovered something
incredible these are pages from
Galileo’s book Siderius nuncius
published in 1610 and in them he
revealed to the world what he had
discovered what he discovered was that
the moon was not just a celestial object
wandering across the night sky but
rather it was a world a world with high
sunlit mountains
and dark Maur a Latin word for seas and
once this new world and the moon had
been discovered well people immediately
began to think I have traveled there and
just as importantly they began to write
stories but how that might happen and
what those voyages might be like one of
the first people to do so was actually
the Bishop of Hereford man named Francis
Godwin and Godwin wrote a story about a
Spanish explorer Domingo Gonzales who
ended up marooned on the island Saint
Helene in the middle of the Atlantic and
there in an effort to get home developed
a machine an invention to harness the
power of the local wild geese to allow
them to fly and eventually to embark on
a voyage to the moon Darwin’s book the
man on the moon or a discourse of a
voyage thither was only published
posthumously and anonymously in 1638
likely on account of the number of
controversial ideas that it contained
including an endorsement of the
Copernican view of the universe that put
the Sun at the center of the solar
system as well as a pre Newtonian
concept of gravity that had the idea
that the weight of an object would
decrease with increasing distance from
earth and that’s to say nothing of his
idea of a goose machine that could go to
the moon and while this idea of a voyage
the moon by Goose Machine might not seem
particularly insightful or technically
creative to us today what’s important is
that Godwin described getting to the
moon not by a dream or by magic as
Johannes Kepler had written about but
rather for human invention and it was
this idea that we could build machines
that could travel into the heavens that
would plant its seed in minds
across the generations the idea was next
taken up by his contemporary John
Wilkins then just a young student at
Oxford but later one of the founders of
the Royal Society John Wilkins took the
idea of space travel in Godwin’s text
seriously and wrote not just another
story but a nonfiction philosophical
treatise entitled discovery of the new
world in the moon or a discourse tending
to prove that tis probable there may be
another habitable world in that planet I
know by the way that were it habitable
that idea in itself would have been a
powerful incentive for people thinking
about how to build machines that could
go there in his books Wilkin seriously
considered a number of technical methods
for space flight and it remains to this
day the earliest known nonfiction
account of how we might travel to the
moon other stories would soon follow
most notably by Cyrano de Bergerac with
his lunar tales and by the mid 17th
century the idea of people building
machines they could travel to the
heavens was growing in complexity and
technical nuance
and yet in the late 17th century this
intellectual progress effectively ceased
people still told stories about getting
the moon but they relied on the old
ideas or once again on dreams or in
magic why well because the discovery of
the laws of gravity by Newton and the
invention of the vacuum pump by Robert
Hooke and Robert Boyle meant that people
now understood that a condition of
vacuum existed between the planets and
consequentially between the earth and
the moon and they had no way of
overcoming this and we have thinking
about overcoming this and so for well
over a century the idea of a voyage to
the moon made very little intellectual
progress until the rise of the
Industrial and the development of steam
engines and boilers and most importantly
pressure vessels and these gave people
the tools to think about how they could
build a capsule that could resist the
vacuum of space so it was in this
context in 1835 that the next great
story of space flight was written by
Edgar Allan Poe now today we think of
Poe in terms of gothic poems and
tell-tale hearts and ravens but he
considered himself a technical thinker
he grew up in Baltimore the first
American city with gas street lighting
he was fascinated by the technological
revolution that he saw going on all
around him he considered his own
greatest work not to be one of his
Gothic tales but rather his epic prose
poem Eureka and which he expounded his
own personal view of the cosmic
graphical nature of the universe in his
stories he would describe in fantastical
technical detail machines and
contraptions and nowhere was he more
influential on this than in his short
story the unparalleled adventures of one
hunt’s fall it’s a story of an
unemployed bellows maker in Rotterdam
who depressed and tired of life this is
Poe after all and deeply in debt he
decides to build a hermetically enclosed
balloon borne carriage it was launched
into the air by dynamite and from there
floats through the vacuum of space all
the way to the lunar surface and
importantly he did not develop this
story alone for in the appendix to his
tale
he explicitly acknowledged Godwin’s a
man on the moon from over 200 years
earlier as an influencer calling it a
singular and somewhat ingenious little
book and although this idea of a balloon
borne voyaged the moon may seem not much
more technically sophisticated than the
goose machine in fact Poe was
sufficiently detailed in the description
of the construction of the device and in
terms of the orbital dynamics of the
voyage that it could be diagrammed in
the very first space flight in sequel
encyclopedia as a mission in 1920s and
it was this attention to detail or to
verisimilitude as he called it that
would influence the next great story
Jules Verne’s from the earth of the Moon
written in 1865 and it’s a story that
has a remarkable legacy and a remarkable
similarity to the real voyages to the
moon that would take place over a
hundred years later because in this
story the first voyage to the moon takes
place from Florida with three people on
board and a trip that takes three days
exactly the parameters that would
prevail during the Apollo program itself
and in an explicit tribute to Poe’s
influence on him Verne situated the
group responsible for this feat in the
book in Baltimore at the Baltimore gun
club with its members shouting cheers
for Edgar Poe as they began to lay out
their plans for the conquest of the moon
and just as Verne was influenced by Poe
so too would Verne’s own story go on to
influence and inspire the first
generation of rocket scientists the two
great pioneers of liquid for rocketry in
Russia and in Germany Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth both
traced their own commitment to the field
of space flight to their reading from
the earth of the moon as teenagers and
then subsequently committing themselves
to trying to make that story a reality
and Verne story was not the only one in
the 19th century with a long arm of
influence on the other side of the
Atlantic HG Wells’s War of the Worlds
directly inspired a young man in
Massachusetts Robert Goddard and was
after reading War of the Worlds that
Goddard wrote in his diary one day in
the late 1890s a resting while trimming
a cherry tree on his family’s farm
having a vision of a spacecraft taking
off from the valley below and descending
into the heavens and he decided then and
there that he would commit the rest of
his life the development of the
spacecraft that he saw in his mind’s eye
and he did exactly that throughout his
career he would celebrate that day as
his anniversary day his cherry tree day
and who would regularly read and reread
the works of Verne and of Welles in
order to renew his inspiration and his
commitment over the decades of Labor and
effort that would be required to realize
the first part of his dream the flight
of a liquid fill rocket which he finally
achieved in 1926 so it was well reading
from the earth to the moon and the War
of the Worlds of the first pioneers of
astronautics were inspired to dedicate
their lives to solving the problems of
space flank and it was their tree
disease and their works in turn that
inspired the first technical communities
and the first projects of Space Flight
thus creating a direct chain of
influence that goes from Godwin to Poe
to Vern to the Paul program under the
present day communities of spaceflight
so why have I told you all this it’s
just cuz I think it’s cool or because
I’m just weirdly fascinated by stories
of 17th 19th century science fiction it
is admittedly partly that but I also
think that these stories remind us of
the cultural processes driving space
flight and even technological innovation
more broadly as an economist working at
NASA I spend time thinking about the
economic origins of our movement out
into the cosmos and when you look before
the investments of billionaire tech
entrepreneurs and before the Cold War
space race and even before the military
investments in looking for rocketry the
economic origins of space flight are
found in stories because it was in these
stories that the first concepts for
space flight were articulated and it was
through these stories that the narrative
of a future for Humanity in space began
to propagate from mind to mind
eventually creating an intergenerational
intellectual community that would
iterate on the ideas for space craft
until such a time as they could finally
be built
this process has now been going on for
over 300 years
and the result is a culture of space
flight it’s a culture that involves
thousands of people over hundreds of
years because for hundreds of years some
of us have looked to the Stars and
longed to go and because for hundreds of
years some of us have dedicated our
Labor’s to the development of the
concepts and systems required to make
those voyages possible I also wanted to
tell you about Godwin PO and Vern
because I think their stories also tell
us of the importance of the stories that
we tell each other about the future more
generally because these stories don’t
just transmit information or ideas they
can also nurture passions passions that
can lead us to dedicate are alive to the
realization of important projects which
means that these stories can and do
influence social and technological
forces centuries into the future I think
we need to realize this and remember it
when you tell our stories we need to
work hard to write stories that don’t
just show us the possible dystopian
paths we may take for a fear that the
more dystopian stories we tell each
other the more we plant seeds for
possible dystopian futures instead we
need to tell stories that plant the
seeds if not necessarily for utopias
then at least four great new projects of
technological societal and institutional
transformation and if we think that this
idea that the stories we tell each other
can transform the future is fanciful or
impossible and I think we need to
remember the example of this our voyage
to the moon an idea from the 17th
century that propagated culturally over
300 years until it could finally be
realized so we need to write new stories
stories that 300 years in the future
people will be able to look back upon a
remark how they inspired us to new
heights and to new Shores how they
showed us new paths and new
possibilities and how they shaped our
world for the better thank you you
I want to tell you this story because I
think need to remember that sometimes
the stories we tell each other are more
than just tales or entertainment or
narratives
they’re also vehicles for sowing
inspiration and ideas across our
societies and across time storm I’m
about to tell you is about how one of
the most advanced technological
achievements of the modern era has its
roots in stories and how some of the
most important transformations yet to
come
might also story begins over 300 years
ago when Galileo Galilei first learned
of the recent Dutch invention that took
two pieces of shaped glass and put him
in a long tube and thereby extended
human sight farther than ever before
when Galileo turned his new telescope to
the heavens and to the moon in
particular he discovered something
incredible these are pages from
Galileo’s book Siderius nuncius
published in 1610 and in them he
revealed to the world what he had
discovered what he discovered was that
the moon was not just a celestial object
wandering across the night sky but
rather it was a world a world with high
sunlit mountains
and dark Maur a Latin word for seas and
once this new world and the moon had
been discovered well people immediately
began to think I have traveled there and
just as importantly they began to write
stories but how that might happen and
what those voyages might be like one of
the first people to do so was actually
the Bishop of Hereford man named Francis
Godwin and Godwin wrote a story about a
Spanish explorer Domingo Gonzales who
ended up marooned on the island Saint
Helene in the middle of the Atlantic and
there in an effort to get home developed
a machine an invention to harness the
power of the local wild geese to allow
them to fly and eventually to embark on
a voyage to the moon Darwin’s book the
man on the moon or a discourse of a
voyage thither was only published
posthumously and anonymously in 1638
likely on account of the number of
controversial ideas that it contained
including an endorsement of the
Copernican view of the universe that put
the Sun at the center of the solar
system as well as a pre Newtonian
concept of gravity that had the idea
that the weight of an object would
decrease with increasing distance from
earth and that’s to say nothing of his
idea of a goose machine that could go to
the moon and while this idea of a voyage
the moon by Goose Machine might not seem
particularly insightful or technically
creative to us today what’s important is
that Godwin described getting to the
moon not by a dream or by magic as
Johannes Kepler had written about but
rather for human invention and it was
this idea that we could build machines
that could travel into the heavens that
would plant its seed in minds
across the generations the idea was next
taken up by his contemporary John
Wilkins then just a young student at
Oxford but later one of the founders of
the Royal Society John Wilkins took the
idea of space travel in Godwin’s text
seriously and wrote not just another
story but a nonfiction philosophical
treatise entitled discovery of the new
world in the moon or a discourse tending
to prove that tis probable there may be
another habitable world in that planet I
know by the way that were it habitable
that idea in itself would have been a
powerful incentive for people thinking
about how to build machines that could
go there in his books Wilkin seriously
considered a number of technical methods
for space flight and it remains to this
day the earliest known nonfiction
account of how we might travel to the
moon other stories would soon follow
most notably by Cyrano de Bergerac with
his lunar tales and by the mid 17th
century the idea of people building
machines they could travel to the
heavens was growing in complexity and
technical nuance
and yet in the late 17th century this
intellectual progress effectively ceased
people still told stories about getting
the moon but they relied on the old
ideas or once again on dreams or in
magic why well because the discovery of
the laws of gravity by Newton and the
invention of the vacuum pump by Robert
Hooke and Robert Boyle meant that people
now understood that a condition of
vacuum existed between the planets and
consequentially between the earth and
the moon and they had no way of
overcoming this and we have thinking
about overcoming this and so for well
over a century the idea of a voyage to
the moon made very little intellectual
progress until the rise of the
Industrial and the development of steam
engines and boilers and most importantly
pressure vessels and these gave people
the tools to think about how they could
build a capsule that could resist the
vacuum of space so it was in this
context in 1835 that the next great
story of space flight was written by
Edgar Allan Poe now today we think of
Poe in terms of gothic poems and
tell-tale hearts and ravens but he
considered himself a technical thinker
he grew up in Baltimore the first
American city with gas street lighting
he was fascinated by the technological
revolution that he saw going on all
around him he considered his own
greatest work not to be one of his
Gothic tales but rather his epic prose
poem Eureka and which he expounded his
own personal view of the cosmic
graphical nature of the universe in his
stories he would describe in fantastical
technical detail machines and
contraptions and nowhere was he more
influential on this than in his short
story the unparalleled adventures of one
hunt’s fall it’s a story of an
unemployed bellows maker in Rotterdam
who depressed and tired of life this is
Poe after all and deeply in debt he
decides to build a hermetically enclosed
balloon borne carriage it was launched
into the air by dynamite and from there
floats through the vacuum of space all
the way to the lunar surface and
importantly he did not develop this
story alone for in the appendix to his
tale
he explicitly acknowledged Godwin’s a
man on the moon from over 200 years
earlier as an influencer calling it a
singular and somewhat ingenious little
book and although this idea of a balloon
borne voyaged the moon may seem not much
more technically sophisticated than the
goose machine in fact Poe was
sufficiently detailed in the description
of the construction of the device and in
terms of the orbital dynamics of the
voyage that it could be diagrammed in
the very first space flight in sequel
encyclopedia as a mission in 1920s and
it was this attention to detail or to
verisimilitude as he called it that
would influence the next great story
Jules Verne’s from the earth of the Moon
written in 1865 and it’s a story that
has a remarkable legacy and a remarkable
similarity to the real voyages to the
moon that would take place over a
hundred years later because in this
story the first voyage to the moon takes
place from Florida with three people on
board and a trip that takes three days
exactly the parameters that would
prevail during the Apollo program itself
and in an explicit tribute to Poe’s
influence on him Verne situated the
group responsible for this feat in the
book in Baltimore at the Baltimore gun
club with its members shouting cheers
for Edgar Poe as they began to lay out
their plans for the conquest of the moon
and just as Verne was influenced by Poe
so too would Verne’s own story go on to
influence and inspire the first
generation of rocket scientists the two
great pioneers of liquid for rocketry in
Russia and in Germany Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth both
traced their own commitment to the field
of space flight to their reading from
the earth of the moon as teenagers and
then subsequently committing themselves
to trying to make that story a reality
and Verne story was not the only one in
the 19th century with a long arm of
influence on the other side of the
Atlantic HG Wells’s War of the Worlds
directly inspired a young man in
Massachusetts Robert Goddard and was
after reading War of the Worlds that
Goddard wrote in his diary one day in
the late 1890s a resting while trimming
a cherry tree on his family’s farm
having a vision of a spacecraft taking
off from the valley below and descending
into the heavens and he decided then and
there that he would commit the rest of
his life the development of the
spacecraft that he saw in his mind’s eye
and he did exactly that throughout his
career he would celebrate that day as
his anniversary day his cherry tree day
and who would regularly read and reread
the works of Verne and of Welles in
order to renew his inspiration and his
commitment over the decades of Labor and
effort that would be required to realize
the first part of his dream the flight
of a liquid fill rocket which he finally
achieved in 1926 so it was well reading
from the earth to the moon and the War
of the Worlds of the first pioneers of
astronautics were inspired to dedicate
their lives to solving the problems of
space flank and it was their tree
disease and their works in turn that
inspired the first technical communities
and the first projects of Space Flight
thus creating a direct chain of
influence that goes from Godwin to Poe
to Vern to the Paul program under the
present day communities of spaceflight
so why have I told you all this it’s
just cuz I think it’s cool or because
I’m just weirdly fascinated by stories
of 17th 19th century science fiction it
is admittedly partly that but I also
think that these stories remind us of
the cultural processes driving space
flight and even technological innovation
more broadly as an economist working at
NASA I spend time thinking about the
economic origins of our movement out
into the cosmos and when you look before
the investments of billionaire tech
entrepreneurs and before the Cold War
space race and even before the military
investments in looking for rocketry the
economic origins of space flight are
found in stories because it was in these
stories that the first concepts for
space flight were articulated and it was
through these stories that the narrative
of a future for Humanity in space began
to propagate from mind to mind
eventually creating an intergenerational
intellectual community that would
iterate on the ideas for space craft
until such a time as they could finally
be built
this process has now been going on for
over 300 years
and the result is a culture of space
flight it’s a culture that involves
thousands of people over hundreds of
years because for hundreds of years some
of us have looked to the Stars and
longed to go and because for hundreds of
years some of us have dedicated our
Labor’s to the development of the
concepts and systems required to make
those voyages possible I also wanted to
tell you about Godwin PO and Vern
because I think their stories also tell
us of the importance of the stories that
we tell each other about the future more
generally because these stories don’t
just transmit information or ideas they
can also nurture passions passions that
can lead us to dedicate are alive to the
realization of important projects which
means that these stories can and do
influence social and technological
forces centuries into the future I think
we need to realize this and remember it
when you tell our stories we need to
work hard to write stories that don’t
just show us the possible dystopian
paths we may take for a fear that the
more dystopian stories we tell each
other the more we plant seeds for
possible dystopian futures instead we
need to tell stories that plant the
seeds if not necessarily for utopias
then at least four great new projects of
technological societal and institutional
transformation and if we think that this
idea that the stories we tell each other
can transform the future is fanciful or
impossible and I think we need to
remember the example of this our voyage
to the moon an idea from the 17th
century that propagated culturally over
300 years until it could finally be
realized so we need to write new stories
stories that 300 years in the future
people will be able to look back upon a
remark how they inspired us to new
heights and to new Shores how they
showed us new paths and new
possibilities and how they shaped our
world for the better thank you you
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