Retrograde Communication
Originally published by now.space, January 13, 2016. Used with permission.
In December, 1797, explorer Mungo Park returned to England, becoming the first westerner to repatriate with knowledge of interior Africa. His sponsor, Joseph Banks — who’d once served as a naturalist with Captain Cook — was surprised and delighted at Park’s return. Since his departure more than two years prior, all of England had come to believe Park dead.
Park experienced retrograde communication, a syndrome of exploration that has all but vanished in our technological age. With each step along the bank of the Niger River, over each passing month, his ability to communicate with his sponsor, family and friends declined. Exploration prowess in The Age of Wonder scaled with remoteness: while travellers by-and-large were interesting public figures, those presumed dead became the stuff of legend. Banks himself roamed the Pacific Islands with Cook for years, before returning to fanfare and ascending to the western presidency of science at the Royal Society of London.
Today’s space race is often compared to sailing of yore: with their otherworldly ambitions, today’s Musks and Bransons are arguably our closest analogues to the Parks and Banks’ of English romanticism. And beyond their exploratory aspirations, tech titans face another parallel with masters of tacking and whaling: space explorers will experience retrograde communication. As we develop new rockets, solar panels and avionics — all of which will enable humanity’s ability to survive farther and farther away from the Earth — our ability to communicate will precipitously decrease.
Round trip lightspeed communication between the Earth and Mars ranges from about 8 to 48 minutes, depending on the respective planets’ positions. From there, things get worse. Quickly.
Saturn’s moon, Titan — rich in organic molecules and possessing an atmosphere somewhat analogous to Earth’s — is more than two light hours round trip at its closest. For Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, that number is eight hours.
On Earth, in New York City, you can Facetime with your niece in Australia and watch her face light up at your crocodile impression in real time. But once you move to Mars, you’ll revert to a form of HD snail mail. You’ll record videos and your sister will play them for your niece. She might react, but she’ll never see you. She’ll talk to you, but never with you.
Since Mungo Park journeyed from England to West Africa, we’ve invented the railroad, telegraph, internal combustion engine, radio, rocket, computer, internet, smartphone and Twitter. This most recent development enables us to share memes in real time, and like-it-or-not these are driving our cultural evolution. Depending on who you follow on Twitter, you can get a bit o’ Neil deGrasse Tyson wisdom at lunch: “Space aliens would surely think it odd that one way humans express affection is the simultaneous exchange of saliva.” Or you can turn to Kim Kardashian: “Who got powerball tickets???”
These two tweets will reach the closest potentially habitable extrasolar planet sometime around 2029. (Personally, I hope the extrasolar recipients will be making out and enjoying their powerball winnings, but I can only dream…)
In the past two-hundred years, our consistent and determined technological progress has been closely paralleled by an inexorable increase in the speed of communication. We’ve progressed from post to email and phone to Facebook. While billions remain unconnected, the prospect of a truly global communication network serving the most remote regions is now within our grasp.
As we embark on a new age of exploration, this aspect of our culture will be bottled up on individual worlds. If we succeed in colonizing Mars, the Solar System and the planets beyond, each iteration of progress will be accompanied by an inescapable loss in communication.
In this far future, political unrest on humanity’s Titan outpost will go unreported on Earth for an hour and a half. During this time, Kardashian kin will play the lottery. Indigenous Panamanians will meet with diplomatic attachés. A cricket match in Pakistan will unfold poorly for the hosts.
Humanity will have reached a fork in its evolution: we will no longer be growing together as a global civilization, but growing apart as many.
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Joe Mascaro (@joe_mascaro) is Program Manager for Impact Initiatives at Planet Labs, a San Francisco-based aerospace company that operates the largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites. At Planet, Joe manages social, environmental and humanitarian engagement, expanding Planet’s efforts to improve forest monitoring and conservation, enhance food security and promote ecological resilience for some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
