176 Morten Tønnessen
one planet. For someone like me, born after man landed on the Moon, it is
hard to imagine how history would have been like without this idea.
JD: You get people who object: ―Why did we spend all those money on space
programs, instead of on social programs?‖ But we were much better off
spending more on space programs and less on arms! And much spent on
―social programs‖ has proven to be so politically misguided as to have
―unintended‖ but seriously detrimental consequences for social order, as in
the unmarried birth rate in the USA, for example.
MT: The situation now is that China and India are both involved in space
programs, even though they give home to close to half of the world‘s poor.
So it is not just a paradox of the West anymore.
JD: It is a paradox of the human condition. Human beings are made to
understand things. And understanding requires that it never stops. Nobody
knows a social system that can cure all these problems – poverty and so on.
We encountered a bird the other day, underneath one of the bridges – it was
really moving. The bird was probably going to die. What can we do about it?
You cannot take every bird you run into that needs help and give it a home.
MT: When you are small, you can.
JD: When you are small?
MT: When you are a kid.
JD: You run into people in the streets – sometimes they are a fraud, sometimes
they are for real... I do not think that semioethics is the answer to problems.
Semioethics is a perspective.
MT: You have read the essay ―The last Messiah‖ by Peter Wessel Zapffe (19 93
[1933]). That very same eco-existentialist was interviewed by a magazine
for mountain trackers fifty years ago (cf. Zapffe 1993 [1958]). They were
talking about the human condition and so on, and the interviewer finally
said: ―Well, if we end up with too big problems here on Earth, we can
always leave the planet – we can leave for Mars. I guess that will be
technically feasible in the future‖, the interviewer said. At that point Zapffe
had an answer which displayed his psychological understanding of human
beings. Because he replied: ―Yes, I am sure it would be exciting the first
week. But then of course we would be starting to quarrel about taxes for
mining and the inflation on margarine.‖ His point was that we would have
exactly the same problems on Mars. The human condition would not change
just because we moved on to another planet. Those who have this science
fiction idea, that leaving Earth would take care of any problem, are
misguided because it does not fundamentally address any aspect of the
human condition. And if we moved on without having learnt on this planet,
we would not be likely to have a different experience there.
JD: And what planet do they have in mind?
MT: It would have to be Mars.
JD: Mars – that is the only one that would even be a possibility, and we do not
know how sustainable it would be.
MT: There are some talking potentially about Venus, but that would be even
more of an engineering project. What they say here [in Surviving 1.000