“Voyage Beyond Apollo”

Created by Richard C. Hoagland aboard the S.S. “Statendam”

December 4-13, 1972

Robert Duncan-Enzmann, Program Director

Krafft Ehricke, Honorary Program Chairman

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

Executive personnel of Holland-America Line with special thanks to Messrs. Tensen

and Kolb for unfailing courtesy and patience

Isaac Asimov

Gerald Bull

John Donnelly

James Fletcher

Kenneth Franklin

Gerald Griffin

Robert and Virginia Heinlein

Frank Korkosz

Homer Newell

Fred Ordway

Neil Ruzic

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Hayden Planetarium

Princeton Museum

Springfield (MA) Museum of Science

Bonestell Collection (courtesy of F. Ordway)

It should be noted that the above contributors have made their contributions of time, effort, financial assistance, and creative ability without thought of personal gain but with dedication to the ideals with which we hope to identify this Voyage and this Conference:

“It is a story as ancient as the Galaxy itself. Planets spread across the night like grains of sand. Races – every imaginable size and color, shape and origin, each with an unnamed urge to Know, to Understand, to mold a future rich with life and promise out of whatever is available. Each starting a journey, a trek from fear and superstition to Civilization – a journey few ever complete.

Along the way there are hazards. Some environments are stronger than the race and Intelligence dies stillborn amid raging ice-age snows and drifting desert sands. Others reach a plateau and there remain, trapped in idyllic gardens without challenge or a future. Still others succumb to astronomical disaster, their worlds destroyed before Intelligence has learned enough.

But there are some, such as ourselves, who do survive famine, flood, disease – everything a planet can array against them. From impossible beginnings, knowing nothing of the universe around them, they mature. Imperceptibly, at first, across silent millennia, at first. Their knowledge grows: fire, farming, metals, and the wheel. Their numbers swell. Their cities rise, vast centers for commerce, culture, communication. Their transportation conquers water, land, and then the sky itself as distances become abstractions of the mind.

The basic limits of reality, the laws of physics, chemistry, and living organisms are explored: industries are born with each discovery. A race controlling energy upon a planetary scale expands across the surface of its world.

But beneath this technological explosion, there is another force, a drive that is as ancient as the origin of life: to multiply, to father kind, to procreate the race. The biological means to immortality.

Upon a thousand worlds amid the stars, races flash from savagery to technological supremacy in an instant of geologic time. Infants they are, victims of their two most potent drives, the urge to reproduce and the urge to Understand. They never have a chance, catapulted as they are a million years beyond their comprehension. FO it is time that, in the end, defeats them; they know too much too soon, but really Understand too little that they know…..”

                                                                                                Richard C Hoagland

                                                                                                From “Environment in Crisis”

                                                                                                (Work in progress)

It is to the Cause of Understanding that this Voyage and its distinguished Conference participants are dedicated. We have been extraordinarily fortunate. We have survived four million years and learned to love and sing and live together trusting that the “average man” possesses the wisdom which is the key to our survival. It would be a cosmic irony to have learned all that and then to fail the final test: communication of the facts among ourselves.

Some concern has been voiced recently regarding predictions of the future of civilization, based on certain computer models and parameters. All these predictions have been essentially negative, and, based on certain assumptions used in the modeling, we might be inclined to agree with the conclusions. Our disagreement lies with the assumptions — assumptions not at all consistent with the present evidence.

It is to present these new options, therefore, that this present Conference was convened. It is also our wish to illustrate the deep historical involvement of civilization with the heavens to such a degree, in fact, that some evidence strongly suggests a causal relationship between this human celestial orientation and the rise of civilization, to begin with.

For those who would prefer to ignore this marshaled evidence, both historic and contemporary, including impending possibilities for drastic improvement in the efficiency of transportation beyond Earth, we offer a quotation: “Man will not be content with mere survival. He will prevail!”

May it help you to leave us with an increased understanding of one important facet of our lives.

           Richard Hoagland

          Creator of “Voyage Beyond Apollo.”

Calendar

Monday, December 4, 1972

4:00 PM – departure New York

Welcoming Ceremonies – Keynote Address

Dr. Kenneth Franklin, Director, Hayden Planetarium, American Museum of Natural History

Tuesday, December 5, 1972

Conference on the Total Environment: The Future of Civilization

First Seminar …………. Cornucopia of Space

Wednesday, December 6, 1972

Second Seminar……Ecological Niches in the Solar System and Beyond

Arrival on station off Pad 39A, Cape Kennedy

Preparation for photography of Apollo 17

Pre-launch ceremonies

9:55 PM………………….Launch of Apollo 17

Thursday, December 7, 1972

1:00 AM …… Departure Cape Kennedy

Third Seminar …….. New Technology for Social Change and the Quest for Artificial Intelligence

Friday, December 8, 1972

Fourth Seminar ……..…. “Energy and Propulsion”

Evening ………………………………..  Dr. Kenneth Franklin

Special Celestial show Courtesy of Hayden Planetarium: “The Origin of the Christmas Star.”

Full effects and music from the Planetarium.

Saturday, December 9, 1972

12:00 noon …….arrival St. Thomas

Free Day

Sunday, December 10, 1972

1:30 AM ……………..…. Departure St. Thomas

7:30 AM ……………………….. Arrival San Juan

8:00 AM …. (in buses) Departure San Juan

10:00 AM ………………………… Arrival Arecibo

Special Seminar hosted by Director, Dr. Frank Drake and Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University: “The Feasibility of Interstellar Communication.”

12:00 noon……Special luncheon buffet for

“Voyage Beyond Apollo” guests – courtesy of Arecibo Observatory

1:00 PM .….……. Departure Arecibo

3:00 PM……..…….. Arrival San Juan

4:00 PM ………. Departure San Juan

Monday, December 11, 1972

Fifth Seminar ………. “The Grand Design”

Evening …. ………………………Special Program

Dr. Carl Sagan, Director for Radio-physics, Cornell University, Mariner 9 Television Experimenter

“Mars – The 90-Day Revolution of Mariner 9”

Tuesday, December 12, 1972

Sixth Seminar …….. “Science, Art, Communication, and Cosmology”

Last night at sea ……………………………………….…. Captain’s Dinner

Special evening program……………. Post-Symposium Colloquium

Wednesday, December 13, 1972

3:00 PM ……Arrival New York

Conference on the Total Environment and the Future of Civilization

(From the Planetology and Space Mission Planning Series)

First Seminar: Cornucopia of Space

Mankind’s relationship with the total environment of Earth and Space extends into antiquity an estimated 40,000 years! What is popularly known as the “Age of Space” is only the result of this investment – over 40 millennia of historical association with the heavens which has literally led to all we know – agriculture, cities, commerce, and the arts, culminating now with the last and grandest stage in this relationship: Exploration of the Universe, first hand.

This development, recent though it is, has seen vast networks rise: communication, weather, and navigation satellites to serve a hundred million people of the Earth, coupled with a celestial survey of its limited resources, just begun. Future children of the world will see this pyramid of systems greatly strengthened to include power generation from the sun, and seismic networks placed on other planets to act as aids to earthquake warning and eventual prevention.

And someday, to save this “good green Earth,” men will turn increasingly to the use, through manufacturing in Space, of the limitless resources of the sun – treasure-troves of minerals, chemicals, and metals orbiting one hundred million miles beyond the biosphere, and hence expendable. The “mother lode” beyond men’s wildest dreams, is the means of silencing forever all those who state that man must stay confined in body and mind to just one world.

Acceptance of his gift, the planetary system of his sun, will ready Man to dare the greatest human adventure of them all: The ultimate of voyages Beyond Apollo, the fascinating journey to the stars!

Topics Include:

• `     Communications
•        Space monitoring of fisheries, storms, ice-floes
•        Navigation – methods old, new, and timeless
•        Direct Broadcast TV to India: Historic experiment destined to revolution educational communication
•        Survey and management of Earth’s precious resources; the space view of crops, blight,   drought, locusts, and animal migration
•        Cosmic weather, solar storms, moon-base blackouts, radiation, and aircraft passengers
•        Earthquake monitoring of other planets for Earth application
•        Weather monitoring for other planets for Earth application
•        The Space Shuttle, for the repair of the foregoing, to prepare for the following
•        The Magnificent Heritage of the inner and outer solar system
•        Unmanned interstellar probes and manned voyages beyond Apollo to the stars

 

Second Seminar: Ecological Niches in the Solar System

“Sunlight streams across the Solar System

Becoming trees and birds and Man

With photosynthesis is the Means

and Consciousness the Plan”

Ecology, the relationship between living organisms and the environment, is old. It is the popular awareness that is new.

Thus the Earth maintains a complex ecology between a shifting crust and a transparent sheath of air, but that ecology gains sustenance, in turn, through a broader ecological relationship among the Earth, the sun, and other planets of this star. Bathed in a flood of energy constant across geologic time, the planets move, in turn, through a constantly shifting interplay of gravitation, radiation, and shards of small debris; not isolated islands in an infinite sea, but interacting members on a grand galactic stage.

It is into this ecology, stretching from the sun to the outer reaches of the solar family, that mankind has been born, participating in an interrelated system that, through its aspirations, will soon stretch outward to involve the stars themselves.

Participants in the discussions for the Second Seminar include:

•        The origin and preservation of the ecology of Earth
•        Utilization of extraterrestrial resources, including lunar habitation and feedback to the Earth
•        Earth-like planets, moon-like worlds, and comets of other stellar systems as minimum acceptable destinations for manned inter-stellar expeditions
•        Genetic adaptation of man to extraterrestrial environments and possible solution to the problem of historic genetic errors
•        The origin and evolution of stars and associated planetary systems