News-Journal article announcing this voyage
Nebraska Press: book that mentions this voyage
Paris Review: story about two stowaways on this voyage
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| Apollo 17, Nasa photo |
The following is a reproduction of the program for “Voyage Beyond Apollo.”
The Total Environment and Future of Civilization
“Voyage
beyond Apollo”
Created
by Richard C. Hoagland aboard the S.S. “Stantendam”
December
4-13, 1972
Robert
Duncan-Enzmann, Program Director
Krafft
Ehricke, Honorary Program Chairman
Acknowledgements
Grateful
acknowledgement is made to the following:
Executive
personnel of Holland-America Line with special thanks to Messrs. Tensen
and Kolb
for unfailing courtesy and patience
For special assistance:
Isaac
Asimov
Gerald
Bull
John
Donnelly
James
Fletcher
Kenneth
Franklin
Gerald
Griffin
Robert
and Virginia Heinlein
Frank
Korkosz
Homer
Newell
Fred
Ordway
Neil
Ruzic
Exhibits:
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:
For the increase of
Understanding and the improvement of the quality of life for the peoples of
planet Earth in these days of increasing knowledge and awareness.
“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 ad 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 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 biologic 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!”
Welcome to “Voyage Beyond
Apollo.”
May it help you to leave us
with 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 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 some
day, 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, it 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!
Participants
in discussions for the First Seminar include:
Isaac Asimov, author, bio-chemist
Ben Bova, editor of Analog
Arthur C. Clark, author, Fellow, Royal Astronomical Society
Miss Pandora Duncan, student ecologist
Robert Duncan-Enzmann, Fellow, New York Academy of Sciences
Richard C Hoagland, science adviser, creator of “Voyage Beyond
Ben Bova, editor of Analog
Arthur C. Clark, author, Fellow, Royal Astronomical Society
Miss Pandora Duncan, student ecologist
Robert Duncan-Enzmann, Fellow, New York Academy of Sciences
Richard C Hoagland, science adviser, creator of “Voyage Beyond
Apollo" Norman Mailer, author
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 repair of the forgoing, 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 organism and the environment, is old. It is the
popular awareness which 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, participant 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:
Isaac Asimov, author, bio-chemist
Roger Caras, author, ecologist
Krafft Ehricke, chief scientific advisor of North American
Rockwell Company
Kenneth Franklin, Director Hayden Planetarium, American Museum of
Natural History
Keith Moore, psychologist
Neil Ruzic, founder Industrial Research
Richard Sternbach, artist, student
Topics 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
The remaining seminars will be posted in sequence. I hope you find this fascinating, and that you ask yourself the same questions I have. This was 1972.
What has happened? Technology races ahead, and yet, forty years later, we have little of this done.
Why?
