EARTH-BOUND ATTITUDES: SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION NEEDED FOR THE SPACE AGE

Abstract

Man stands on the threshold of perhaps the most audaci ous venture of his evolutionary career. It promises to outdo the feat of our forebears, when million of years ago, they term inated their arboreal apprenticeship and dared to struggle for survival on the ground. A chancy undertaking indeed that was, coming down out of the trees and pitting the frail primate physique against a ferocious fauna and countless unknown dangers. It may have been the boldest move so far. But today man is making one yet more daring, as he readies his machines to launch himself into outer space, there to begin exploration and discovery that promise to free him from his earth-bound status and open to him the greatest adventure of all. Between these two epochal feats—the descent from the trees and the ability to escape from the earth's gravitational field—lie many another evolutionary step that has carried our race further away from the estate of our animal relatives, and has involved us every more complexly in modes of life and in problems that are uniquely our own. The earlier steps in the hominidal direction were biological and therefore blind—our anthropoid ancestors could not foresee the consequences of mutant developments or other sematic changes such as the enlarged neopallium of the brain, or the pelvic and orthograde posture and bipedal locomotion. Saltatory genetic processes and the morphological plasticity of the primate stock give rise to the unique biological species, Homo sapiens, with no one aware of what was happening or pondering about what might lie ahead. Scarcely less blind must have been the early forward steps in cultural evolution—the first fabrication of tools and weapons of wood or stone, the first art of fire-making, the first gutteral