Lost in the Cosmos

free as he to initiate sexual behavior. (Her insistence on this point at the first interview made the male astronaut’s eyes sparkle with anticipation.)
    These two were technically the best qualified of the crews, but one thing troubled the NASA project manager. In the standard questionnaire, the male astronaut responded to questions 45, 46, and 47 in the following fashion:
    Q.: Do you now or have you ever professed a religion?
    A.: Yes. But not now.
    Q.: What was it?
    A.: Catholic.
    Q.: Do you regard sexual intercourse outside marriage as sinful?
    A.: Technically, at the most. But in the interests of God and country I will make the sacrifice.
    What bothered NASA was not that he might be compromising his principles—indeed, he seemed gleeful at the prospect—but rather a certain irony and flippancy in his answer. Beware of smart-ass ironical types, warned one of the older astronauts, the last of the line of un-ironical men beginning with John Glenn and Neal Armstrong. The NASA psychologist noted that the irony might conceal a deeply rooted scruple which might surface later in the mission. One thing the mission didn’t need was a guilty astronaut. Imagine an adulterous and penitent Catholic looking for a priest and a confessional on PC3 like a character in a Graham Greene novel.
    (5) Two Nobel Laureates, both male and past middle age, who, though just barely competent as astronauts, expressed a willingness in the interests of humanity to masturbate regularly during the ten years of a mission, saving and freezing the ejaculate for the insemination of millions of suitable if intellectually inferior women toward the end of upgrading the human gene pool.
    Which crew would you choose? State your reasons.
    CHECK ONE )

(20) The Self Marooned in the Cosmos:
    What do you do if there is no man Friday out there and we really are alone?

    A STARSHIP IS RETURNING to earth after a voyage of eighteen years. *
    It set out with hope and excitement and good reason to expect success.
    After many years of fruitless monitoring of radio emissions from space, the spectrum analyzer at SETI picked up a patterned transmission in the 1400-megahertz range which could not, apparently, be accounted for by the random noise of the Cosmos. The source was the region of Barnard’s Star some six light-years distant. There were bursts of energy with a lesser radiation in between. The configuration was repeated over and over again. Some of the clusters could be countered as prime numbers. Very possibly it was a message in a nested code: a kind of palimpsest consisting of an overlay of prime numbers (but somewhat garbled) to make contact, and under it a primer to establish a language, and under that, the message.
    Hopes were raised further by an analysis of a perturbation of Barnard’s Star suggesting an orbiting planet, perhaps two, and now confirmed with such a high degree of accuracy that only two planets approximately the size of the earth could cause it.
    But the message, if it was a message, could not be decoded. No doubt it was garbled by some intervening source of radiation.
    Finally, it was decided at NASA to send a manned vehicle, the Bussard interstellar ramjet, which accelerates to velocities approaching the speed of light by means of a frontal scoop that funnels hydrogen atoms into a fusion engine and ejects them through a rear jet.
    Some extraordinary considerations went into the planning. One was the generally accepted, though not yet proved, consequence of Einstein’s general theory, namely that—and here the mind boggled—though the voyagers on the starship would experience time as a lapse of eighteen years and would be eighteen years older when they returned, between 400 and 500 years would have elapsed on earth upon the return of the starship—depending on how close to the speed of light the Bussard ramjet could drive the ship.
    The human problems were unprecedented. Friends and family of the crew, and fellow scientists, would be as long dead to them as Galileo and Columbus are to us. A crew must be found who shared the following unusual characteristics: they must be willing and able to live together in close quarters for eighteen years; they must be willing to leave behind family, husbands, wives, forever; they must be prepared to return to an earth which would either be destroyed or so technologically advanced that their homecoming in the ancient ramjet would be something like Rip Van Winkle riding a mule into the Jet