Aliens approaching Earth today on a spaceship would have no doubt that our planet was inhabited. In addition to our big blue planet, they would see the satellites, thousands of them, man-made, orbiting the earth. We use them to send information – weather, television, phone calls, bird’s-eye photographs.
Aliens approaching our planet 250 years ago would have seen no such satellites at all — just a lonely, pristine planet. But if they got closer, they’d see hundreds of wooden ships, going back and forth across the big blue expanses of ocean, confined to crawling along a vast sphere, prisoners of non-Euclidean geometry.
I’ve been reading a biography of John Adams lately – not the popular one by David McCullough (I’ve heard that it’s too hagiographical and sentimentalized, that McCullough dumbs down Adams’s personality by making him too likable), but a better one that I discovered, John Adams: Party of One, by James Grant. It’s delightful, and James Grant is incredibly witty – he appears to be a good match for Adams’s cantankerousness. (Adams spent a few years in France as the American minister; he had no patience for diplomacy and sorely tested the graces of the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, who couldn’t wait for Adams to leave the country.)
What strikes me is how slowly information traveled in those days. I’m currently reading my sixth consecutive book about colonial America (I don’t think I’ve ever read so many books in a row on a single topic before), and this keeps coming up. Back then, it took about four to six weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean. As colonial American society matured over the course of the eighteenth century, the colonies became more closely tied to the mother country; the more well-to-do colonials liked to keep up on the latest British fashions, and London newspapers crossed the ocean to be read and discussed in the coffeehouses. And yet, the news in those newspapers was at least a month and a half old. When King George II died, the colonials didn’t know about it for weeks.
The same thing with letters. I don’t understand how the British ever managed to govern their colonies. If a colonial official needed permission from the mother country to do something or some information on a particular matter, he’d have to wait four to six weeks for the letter to cross the Atlantic, and four to six weeks for the response to cross back over the water – in addition to the time spent crafting that response. Information traveled no faster than a human being, no faster than the wind could push a ship across the ocean. When John Adams in France received letters from his wife Abigail back in Massachusetts, who knew how out-of-date the family news he was reading might be?
And yet, as John Steele Gordon writes, this slowness of information travel was “simply a fact of life. Like growing old, or needing to sleep for several hours a day, it was taken as a given, if sometimes regretted.”
It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the first transatlantic cable was laid and the Old World and the New could finally communicate near-instantaneously.
Today, we’ve got our satellites and cellphones and airplanes, email and instant messaging, live television feeds. As soon as I hit “publish” on this entry, someone in far-off Indonesia will be able to read my words on a page visually formatted exactly the way I want it.
How can we take this stuff for granted?
Look around the room you’re in right now and think about what you see. A computer made of plastic and metal. Electric lights. A television, a telephone. Maybe some photographs. You might hear car traffic. I just took the elevator down to the lobby and got a snack, processed someplace far away, covered in a plastic wrapper. All these unnatural things!
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been deeply absorbed in colonial America this summer… but sometimes it really does feel like we’re living in a weird, make-believe future.
Fantastic post. I love imaginging what was.
Heck, even think about the 80s pre-cellular. When you left the house, you had your plans! You didn’t carry a phone in your pocket so people could call you and change or tell you they’d be late or cancel or…
Eric, i agree, especially with your initial statement.
Re. John Adams…
Growing up in my education those of the colonial era struck me as having a very peculiar general psyche: harsh, uncompromising, determined, overly-ambitious, idealistic to a fault — yet totally carnal in amusements/obtaining-their-desires (even Adams with his damn gardening). There is a (unfortunately limited) body of colonial era diaries/short-journals that put the psyche of that era’s inhabitants into context for me. These type of documents bring issues to the fore that contemporary American culture tends to neglect in importantance (smallpox, quality of life expectations exponentially diminishing each year, ability to conduct one’s work-trade likewise) making Adams’ world-view a sense-made and sane ideological response to current-events and the possible trajectory of social trends.
There once existed a popular American culture that prided itself upon one’s ability to live ever more frugally, on the ability to make-do, on the skill to solve problems in the face of little with which to work, and on equality amongst citizens as they strive to do so; Adams was one man amongst maybe a hundred or so whose personalities made such things popular, once, in our culture.
rob@egoz.org
It took even longer (6 months to a year) for information from Spain to reach Tucson, which was up on the northern frontier.
In the future, that delay will resurface if/when we colonize throughout our solar system, but it will be measured in minutes and hours instead of weeks and months.
Actually, that delay exists now in space exploration.
For instance, rovers on Mars cannot be controlled real time as if it was some fancy video game. The delay is too great. Each move and event has to be carefully considered and peer reviewed before uploading to the rovers for execution.
You only considered the latency side of the communications problem. The other portion is bandwidth. Until quite recently, one baud in space was considered a big deal. That’s about what the Galileo spacecraft had since the high gain antenna failed during deployment.
Yet, another problem to consider (that you touched on with colonial fashion and news) is that technological advances on earth will travel (for hardware) as fast as a rocket (for now). Think of the compute power of a voyager probe. Your cell phone likely surpasses that by a great deal. There’s no way to update the hardware, there.
Just wanted to show you that the “delay” still exists in today’s world in some form.