THE EARTH AS A SPACE STATION THE EARTH IS A POSSESSIVE MOTHER and we are held down tight to her bosom by the force of gravity. Men may have dreamed of space travel since the days of Lucian of Samosata in ancient Greece, if not earlier still, but few have seriously resented their terrestrial prisonment,or indeed recognized it as such; and yet astronomically and philosophically it represents a very serious limitation. In our ' Age of science ' it is not easy to visualize the mental climate in which Galileo could be sent to prison and Giordano Bruno burned alive for believing that the Earth revolved about the sun. How cruel,how bigoted,how parochial mankind used to be only four long human lives back! It is easy and gratifying to scoff and marvel at the errors of the past by hindsight; but neither so easy nor perhaps so gratifying to probe the faults of the present by foresight. A few days ago I was reading a serious scientific work, whose author stated flatly, without...
