As promised earlier in the week, here is a snippet of Frederick Turner’s “Worlds Without Ends” essay from 1996; more on what he means by the ‘charm industries’ in a later posting. I’m not aware of an online version of this piece, but it’s well worth seeking out in your local library.
The arts and pleasures of the charm industries take up time and space; they also paradoxically increase both time and space by their magical powers of illusion, delay, inner articulation, and concentrated attention. But time and space, with the present buildup of physical, temporal, and cultural waste product on our planet, are becoming increasingly scarce and increasingly at a premium. We are swamped by mountains of junk information, junk production, junk cultural overflow. We will be prepared to pay top dollar for silence, horizons, the threat and presence of death, the strange and mystical experience of uneventful time. Japanese Heian princes, with all the resources of a rich civilization open to them, sought the exquisite boredom of glacially slow Noh drama and court music. American and European millionaires outfit one-man ocean-going yachts and, on the fine edge of loneliness, terror, and tedium, sail round the world. Our civilization as a whole will seek out the ultraviolet-ravaged red wastes of Mars, the voiceless empty grandeur of the Jovian moons.
New planetary habitats obviously offer enormous amounts of empty space. Less obviously, they also offer huge quantities of empty time. Outer space has an inexhaustible resource, which is temporal separation from the home planet. Nobody on Mars can have a phone conversation with anyone on Earth, because the light that carries the message takes time to get from place to place, and even a one-minute time lag puts a gap between two people almost as great as the grave: Mars is at least three minutes away, and sometimes as much as 20. The times of Mars and Ganymede are empty of Earthly chatter and Earthly information overload. The relativistic time-separation from Earth of even the closest planets imposes an impenetrable barrier of privacy, and creates huge unexploited temporal niches for the coming charm industries. The tragic existential choices that faced emigrants to the New World, and that made possible their creation of new societies and new alternatives for the human race, will once again be possible.
From Frederick Turner, “Worlds Without Ends, originally in Reason, June 1996, Vol. 28, Issue 2.
