james burke

• i'll finish with this: the challenge we face reminds me a great deal the kind of thing that used to happen when i was working for bbc many years ago when i covered the space program and i was often in moscow. and sometimes, you'd be in a bar, far enough away from the comissars for one of the locals go "psst" and then ask you questions. and all of us report the same kind of questions from them.
  
  they used to ask questions like: "how do you people in the capitalist west survive all that dangerous confusion and anarchy?" and we would say: "what dangerous confusion and anarchy?" and they would say -and it's something that encapsulates everything we face today ahead of us- they said: "all that choice!!!"
  
  i have an absurd optimistic view of your ability to handle what technology will do to you and then we'll copy you and we'll survive too. because i believe that americans have a uniquely flexible view of technology. maybe it's a frontier thing and i came across it early on my work and it didn't leave me polyannish but it left me thinking that optimism's the right thing to have. because if you think about it, pessimists jump out of the window and are no longer involved right? so i became an optimist.
  
  here's what made me an optimist:
  
  back in the 60s the bbc has decided to cover the apollo moon mission. and for some reason or another they asked me to be the anchor chief reporter. they said "look, your mandate is this: tell the great british public why americans keep doing the same thing (go to the moon, bounce around, come back. go to the moon, bounce around, come back)" what they really meant was, go into great detail and explain why one mission's different from another, which they were. i did a good enough job, look? i'm here.
  
  but there was one thing that i utterly failed to do and for which i've got hate mail. i used to get mail from people saying "you're paid *far* too much money to be on that screen to tell us things. so tell us what *this* thing is!" well i couldn't. and the letters kept pouring "what is the thing that they keep using?"
  
  what they were talking about was a thing called a "cuff check list".
  
  well.. here you are on the surface of the moon, you have this much oxygen, this much work, and this much time. there is not *that* much oxygen. so you get your work done properly and correctly, or you blow it.
  
  this cuff checklist is a kind of little ringbinder with plastic leaves on it and on the leaves were printed instructions for what to do if things went wrong.
  
  for example, you're on the surface of another planet for the first time, 240.000 miles from the nearest workbench.. you take a piece of white hot technology that some poor slob of an engineer has worked his or her entire adult life... you lay it reverendly on the lunar dust... you press its little button..
  
  and it doesn't work.
  
  back in the science room in houston, the person is tearing their hair out. but you are 240.000 miles away! so you turn to your cuff checklist. and this is something i never managed to explain to the audience and why i've got the hate mail.
  
  i can't even get it myself i didn't understand it even and i would ask engineers and they would say "it's perfectly simple" and then i couldn't understand the simple answer. so we just avoided mentioning it, it wasn't there.
  
  it said -i'm making it up- "if the lrq fails, technological repair option 1: squiltch the pc mode to outlock 2 and hit 5 5 x 5. if option 1 fails, option 2.." even more incomprehensible. if option 2 fails, option 3.. and each little thing would have about 6 options.
  
  so here you are, with solutions to a way of staving off a technological crisis on the surface of another planet for the first time in history, watched by billions of people at the end of each of these notes, came a message from nasa, that could never have been written by anybody but an american. it could never have been written by an english, european, russian or chinese space agency. ever.
  
  and it revealed something about your view of technology that has heartened me ever since. it shows the resilience you have.
  
  it said: if all other technological options to this point have failed...
  
  "kick with lunar boot"