In April 1970, Blanche Lovell, mother of the commander of the Apollo 13Jim Lovell, was looking for his son on TV. In Ron Howard’s realistic film (from 1995), the scene is poignant: in a nursing home, she waits to see the historic launch, only to discover that the major networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – had decided that going to the Moon had become “routine”, with no right to direct broadcast. The world only turned on the television again when the disaster happened and the fight for survival became entertainment.
This scene was not just a dramatic device; is the portrait of a world of “gatekeepers”, of those who decide what the “people” have the right to see. In the era Apollowhen the guardians of attention decided the space was boring, the space ceased to exist for the public.
Today, although many people linked to the profession sigh with nostalgia for those times, we experience the total opposite. This is why the “new” space race, led in recent days by the mission Artemisbut also by SpaceX, does not depend on the permission of any editor or director of a media organization. It lives in the cybersphere and in the fragmentation of niches that, together, form global audiences that traditional media can no longer ignore.
But this is where the exploration of the void intersects with the exploration of truth. Many look at the current social media landscape – populated by trolls, flatearthers and conspiracy theories – as a threat to science. Reflecting this thought, a speech at the UN General Assembly, in September 2022, by the then Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, has now gone “viral” again on social media (both to criticize and to praise, depending on…), arguing that disinformation should be treated as a “weapon of war”. For her, freedom of expression without state or institutional control leads to “chaos, preventing collective action” on “issues such as climate change”.
Ardern embodies – her governance reflected this, in fact – the vision of those who believe that only benevolent elites are capable of filtering reality for the masses and that their tutelage is necessary to avert disaster. And there are so many who follow this philosophy… But History teaches us that, whenever the State tries to decide what are “facts” and “fake news”, he always moves towards the newspaper model Pravda: an official truth that serves only to protect power. The Soviet model collapsed precisely because it eliminated the mechanisms of feedback: without the “noise” of criticism and exposed error, the system became fragile and blind, and rotted from the inside in half a dozen days (literally).
In the market of ideas, truth works exactly as price does in a free market, as Smith explained. There may be speculation and bubbles of lies, but the gravitational pressure of reality always ends up bringing information back to facts. Just give him some time. Today’s digital “niche” – the enthusiasts who analyze every image in the Starship in high definition, the images sent from the Orion – is the army of fact-checkers. And they are more and much better informed than the flatearthers that “to troll” this same information. They do not ask permission to check telemetry, on the contrary, they force institutions to be transparent, through constant surveillance.
On the other hand, the trolls and the ignorant people who bombard public opinion are the price to pay for freedom. And when you look at it, it’s a cheap price. It is not from the benevolence of the bureaucrat (or the “gentle” tutelage of Ardern) that we expect the truth. On the contrary. It can only come from fierce competition between those who want to be heard. The attempt to create state “security bubbles” only atrophies the critical muscle of the citizen. A society that is never challenged by lies becomes incapable of recognizing the truth.
The current space race is, therefore, a race for the truth in a decentralized way. Smith’s principles (and refined by Thomas Sowell) show us that the market of ideas, even in its “savagery”, is more resilient than any Ministry of Truth. Because Physics doesn’t care about state decrees or protected narratives. The rocket either takes off or explodes. And, in a world of free information, there will always be millions of attentive eyes to witness the fact, ensuring that the truth is not the property of anyone, but a real asset of everyone.
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