In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. It was, she wrote, an event “second in importance to no other.” 2 Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long-wished-for goal: to escape the earth. The Soviets declared, “The new socialist society turns even the most daring of man's dreams into a reality." 1 The United States vowed to win the space race.įor Hannah Arendt, the launch of Sputnik meant something very different. The Radio Corporation of America broadcast to a rapt nation the “pinging sound” emitting from the satellite. Military experts assured Americans the satellite could not drop nuclear bombs. Scientists dreamed that the launch represented a new era of human achievement. On October 5, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into space. Arendt is best known for her writings on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, and one can hardly imagine her reading Wired magazine. The revolution in technology over the last 30 years and the promise of the singularity-a merging of humans and machines into a common species-seem to have very little to do with Hannah Arendt, a chain-smoking German-Jewish émigré who stood far from the swift currents of popular culture.
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