Pop culture and entertainment provide windows into people’s thoughts and passions without explicitly revealing them as in an opinion poll, and the obvious catch is their meaning must be inferred. The most obvious targets are pop music and movies, but other genres like television, novels, and fashion can also provide signals of increasing interest in space.

For example, Elton John’s 1972 top 10 hit – “Rocket Man” — was directly inspired by a story by famous science fiction author Ray Bradbury. It’s about an astronaut on his way to Mars who was lonesome for his wife. Rocket Man went to #6 in the U.S. so it obviously resonated with a large audience. David Bowie’s much less well-known song “Space Oddity” was timed for a 1969 release to coincide with the launch of Apollo 11, the first manned Moon landing mission. But it didn’t chart in the U.S. indicating the artist and the material are at least as important as audience interests!

Science fiction films in the 1950s (one 56 year energy cycle ago) were of uneven quality but explored several themes of interest to post-war audiences, including: extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and space travel to distant worlds. The best of these were, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952) about a space alien (Klaatu) and his robot (Gort) who came to warn Earthlings about their violent tendencies, and “Forbidden Planet” (1956) that pioneered several elements later featured in various, immensely popular Star Trek TV series and movies. If you Google “Klaatu” you’ll see the rock group is organizing a letter writing campaign to get their music included in the re-make of the original movie!

Science fiction films have been released to large audiences consistently throughout the last 30-40 years. The list includes: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), possibly the greatest science fiction film ever, Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Star Trek, TMP (1979), ET: The Extraterrestrial (1982), Independence Day (1996), and many others. This suggests they are simply resonating with deeply held, long-lived interests of large numbers of people about the cosmos. In 2003, author Marina Benjamin (Rocket Dreams) suggested that since the death of the space program (!), frustrated would-be space travelers had taken refuge in cyberspace – another form of pop culture — where they now focus most of their “cosmic” energies.

The popular animated sci-fi sitcom, Futuruama does a good job reflecting popular attitudes about where we’re headed as a global society. The plot line chronicles the adventures of a 21st Century pizza delivery boy who is frozen for 1000 years and lives in the year 3000. In the year 3000, space has been fully colonized and Earth is headed by a unified government, lead by the preserved talking head of President Nixon. The Universe is a multicultural place with humans, robots, and extraterrestrials living in harmony. Although Matt Groening may not know it, he has depicted a future not too different from 21st Century Waves expectations.

One of the more interesting books you’ll ever read is by Howard McCurdy, called Space and the American Imagination. He contends that space advocates oversold the potential for space by highlighting fundamental American cultural themes like the frontier, the heroic explorer, and progress through technology. Both McCurdy and Benjamin apparently do not fully appreciate the relation of space exploration to major human explorations and MEPs over the last 200 years, as well as its strong interactions with long-term waves in human generations and economics. Upcoming posts in Wave Guide 10 will identify and comment on signals in pop culture of hightened public interest in space, exploration, and technology as we approach the opening of the next Maslow Window near 2015.

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