Rocket Dreams

From the first landings on the moon to the implications of our cyber worlds, this unusual and intriguing book takes a provocative look at our fascination with space. Rocket Dreams is a fast-moving, fact-filled study of how all the dreams that went into moonflight in the '60s have found new homes and mutated into new fascinations. It is about our unquenchable desire to reach out to other worlds, physical and imaginative. It deals with the Apollo astronauts; with Roswell and the UFO and 'abductee' fanatics; with 'interplanetary imperialists' like the Mars Society, and especially with SETI - 'Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence', a body funded by NASA for a quarter of a century and now by the internet moguls - dedicated to listening for radio signals from space with a vast radio telescope, and scanning data constantly through millions of linked home computers. From here the book moves on to the military origins of the internet, and the whole phenomenon of 'virtual communities', showing how the ideals and longings pinned on cyberspace have evolved directly from those of the space age. Space dreams have been transformed into screen dreams, but the longing for communication with 't