Here he reflects on how science and technology had taken the place of nature as our primary source of awe:
For thousands of years, it had been nature -- and its supposed creator -- that had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.
Nature, meanwhile, had become an object of concern and pity, like a former foe arrived at one's gates, bleeding to death. No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpassed us, the natural landscape instead everywhere bore the scars of our quixotic powers. We could look up at the diminishing snows of Kilimanjaro and reflect on the ill effects of our turbines. We could fly over the denuded stretches of the Amazon and perceive the rain forest to be no more robust than a single flower in our hands. We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt toward glaciers.
After the thrill of the launch and the feelings of "mastering the workings of the universe", Alain brings himself (and us) back to Earth:
I fell into an unexpectedly melancholic mood, perhaps inspired by the realisation of how much of life was set to continue as it had always done, prey to the same inner inclemencies, gravitational pulls and depressions as those our cave-dwelling ancestors had known. Our bodies would disintegrate, our plans would be blown off course, we would be visited by cruelty, lust and silliness -- and only occasionally would we be in a position to recover contact with the speed, elegance, dignity and intelligence evidenced by the great machines.
I felt keenly the painful psychological adjustments required by life in modernity: the need to juggle a respect for the potential offered by science with an awareness of how perplexingly limited and narrowly framed might be its benefits. I felt the temptation of hoping that all activities would acquire the excitement and rigours of engineering while recognising the absurdity of those who, overly impressed by technological achievement, lose sight of how doggedly we will always be pursed by baser forms of error and absurdity.
