You dine out on it later: what they looked like, what they said. You use words such as “charm” and “charisma”, and perhaps “curse”. But meeting a Kennedy goes far beyond touching a great Hollywood celebrity or shaking hands at Buckingham Palace It is not about mere fame or glamour or ceremonial. The Independent’s thesis is that the Moon proved to be “just another lump of rock” The antithesis is that Earth is stardust. We are understanding where our Earth has come from, and what has happened to it.

We are learning how it works, how it interacts with the Sun, and what may happen to it in the future.From space, we realised how valuable our Earth is. They precisely locate each of us, minute by minute, in the air, on water or ashore. Satellites link us, from second to second, through an international Web of messages.Our robots explore other planets, and our telescopes look out to other stars But our Earth and our Sun remain in the back of our minds. The multinational satellites daily show us the global weather, the sea, and remote areas.

But we drew back from unsustainable national primacy, unaffordable lunar colonies and dangerous space tourism.Just as Columbus dreamt of gold but discovered potatoes, space became practical, with a working system of satellites more valuable than an insubstantial dream. Nasa’s technology, Russia’s experience and Europe’s industry co-operate in global space projects.Inspirational pull and competitive push spurred the modern reality. He was inspired to put man on the Moon, but he was also pushed by Cold War competition. As we all know, the first footprints on the Moon are American.
Well, the Cold War is over, the Moon is deserted, and Mir nears its end But these races have given way to team events. True, President Kennedy, when starting the Apollo programme, accepted the challenge of the space race. YOUR LEADING article (“The empty legacy of the Moon landings”) describes the space programme as “an empty imperial gesture” not so different from the activities of explorers past, and says there is little interest in space travel now. “Happy is he,” Leon Trotsky once wrote, “who in mind and heart feels the electrical current of our great epoch!” Davis certainly feels that current, and TechGnosis enables us to feel it too..

It’s undoubtedly a better world for Murdoch, Microsoft and Monsanto, but what about the rest of us?TechGnosis is a masterpiece of informed polemic, welding seemingly disparate blocs of knowledge and thought into a coherent, challenging whole with passion, erudition and wit. This is great news if you can run with the bulls, but when the economies of entire nations can be deconstructed in a matter of days, it is increasingly unclear what all this has to do with building a better world”. He thinks it is “detaching itself from the fleshly vehicle of material goods and production to become a metaphysical chaos of pure information. “One irony in the rise of ecological thought is that its organic models and holistic metaphors are also used to justify the unfettered excesses of the global market and its technological engines,” he argues.Similarly, the degeneration of Davis’s old home base, Wired, from a stimulating mass-market digital-lifestyle mag into a cheerleader for the wonders of e-commerce, is echoed by his perception that “money has gone gnostic”. It’s many degrees worse than unfortunate that, as Davis points out in a dazzlingly derisive passage, capitalists appear to have got there first.”Profit, not cosmic evolution, is the driving spirit of planetisation – its major metaphor, its omnipotent and universal truth,” he writes, flaying the free-market theorists and techno-libertarians for an utter disregard of the human and ecological costs of their greed and hypocrisy. The model Davis cites is that of The Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation – a wired-up way to achieve the “sweeping vision of planetary consciousness” envisaged by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.One world! The dream of “techno-utopians, new agers and cybertheorists”, not to mention eco-mystics and Gaia groupies, Marxists and Muslims, Christians and apocalyptics alike. The goal was “dropping the meat”: shucking off the body and its discontents and using cyberspace to lead a purely spiritual and intellectual existence, in ecstatic communion with a global brotherhood.