Feeling like a proper European in the first flush of the New Year, I wanted to check out the European Constitution's attitude to space travel, writes Kevin Myers.
So I logged into the EU website, typed in my request, and then began one of those interminable downloads which are now one of the many unforeseen aspects of new technology. After half an hour, the process was complete, and I logged out and with relish opened up the file to read about space in our united future. This is what I saw: 4èX4Kç$Bâ6=gl"¸÷îÒd)mÔâvfHFÏ/ÉÄô8$3Ó"BÒ¶(T§°qnæÈ. Thousands of times over.
It's possible that this is Lettish, or Polish, or Welsh, though I doubt it. It's more likely that it's one of these little scripts new technology possesses in its software in order to confound us, even as its hordes of little chips and microcircuits convulse with laughter. Put your ear to a computer, like with a seashell, and you can hear the faint hiss of silicate hysteria breezing through its interstices as the memory modules whisper their little jokes to one another.
The Internet linking us with gibberish. That was never the forecast. But then futurists always predict wrongly. The recent Government files reveal that 30 years ago an American scientist proposed turning the Blasket Islands into a launch station for spacecraft. By the year 2000, he said, "most of the raw materials used in industry would be obtained directly from the moon".
That was the consensus at the time: that we were on the edge of a new frontier which we were about to break gloriously through. Space was the future. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth. Space travel of any kind has proved to be prohibitively dangerous. And though space exploration - or so I believe: the hieroglyphs above were as far as I got in my search - is an imperative in the European Constitution, we know it doesn't mean much. It's there to placate the French lust for technological vainglory against the US, rather as our own constitutional embrace of Irish is a linguistic fetish which has no relevance to our real lives.
So, though I believe there's a proposal to put Europeans on Mars by the year 2040, or something like that, we might equally set a date by which Irish will be the first national language of Canada. It's all rubbish, all nonsense, all macho posturing. Almost no one in a single space agency has yet had the courage to state the truth: space exploration by human beings is not economic or sensible or rational. Manned space flight is a technological cul-de-sac into which you can only pour the lives of good men and women. It is morally wrong. It should be stopped.
Meanwhile, in the simpler things in life, we are going visibly backwards. One hundred years ago, there were several postal deliveries a day. A parcel sent from London would arrive at its Dublin destination the next day. No longer. The more likely outcome for a parcel sent from London is that it will be returned to sender without ever getting near the addressee. For this is the wonder-world of GLS, proof positive that merely because something has been privatised, and is driven by the wonders of profit and new technology, doesn't mean it will work.
GLS is a subsidiary of the comically awful British company Consignia. When it was the public company Royal Mail, it was able to transport parcels and letters punctually and efficiently all over the world. As Consignia, it seems incapable of scratching its own nose. It nonetheless has been given responsibility for deliveries of air-mail parcels to Ireland.
Here's how Consignia works. When a parcel arrives at its headquarters, it sends out a card saying that it has a parcel that it hasn't been able to deliver - because it probably hasn't even tried - and that you must contact it to arrange delivery. You are given a telephone number which you must ring in five days from the date the card was sent; otherwise the parcel is returned to sender. When you ring that number, you are - yes, that familiar hellhole of new technology - given an electronic menu to choose from. If want a heart transplant, press one, a sex change, press two, et cetera.
I have rung Consignia at least 20 times without ever managing to speak to a human. And anyway, since the cards warning of the arrival of the parcel may have arrived five days after the alleged arrival of the parcel, the chances are that the goods in question were probably already on their way back to the sender.
Why we have confiscated powers of delivery from An Post to give to the shower of inept buffoons of GLS is certainly worth investigation. But that's not my point here. It is that soothsayers never predicted a world in which the simple postal service which had functioned brilliantly for two almost centuries would in the 21st century cease to function at all, or that companies would be given monopoly over a particular service, and then be allowed to hide from the public behind impenetrable telephonic menus.
Europe's leaders have been gathering in Dublin to determine our future. Yet so much of our real future is indeterminable and unpredictable and beyond the power of elected politicians - though they, of course, would be the last to acknowledge that.
Greater by far than the politician's wand is the empire of unintended consequence, the most potent ruler of the world since the beginning of time.