Leopoldo Zea

Satellites and Our Morality

Are we facing a new dimension of the human? Is technology, in expanding the possibilities of man, going to create a new horizon of values? Will our morality, our strongly old-fashioned morality, remain static while man is given the possibility of realizing worlds which one can almost not venture to dream? These and many other questions face us as a result of the scientific discoveries of the last few years or, better still, the last few months.1 Hardly twelve years have passed [in 1958] since the moment when the whole world trembled before one of the most fantastic discoveries, one of the greatest deeds realized by man in his effort to dominate nature: the discovery and use of atomic energy. Man entered a new age, which would from then on be called the atomic age. But how did man enter into this age that should have filled all of humanity with pride? Everyone remembers. We all remember that terrible date — August 5, 1945 — as an ominous date in human history. We did not enter into the atomic age with the happiness of a man who has overcome an obstacle, but with shame and terror. On August 5, 1945, man demonstrated his capacity not for creation, but for destruction. An energy, a tremendous energy which, underestimated within the possibilities that man had established for it, was transformed by human hands into a powerful instrument of destruction. That which this force had not done for man in thousands of years, it was doing now under the direction of man himself. Hiroshima on that day, and Nagasaki on the ninth day of the same month, signaled the entrance of humanity into the atomic age.