NASA people are 18th Century types, pre-Jules Verne, pre-H.G. Wells. They live in a kind of nursery world like in Yellow Submarine. NASA is a very old fashioned bunch, semi-literate, never been through the real course. Anyway, the stuff they put out is cheap science fiction. It’s hardware. And it’s thanks to their ignorance of literacy in its full sense and ignorance of auditory space. Now the peculiarity of auditory space – and I’m simply challenging anyone of them to come forward, any scientist at all. I’ve met them on their own ground many times on this point. Auditory space is a very peculiar thing and we live in echoland now, in a simultaneous, instantaneous, all-at-once world, that is echoland, and that is auditory space. And space has a very peculiar property. It is a perfect sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. It is totally nonvisual and nonvisualizable. Our DNA boys and our NASA boys still try to visualize space, meaning they have no relation whatever to the science they talk about.
Address to the Author's Luncheon, 1966; video is on Youtube; transcript, 16:30
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan