We explore space, but our horizons narrow

More and more, we locate ourselves not in the universe but inside our own heads

My nephew, Jack, confidently expects that one day, and for many, many years, he will live in space. His outlook is all-encompassing, and he locates the universe as his home. Already, in his mid-teens, he is thoughtful about his mortality, keen to secure a lifespan enduring enough to allow him fully to achieve all that he wishes. He is acutely attuned to the development of technologies that, he hopes, will enable him to enjoy a life expectancy far beyond that accorded to past generations, in an environment that so many people seem to have stopped even imagining.

I love Jack's faith in the future, and his belief that it will be bigger and wider than anything on offer in the world he now inhabits. There is no doubt for him that the seven people who lost their lives at the weekend in the name of space exploration did not die in vain.

Much has already been said about the meaning of the deaths of the seven, and the point has been made again and again that in all feats of exploration, either of new lands or new technologies, heroic people laid down their lives.

And, of course, I know that Jack is not so unusual. People still stand in awe of the universe, and people still want to leave the earth behind. Even today, three human souls are out there, surely pondering not only the loss of their colleagues, but also a renewed understanding of their own terrible vulnerability.

But still, since my own childhood, there has been a huge shift in what the space programme means in the popular imagination. As a girl I also pictured a future in which trips into space might not be so very remarkable. Nor would jet packs for personal transport (and it was nice to see news reports last week suggesting that such dreams could soon come true), meal pills instead of food and paper clothing that its wearer would send off for recycling when it was worn out.

Instead, the future that arrived was altogether contradictory to the one that was predicted back in the Sixties and Seventies. Paradoxically, we now fetishise the elaborate preparation of food more than ever before, we worship the individuality of our "personal style" and we rely almost hysterically on the privacy that our cars afford us, as much as their convenience.

More and more, we locate ourselves not in the universe but inside our own heads. Technology, far from broadening our horizons, and enlarging our ambits, can be seen to have narrowed them. Of all the technologies that have an impact on our personal lives, it is the internet whose presence is most felt. We can access information without leaving our homes and discuss matters at length with people we never see.

More popularly, it seems, if the stories about most searched keywords are true and the e-mails offering individual porn sites are delivered to other addresses as frequently as they are to mine, we opt to enter into sexual liaisons without feeling the touch of another person's hand.

Nowadays we even prefer to purchase our holidays without venturing out to the travel agent. And while we may travel more widely than we used to, we have at the same time managed to become more insular, unwilling to learn the languages that others speak, unwilling even to share our own patch of earth with our fellow citizens of the world.

As the world becomes smaller, we appear to respond by retreating into what we refer to as individualism, but what instead involves doing the same as everyone else, but privately. Even the mobile phone, fêted as unleashing ever greater personal freedom, is a sort of shield, enabling us to communicate with those we know already, while the person next to us on the train is more likely than ever to remain a stranger.

Most of us nowadays are a great deal more concerned with endless exploration of our inner space – outer space is just the place where anyone a bit different to ourselves might as well have come from.

This reluctance to have any truck with the lives of unknown others is not seen just in these small ways, but in broader cultural shifts. From gated communities to sink estates, the signs of social polarisation and insularity are all around us.

Middle-class flight from state education has been as much a cause of its decline as a consequence of it. And often the worries that drive such decisions are more sociological than educational. Parents fear the sort of people their children might be educated alongside as much as they do any possible academic failure.

If a single salient fact about the Columbia disaster speaks eloquently of the tendency of technology to inure us from human feeling, rather than enhancing it, it is the dreadful auction of parts of the Columbia that immediately started on the internet. Yes, there was enough revulsion abroad for this "consumer service" to be withdrawn almost immediately. But still, it is sobering to consider how quickly systems can be organised for trading in human misery, and how many people find it appropriate to sign up to such systems.

Yet again, this sort of trade is familiar to us, even if the currency – space shuttle parts – has novelty. Those high priests of the cult of individualism, the celebrities, are expected to hawk their precious privacy in return for the maintenance of their elevation. We may mock Zoe Ball and Norman Cook as they keep the planet abreast of their disintegrating family.

But perhaps they simply cannot see a way of cancelling the deal they have made with their audience. Their behaviour is at least more logical than that of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Their case against a celebrity magazine that offered to the public gaze a wedding they had already sold to another magazine may be a milestone in the evolution of British privacy laws. But it is no less absurd for that.

The essence, I suppose, of why my nephew comes across as so refreshingly different is that he does not locate his interest, as so many young people do, in the world of celebrity gossip and reality television. He rejects this rancid brand of individualism and, in the process, marks himself out as an individual of singular intensity.

Before Saturday, we did not even know the names of the seven people who were out in space doing something we now acknowledge to be strange and wondrous, even if we don't understand exactly what it's for. Now the worry is that their deaths may jeopardise the space programme, not for any particular reason beyond a feeling that it provides a metaphor for a sort of human endeavour that we understand is rare and precious.

It is an expensive metaphor though, and one that does not bear too much examination. For when all is said and done, an evaluation of what the space programme actually hopes to achieve brings those who dream of the stars back to reality with a bump. For the space programme, no less than other aspect of Western life, is ruled by the desire not for expansion or exploration, but for withdrawal, protection and privacy.

The greatest ambition that we can muster for it is that it can offer a foolproof defence against missiles. From space, we can create gated communities out of entire nations, without troubling to learn the names of the people doing this for us until they have suffered awful deaths. No wonder Jack prefers the idea of living out in space. An empty universe is most attractive, when this world is so very, very full of so very, very little.

d.orr@independent.co.uk