Can Elephants Be Persons?

Personhood for Happy would create a legal precedent and framework for granting fundamental rights to nonhumans in the future.

Sarah Kasbeer Dissent Magazine

If Happy the elephant were allowed to live a natural life in the wild, she would likely spend her days roaming miles of tropical forest and plucking fruit and leaves from trees with the finger-like tip of her trunk. She would have grown up as part of a complex social system, in which elephant calves are doted on by older siblings, cousins, and aunts. By age forty-seven, Happy would likely have already raised multiple calves of her own. She would trumpet with excitement at the other members of her herd and call to potential mates using infrasonic rumbles that travel long distances, inaudible to the human ear.\

But Happy does not do any of this. She currently lives alone at the Bronx Zoo. And recently, she has become the subject of an unusual custody battle that could result in her release. In 2018, an advocacy group called the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a writ of habeas corpus (Latin for “produce the body”) on Happy’s behalf, and, for the first time, a court heard the case for an elephant’s legal personhood and subsequent right to bodily liberty. Previous habeas petitions by the NhRP, designed to challenge the captivity of chimps, have been unsuccessful. But the arguments have succeeded in furthering the debate around whether animals—especially those proven to have high levels of cognition—should qualify as more than just “things” under the law.

Elephants have a knack for demonstrating that they think, feel, and remember—in a way humans can easily understand. Famous for ritualized expressions of grief, they have been observed covering deceased family members with leaves and dirt, touching their bodies, and even visiting their gravesites. The elephant’s trunk, a combination nose and upper lip that contains 40,000 muscles, is capable of expressing compassion and annoyance in a human-like manner through affectionate touches and playful shoves. An elephant can even apparently communicate an aversion to captivity, by pulling at the rope around its neck or stuffing leaves into the bell on its collar to avoid being easily found for the start of a logging shift.

If Happy could return to the wild now, she would likely face an entirely new set of threats. In the last century, the elephant population in Asia has declined dramatically. Approximately 45,000 remain, many of which have been forced into captivity for the tourism and logging industries, or are used by panhandlers in cities like Bangkok to beg for money or food. Their habitats have been destroyed by deforestation, slash-and-burn agriculture, and human settlements that choke off critical migration routes. Due to the fragmentation of forests and lack of natural corridors connecting them, elephants trample and raid human crops in their search for food and water. Humans retaliate with violence, further squeezing what has already become a dwindling habitat.

In the larger scheme of things, one might argue that Happy doesn’t have it all that bad. Captured in or around Thailand along with six other calves in the 1970s, she was sold to a now-defunct California corporation called Lion Country Safari. She was transferred to the Bronx Zoo in 1977, where she lived with a companion elephant, Grumpy (also named after one of Snow White’s seven dwarfs), for twenty-five years. In 2002, the zoo’s other elephant duo, Patty and Maxine, charged Grumpy, who failed to recover from her injuries and had to be euthanized.

In the wild, Asian elephants spend their entire lives in matrilineal groups made up mostly of females. The males leave during adolescence to form loose bachelor herds. To replicate natural social conditions, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums recommend that females in captivity be kept in groups of three or more. After Grumpy’s death, Happy was then paired with another young female, Sammy—also euthanized after suffering from a liver disease, the third elephant to die at the Bronx Zoo in four years. A week after Sammy’s death, the zoo announced it would phase out its elephant exhibit all together, limiting Happy’s prospects for a new partner anytime soon.

In 2012, the New York Post ran a story about Happy’s lonely predicament, which gained traction with animal rights and wildlife conservation groups. In response, the zoo maintained Happy had “auditory and tactile” contact with the other elephants, and was not—as petitions that had begun circling the internet suggested—in “solitary confinement.” The interest in her plight grew in 2015, when the organization In Defense of Animals placed the Bronx Zoo in its “hall of shame,” listing it among the ten worst zoos in the country for elephants. Happy has now lived alone for over a decade.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, scientists began amassing evidence about the spectrum of animal sentience. Their findings supported Darwin’s theory of evolutionary continuity, that differences between species were differences in degree—not in kind. In 2005, researchers studying the evolution of cognition gave the elephants at the Bronx Zoo the mark test for mirror self-recognition (MSR), a behavioral indicator of self-awareness. A 2001 study had demonstrated MSR in dolphins, an attribute previously thought to be associated only with humans and primates. Scientists theorized MSR correlated with “higher forms of empathy and altruistic behavior.” Because elephants have large brains and exhibit attentiveness to the needs of others, they were the next logical species to test.

Animals with MSR tend to pass through four stages: 1. Social response (which can be aggressive displays), 2. Physical inspection of the mirror itself (checking behind it), 3. Self-directed behavior (examining parts of their own bodies), and 4. The mark test, in which a mark is painted on an otherwise imperceptible area of the body to see if the animal will spontaneously touch it in front of a mirror. None of the Bronx Zoo elephants fell for the illusion of “another elephant,” but only Happy passed through the final stage. When faced with her reflection, she used the tip of her trunk to touch a white “X” that had been painted on one side of her head, while ignoring a clear “X” painted on the other, demonstrating that she was responding to the representation of herself and not something she felt or remembered.

Because Happy passed the litmus test for MSR, her species was added to a growing list of animals capable of demonstrating self-awareness. In front of the mirror, self-aware species act a lot like humans. Chimps groom parts of their body they could not see without a mirror; dolphins have been observed examining their genitals. Maxine the elephant pulled one of her ears forward to look at it from different angles. The implications of self-awareness, however, could extend beyond visible, physical aspects to include an ability to reflect on private thoughts and autobiographical experiences. If Happy is lonely, she may have the ability to dwell on it.

Renowned conservationist Daphne Sheldrick, who helped rescue and rehabilitate over 150 orphaned African elephants over the course of her lifetime, called them the most “emotionally human” of all land mammals. They possess strong social bonds and have been known to console each other with reassuring touches. In a gesture that may be akin to handholding, an elephant will place its trunk in a companion’s mouth. They experience affective empathy and emotional contagion, responding to the distress of another with distressed symptoms of their own: standing with their tails pointed straight out while vocalizing rumbles, trumpets, and roars.

It has long been said that to anthropomorphize—ascribe human characteristics to animals—while intuitive and enjoyable, is unscientific and misguided. But given the recent research into animal consciousness, what was once considered a cardinal sin of ethology has since returned to favor, so long as it’s implemented responsibly. Some scholars now argue that we can use our human experiences to create testable hypotheses about animal behavior. Anthropomorphic empathy has been a driving force in improving conditions for zoo animals—granting them more space, companions, and “enrichment” toys.

The urge to anthropomorphize is a common psychological tendency, triggered by experiences such as recognizing the existence of a face, perceiving movements as lifelike, and making eye contact. We are predisposed to identify with the objects of our anthropomorphism, whether animal or robot, and only through a subsequent cultural judgment do we “correct” this impulse and downgrade their moral standing. While we cannot rely solely on intuition to make inferences about why animals behave the way they do, to ignore it entirely would amount to “anthropodenial.” The term was coined by Frans de Waal, primatologist and co-author of the MSR study at the Bronx Zoo, to describe the pervasively harmful idea that animals do not have inner lives worthy of our consideration—an idea that has allowed their brutalization and inhumane treatment to continue for centuries.

A few years ago, I sat in an off-road vehicle in Masai Mara, Kenya, watching a family of wild African elephants trek down a hill toward a stretch of grassland. In the background, a rocky escarpment dotted with pine-colored acacia trees rose above the savannah. Two elephant calves were traveling side by side, but when they got to a small embankment, the larger one climbed easily down while the smaller one stood atop it and squealed. The calf’s mother seemed to hear his cries, but kept browsing for food, plucking up clumps of greenery and stuffing them in her mouth. Two other females came to the aid of the baby instead, guiding him down with their trunks.

There was something relatable about this scene—the desire to do what your slightly older cousin is doing while your exasperated mother ignores your pleas. In an ideal world, this is the kind of behavior zoos could show us. It could cause us to become more empathetic toward our nonhuman neighbors. But zoos rarely have the resources to give animals like elephants the space or companions they need to move and socialize as they would in the wild. The education that zoos claim to provide the public is inaccurate at best. The editors of Scientific American argued in 2014 that elephants don’t belong in zoos at all.

Inappropriate climate aside, the Bronx Zoo, operated by the Wildlife Conservation Society, should be one of the better zoos for elephants. The facility receives over 2 million visitors a year to its well-maintained 265 acres. It was the subject of The Zoo, a documentary series that aired in 2017 and 2018 on Animal Planet and explored what it takes to care for over 6,000 animals. One episode highlights how they’ve modernized their elephant husbandry practices from a circus-style “free contact” method to “protected contact,” in which the animals are separated from keepers by barriers and motivated with positive reinforcement.

In the episode, which has been criticized by animal rights groups for whitewashing Happy’s conditions, Bronx Zoo director Jim Breheny admits that the future of ethical captivity for elephants is to keep them in multi-generational herds. Although captive breeding may create a healthier social environment, it also raises new ethical considerations. Who will actually benefit from forcing entire elephant families to live out their lives in confined spaces, never knowing the freedom or hardship of the wild?

Despite having lived in New York City for over a decade, I had never been to the Bronx Zoo until I learned about Happy and decided to visit her. I started in the JungleWorld exhibit, where I felt a familiar tinge of shame at the casual cruelty on display. Both children and adults pounded on the cracked glass to provoke reactions from the small monkeys inside, who looked back intently from their perches, their tails hanging down from tree branches. A grizzly bear meandered about in an outdoor habitat nearby, enjoying the September sun. I stopped to watch his shaggy brown outline before breezing by a family of giraffes, almost missing the orange head of a tiger peeking up through the shrubbery.

To see the elephants, you take a twenty-minute monorail ride that overlooks their single-acre enclosure, open from May to October. As my car approached a grassy incline, I could make out a lone brown elephant at the top of the hill. From afar I couldn’t identify her, but the conductor confirmed the solitary pachyderm was indeed Happy. The edges of her ears were pink, as if they’d been dipped in Easter-egg dye, with blotches of brown skin peeking through like oversized freckles. The monorail doesn’t stop, so my eyes scanned the trees, hoping to get a good look at her through a clearing. She appeared almost childlike standing next to an oversized log, flapping her ears and swinging her trunk. My on-demand access to a fifteen-second glimpse of Happy’s captive existence hardly seemed worth a lifetime of her freedom.

Two days after my visit, the NhRP filed a writ of habeas corpus on her behalf, asking a judge to recognize her “personhood” and subsequent common-law right to bodily liberty. Personhood, their attorneys argue, should be interpreted not as a synonym for human being, but as a container for civil rights. Even U.S. corporations have achieved some of the privileges and duties associated with legal personhood, including the ability to sue and be sued, to own property, and to enjoy some First Amendment protections.

Happy’s circumstances cannot be rectified with animal welfare statutes, which mostly only prevent “unnecessary suffering.” And since she’s not a legal person, she lacks the standing required to become the plaintiff in a lawsuit. If granted, a habeas petition requires the agent of the detainment to show up in court and defend its legality—a method that has been previously employed to force the issue of personhood. In Somerset v. Stewart, attorneys successfully used it to challenge slavery laws in eighteenth-century Great Britain.

Over the last two hundred years in the United States, the definition of legal personhood has expanded to include slaves, indigenous people, women, and children. Could certain animals be next? Although the NhRP is only asking the court to recognize one right for Happy—bodily liberty—neither full nor partial rights for a nonhuman would be entirely unprecedented. In 2017, courts in two U.S. states began considering the well-being of cats, dogs, and other animals in divorce proceedings, blurring the lines between person and property. The same year, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River full legal personhood, including all of the “rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” Two legal human guardians were appointed to advocate on its behalf. And in 2015, a court in Argentina declared a zoo orangutan named Sandra “una persona no humana” and ordered her released into the custody of a sanctuary.

Success in Happy’s case would require finding a judge sympathetic enough to be the first in the United States to grant personhood to an animal. Although her guardianship would be determined by the courts, the NhRP has recommended Happy be released to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in San Andreas, California, a sanctuary that could provide care for her on a property of more than 2,000 acres, where ex-performing and abused elephants forage freely and choose their own social partners.

According to the Bronx Zoo, Happy shows no signs of physical or emotional distress and is closely bonded with her human caretakers. Zoo spokespersons have suggested that she also might not get along with new elephants, and that a cross-country move poses risks to her health. But an affidavit filed by the preeminent research scientist Joyce Poole lays out examples of half a dozen elephants—some with noted “aggression” issues likely due to captive circumstances—who have been successfully moved long distances and integrated into sanctuary populations. Poole noted that some of Happy’s behavior, like the trunk swinging I observed, was likely a stereotypical response to an environment that doesn’t meet her physical and emotional needs.

A 2016 study of over fifty Asian elephants in sanctuaries in Thailand, most of whom had previously been used for captive performance, riding, or work in the logging industries, found that between one-third and one-half exhibited symptoms of human-like PTSD, including mood disturbances (anxiety and aggression), tension-reducing repetitive behaviors, and fear of the trauma-related stimulus. Scientists have long reported an epidemic of PTSD in wild African elephants, stemming from decades of violent culling, poaching, maternal separation, and capture for captive trade. Slaughtering the adults is the easiest way to separate a calf from the herd, and elephants that suffer formative traumas during the first year of their lives have shown a reduced ability to handle stressful situations later on.

A court in Orleans County, New York, heard oral arguments for Happy’s right to liberty in December 2018. The case stalled when the judge granted the zoo’s motion to transfer proceedings to Bronx County, which could prove less sympathetic. At the time this article went to press, the courts had not yet announced whether they would hear the petition. Since Maxine was also euthanized in November, after suffering from an illness for a year, Happy’s situation feels even more urgent.

Although personhood seems like a good option to those who believe animals should have fundamental rights, it is a fraught legal and philosophical concept—with implications for reproductive rights and ethical issues with artificial intelligence. What level of consciousness qualifies a “person” as such? Self-awareness in humans only begins at around age two, and some theories of personhood based on cognitive, emotional, and psychological capacities would actually include select animals while excluding some humans, such as infants and comatose adults. Even the court’s definition of who constitutes a legal person is vague and can seem arbitrary.

The NhRP’s first client, a retired performing chimp named Tommy, was found living alone in a cage in a cement shed on his owner’s used trailer lot. Fulton County courts ruled that Tommy could not be a legal person entitled to habeas relief because: 1. A chimp is not human, 2. A chimp cannot participate in the human social contract, and 3. A chimp cannot bear the responsibilities and duties associated with personhood. (The NhRP disagreed that any of these were prerequisites for legal personhood or even accurate premises.) Although Judge Eugene Fahey of the New York Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, he conceded that “the issue whether a nonhuman animal has a fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus is profound and far-reaching. Ultimately, we will not be able to ignore it.”

Personhood for Happy would create a legal precedent and framework for granting fundamental rights to nonhumans in the future—a step in the right direction for those of us who believe animals deserve more than just protection from unnecessary suffering. As our understanding of the animal psyche evolves, so must our definition of what ethical treatment looks like.

In 1982, the Bronx Zoo held a birthday party for Patty’s newborn calf Astor, whose floppy ears and rambunctious behavior had already endeared him to zoo patrons. Back then, Happy and Grumpy regularly gave rides and performed for shows that a keeper at the time referred to as “strictly educational.” At the party, Grumpy lost a tug-of-war to the Fordham University football team. There was a special birthday cake for Astor made from Italian bread, apples, carrots, and flowers. A few months later, Astor, the three-foot elephant calf, died from a heart condition.

It’s unlikely that, say, an arachnid would have been given such an impressive birthday celebration, or been memorialized in the New York Times as “mischievous” and “inquisitive.” One of the downsides to anthropomorphism, besides self-indulgence, is that it tends to favor those like us—mammals and other vertebrates. Ironically, “speciesism,” a form of discrimination often cited by animal rights groups that assigns a different value to different species, also serves as a basis for an argument against personhood for nonhumans. If we give an elephant rights, what does that mean for the rest of the animal kingdom?

There will always be resistance to recognizing the need to rethink our relationship to the world around us—to admit we got it wrong before we got it right. Personhood as a legal concept may not be appropriate for all beings. But to deny it to one simply because we do not wish to grant it to all is illogical. We are already engaging in an extreme form of speciesism by placing our own need to dominate the planet’s resources above of the rights of other species to exist. The least we could do is use our ability to navigate complex ethical dilemmas—our so-called human exceptionalism—to address injustice by whatever means possible. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, only the best option in a given situation. For Happy, it’s an elephant-

shaped container for civil rights.

Sarah Kasbeer lives in New York and writes about humans and other animals.

An Interstellar Probe 93 Billion Miles!

An Interstellar Probe 93 Billion Miles!

Sarah Kaplan Washington Post

LAUREL, Md. — One of the top prizes in the March 1970 Fort Worth Regional Science Fair — a slide rule and a free dinner in Dallas — went to a high school junior named Ralph McNutt, who had written 30 pages on the question “Interstellar travel: Is it feasible?” and built a cardboard scale model of the spacecraft he said could be the first to visit another sun. 

Humans had landed on the moon the previous summer, the 16-year-old noted in the treatise his mother transcribed for him on her Royal No. 10 typewriter. Soon, he was sure, we would venture to all the other planets of the solar system. Then it would be time for the next step: “Going to the stars.” 

On a sweaty summer afternoon, McNutt sits in his office at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a 65-year-old with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch and thinning hair. On his computer screen is the latest draft of his boyhood dream: a plan for a probe that would travel 1,000 times farther than Earth is from the sun, leaving behind the safety of our solar system to explore the wilds of interstellar space. 

From that far-flung vantage point, Interstellar Probe will help humans finally see ourselves for what we truly are, McNutt says: citizens of a galaxy. Our home planet will be just one world among many, and the sun that gives us life just another pinprick of light in the endless dark. 

It’s an audacious proposal, even by space travel standards. The probe would take 50 years to reach its destination, by which time nearly everyone currently involved in the project will be dead. 

Nevertheless, McNutt and a cadre of fellow dreamers hope to get an important endorsement in a few years, when the nation’s space scientists release a list of their top research priorities. To get Interstellar Probe on the agenda, its supporters must convince their colleagues that its goal is scientifically valuable, not to mention politically viable, when there are so many questions inside the solar system still unanswered and so many Earthly squabbles still unsolved. 

What makes McNutt believe it’s possible? 

The scientist leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. When he answers, it’s in the form of poetry. 

“I think man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” he says, paraphrasing Robert Browning. “Otherwise, what is a heaven for?” 

McNutt shows off his slide rule — a mechanical instrument for making mathematical calculations — which he won as a high school student for a science fair presentation on interstellar travel. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) 

93 billion miles from the sun 

Our sun sits on a minor arm of the spinning, star-strewn pinwheel of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core. Zooming through the cosmos at roughly half a million miles per hour, the solar system is buffeted by gusts of gas and dust and bombarded by energetic particles whose origins are a mystery. 

But we on Earth are partly shielded from this chaos by the heliosphere, a balloon-like structure inflated by the solar wind. Charged particles flowing from the sun stream out to the edge of the solar system — past the planets, beyond Pluto, through the frozen halo of the Kuiper belt, to a place called the heliopause. 

This is the liminal zone between the river of solar particles and the ocean of interstellar space; the boundary between our celestial neighborhood and the wider universe. 

Only two spacecraft have reached that zone and lived to tell the tale: the twin Voyager probes, which launched in 1977 and took more than 35 years to reach the heliopause. (The Pioneer probes left the solar system but were defunct by that time.) Now their radio communications are increasingly feeble, and several instruments have failed. 

Voyager 1, the most distant human-built object in the universe, is now 145 astronomical units from Earth (an astronomical unit is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun). At that pace, it would take 283 years to reach 1,000 AU — 93 billion miles from the sun — the place McNutt hopes to reach. 

“To really explore what’s out there . . . you want to get out of the solar system as quickly as possible,” he said. 

And for that, you need a really big rocket. 

NASA might soon have one. The ultrapowerful (but long-delayed) Space Launch System, which is capable of nearly twice as much thrust as the biggest rocket in operation, is expected to make its first flight sometime in 2020 or 2021. 

With the SLS, Interstellar Probe could leave Earth at a speed of about 9 miles per second. After looping around Jupiter, the probe would fall back toward the sun, picking up speed from our star’s gravitational pull. It would pass the orbits of the inner planets and soar through the solar corona until finally, just above the sun’s blazing surface, it would fire a second rocket and zoom off into the dark as fast as 60 miles per second. At that blistering — and admittedly aspirational — pace, it would need little more than a decade to reach the heliopause. 

The travel time would not be wasted. Kathy Mandt, a planetary scientist, has been exploring the potential for Interstellar Probe to fly past Uranus, Neptune or an icy body in the Kuiper belt called Quaoar. 

Abigail Rymer, a physicist, is dreaming up ways for the mission to assist research on exoplanets. One experiment might involve looking back at the planets with the same techniques scientists on Earth use to study alien worlds. 

“Against the backdrop of the stars,” she says, “we will see our habitable home . . . and we’ll have a better understanding of what habitability means.” 

Crossing the boundary into interstellar space, the probe could scan for dust and slurp up particles to help researchers understand the structure of the heliosphere and the material from which our solar system formed. 

And once it departed the sun’s protective bubble, it could finally study phenomena the heliosphere obscures: galactic cosmic rays from exploding stars; light from the afterglow of the big bang; disks of debris where planets are forming around other suns. 

The right time to try? 

For now, Interstellar Probe exists only in the form of PowerPoint presentations and a twinkle in McNutt’s eye. His team has received about $700,000 for concept studies, and they are waiting to hear whether NASA will give them an additional $6.5 million over the next three years to pull together a more detailed science plan and mission design. 

Their do-or-die moment will come in 2023, when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are slated to publish their next decadal survey for solar and space physics. These assessments, conducted every 10 years at the request of Congress and NASA, represent the official consensus on the nation’s space science goals and guide NASA’s budget in subsequent years. 

If Interstellar Probe is going to launch in McNutt’s lifetime, it needs to be ranked as a top priority. 

“It was always something we couldn’t do immediately, but set aside maybe for the future,” says Richard Mewaldt, a Caltech physicist who served as chair for the solar and heliospheric physics panel during the most recent decadal survey, published in 2013. That report ranked “advance planning” for an interstellar probe eighth among nine imperatives for NASA. 

Mewaldt notes that NASA’s heliophysics division — which would oversee an interstellar mission — gets the least funding of any of the agency’s science divisions. Interstellar Probe might fare better if the planners get an endorsement from the planetary science community, who could benefit from flights past the ice giants or through the Kuiper belt. Yet the scientific world tends to be siloed, he says, making it difficult to get missions funded across multiple NASA divisions. 

Even if the project goes forward, it’s not clear how a spacecraft could survive the solar flyby. The best heat shield humans have ever made, currently flying on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, is designed to keep a spacecraft safe within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface. To achieve its desired speed, Interstellar Probe would need to get more than twice as close. 

“There is a moment for every big mission, almost an ‘aha’ moment, when the technology is ready and you’ve got a plan and it makes sense and is going to answer the science questions,” says Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division. The heat shield problem, she says, still stands between Interstellar Probe and that moment. 

But then again, she says, there also comes a moment for every big mission when scientists simply decide that now is the right time to try. 

Another question looms over the mission, one that goes beyond issues of budgets and bureaucracy to the boundaries of what humans can accomplish. 

Rarely has the gulf between what the world can do and what it will do seemed so vast. 

'They just can't wait for the future to come' 

But maybe, Mandt says, the apparent audacity of an interstellar mission is exactly what makes it worth trying. 

“This would be an example of a large group of people working together on something multigenerational,” she says. “Which is the same thing we need with climate change.” 

Members of the Interstellar Probe team, she noted, range from fellows just out of graduate school to people staving off retirement. They come from at least eight countries. They include planetary scientists, astronomers, engineers and a particle physicist. 

Last fall, Mandt invited Janet Vertesi of Princeton, who has conducted ethnographic studies of spacecraft teams, to advise the team on organizational issues. It is the first time they know of that a sociologist has been involved in the conception of a NASA mission. 

Her job is to “remind them of the human side,” Vertesi says: How to resolve conflict. Where to store data. How to conduct outreach so that the demographics of the project team today reflect the more diverse nation that will launch the probe in decades to come. 

“We’re testing out this notion that you can actually plan a mission up front to achieve certain social objectives, too,” Vertesi says. 

In these “uncertain times,” she adds, it’s a heady feeling to take part in something so inherently optimistic. To watch as a computer calculates the precise location of the planets on the date 50 years from now. To see scientists commit the remainders of their careers to an idea whose fruition they may never live to see. 

“These people,” she says, “they just can’t wait for the future to come.” 

At his office in Maryland, McNutt turns away from the unfinished plan on his computer screen and tries to visualize the moment when Interstellar Probe reaches the void between the stars. 

There’s no way of knowing what it will find out there, beyond the veil of the solar wind. But of one thing, he is certain. 

When the probe turns toward Earth to beam back the data it has gathered, it will have in its sights “one of the most special places in the universe,” McNutt says: the small, watery world where it was first dreamed into being. 

in Search of America’s Best Orgasm

My Road Trip in Search of America’s Best Orgasm

What started as a search for the ultimate auto-erotic experience became a fantastic voyage into my own body.

Stephanie Theobald The Daily Beast

When I attended the New York “masturbation master class” thrown by 86-year-old rock and roll feminist Betty Dodson in April 2015, I had no idea that the experience would be so mind-blowing that it would set me off on a road trip across America.

Betty’s message is that masturbation is the foundation of every woman’s sexuality and my goal was to gain more of this wisdom by meeting more of the sex-positive legends from the 1970s and 1980s. To begin with, I wasn’t sure of my itinerary, but I’d been told that former porn-star-turned-cult-sex-artist Annie Sprinkle had christened San Francisco “The Clitoris of America,” so that was where I was headed.

#MeToo was yet to happen, but these incredible women were waiting in the wings. Their message that female pleasure is political and that shame-free love of your body is the ultimate road to true “female empowerment” now seems very timely. Every night of my 3,000-mile journey I did my solo sex “homework” to keep my mojo rising. I had twenty $100 bills in my suitcase to last me for my three-month trip, so while the physical realities of my lodgings were often stark, the kinky movies I invented in my head could take me anywhere.

What started as a search for the ultimate auto-erotic experience became a fantastic voyage into my own body. Sex Drive: On The Road To A Pleasure Revolution is my account of that journey. In this passage, I have just left the Arkansas home of Joycelyn Elders, 82, the notorious African-American Surgeon General who was fired by Bill Clinton in 1994 for saying that masturbation should be talked about in schools.

I spend that night in Hope, Arkansas, the birthplace of Bill Clinton. There doesn’t seem to be much hope in Hope. My motel is called the Village Inn, although there are no garland-festooned maypoles or jaunty hanging baskets of geraniums. Still, the smell inside my room makes me feel at home. I’ve not been in a cheap American motel ($42 including tax) since I made a road trip across the US with a friend of mine fifteen years ago. The police-station lighting, the whiff that hits you when you walk through the door: high-octane air freshener fighting a battle with something dirty and seedy. And plastic curtains. Are they worried about men ejaculating on the windows?

A particularly heavy Tex Mex meal (the El Caballero Dinner: a tamale, a chicken burrito, a beef burrito and a hard-shell taco for $11.95) just outside Hope has put paid to any thoughts of solo sexual activity tonight. The meal tasted of warm foam and I knew it was my lucky day when the tax on the bill came to $1.11 (more on that later). So I curl up with my bellyache and watch a TV show called Lock Up: Extended Stay, a program about life inside different American prisons. I watch the San Antonio, Texas, episode (concentrating mostly on Latino criminals and young gay men) and then the episode in the prison in Cleveland, Ohio. This focuses on the all-black Heartless gang also known as “the Family.” It’s great TV for a foreigner like me. The stress proves too much for one Family member and he goes crazy, smearing himself with his own feces. I finish the night with the TLC channel, which has great shows about fat people, and drop off watching My 600-lb Life.

The next morning, I see that my door has been open all night because the lock is broken. Outside is a damp, grey vista: wet concrete, an abandoned swimming pool, the sound of thundering traffic, a few brave trees soldiering on. Still, I’m excited to make porridge in my $14 Sunbeam kettle from Target. Inside is a black hotplate you can make toast on. Or heat water or beans or porridge. It’s genius. I get very excited by the idea of self-sufficiency. I mix oats and linseed and let it bubble for ten minutes. It’s pretty disgusting, but at least it’s hot. I eat it, wandering around by the front of the Village Inn, wondering if I should have gone to the Yellow Top Smokery Barbeque with a sign saying “Breakfast. Dollar Menu. Trucker Special. Be Happy.” There’s a green Art Nouveau-style lamp by the derelict swimming pool. It’s a replica of one of Hector Guimard’s 1920s réverbères for the Paris Metro.

Maybe someone apart from Bill Clinton did have hope once in Hope. But then a man throwing junk into a dumpster starts looking at me like I’m weird. I get in the car and get the hell out of Arkansas.

I make a brief stop-off in the adjacent state of Texas to pick up some weed from a friend of a friend who lives in a self-sufficient rural compound in the middle of nowhere. Christina turns out to be a stoner conspiracy-theorist internet French teacher and she’s a great hostess. I’ve forgotten how vast America is. I’m exhausted after my five-hour drive and her welcome and her weed make me feel very happy.

When I hit the road the next morning, I finally experience that “Woo hoo! I’m driving west!” feeling. The sun’s out, I’m down to a T-shirt and Prince is blasting out a tune about a sex fiend called Nikki, who he meets in a motel lobby masturbating with a magazine.

As the immensity of America unrolls before my eyes, I listen to songs on my newly burned CD. By the time I hit the entrance to the 290, the sex fiend from “Darling Nikki” has captured Prince and taken him to her device-filled castle. Here, the lights go out, and Nikki starts to grind.

“Darling Nikki” turns into “A Little Respect,” Erasure’s 1988 synth-pop classic, which is by turns elegiac and euphoric. It climbs to a massively high note, which I can never quite reach, but here in the car it doesn’t matter if I’m a terrible singer. That’s the great thing about a solo drive: you can let yourself go and not care what anyone else thinks. “To-oo, oo- oo meeeee!” I miss the high note again and laugh as the blue skies and green trees whizz along outside the window. Then “Yellow” by Coldplay comes on. I know this is the thin end of the wedge of good musical taste, but I don’t care, because nobody else can hear it. It’s like masturbation. Your dirty thoughts could be the equivalent of Barry Manilow and The Teletubbies theme tune rolled into one, but if they hold you spellbound, it doesn’t matter.

By 2 p.m. the land has become desert. It’s so hot that I stop off in a desolate place called Ozona, where the only sign of life is a gas station. I pump some gas and go inside to pay. It’s wonderfully cool and I spend a while perusing the impressive jerky selection: beef jerky, BBQ jerky, green lime jerky, cowboy-style jerky and, my favorite, teriyaki jerky. At the cash desk, a man with glossy black hair is being short with one of the snowbirds, as they term the old people who drive west for the winter. It’s quite unusual to hear rudeness in Texas. When it’s my turn, the man narrows his eyes and asks me if I’m on my own. When I was hitch-hiking around France one summer in my early twenties, I would reply “Je suis mariée” to the truck drivers who picked me up and invariably asked me this same question. But now I’m nearly fifty, so I tell the man that yes, I am alone. Whereupon, without any trace of humor he says, “When you drive back this way, stop off and we can have a meal together,” with the brass of some toff back in London saying, “Darling, shall we do lunch at the Wolseley next Tuesday?”

I get back in the car and don’t really enjoy the jerky because of the man with glossy hair. And then as I drive on, the heat turns to really hot heat. This is the part of Texas where things become arid. I’m soon driving through miles of burned, scrubby land framed by ugly flat mountains and a relentless glassy blue sky. I’ve got the window open because someone told me that air con uses up petrol, but the outside air feels like hairdryer air and the noise means I can’t even hear my music any more. I try and call some friends but nobody picks up. This is the reality of a solo road trip: driving through a dry, repetitive terrain for hours on end and you’re all on your own.

I stop for the night in a place called Van Horn. It’s where Central Time becomes Mountain Time. You are literally on the edge of time. I spark up some Texan happy weed in my new motel room at the Desert Inn. It’s a no-smoking room, but one joint isn’t going to change the lemon-tinged low-income smell. When I go for a sunset wander, everything is collapsed or crumbled. La Cocina de Maria is boarded up next to a deserted welding shop. A dilapidated sign offers “Liquor and Beer” to nobody any more, but thanks to the sky, everything man-made can be forgiven. This is the part of America where the desert spell begins. An eerie pink and baby blue light bathes everything at this hour. What a show. It becomes a spectacular finale when there’s a long, plaintive wail and an endless freight train rushes across the plains. Trains make America feel like the oldest, most romantic place in the whole world, as if cowboys or brigands might leap on at any minute to hitch a free ride west.

Back in the room, Virginia and her Windex spray bottle cross my mind. I wish I’d brought the scented candle she offered me back in New York. I sit cross-legged on my hoodie on top of the polyester bedcover eating some quinoa with black bits in that I boiled up in the Sunbeam kettle. My back’s killing me and my tummy’s bloated from my imminent period, but my luxury is that I’ve come up with the idea of putting a white T-shirt over the nylon pillowcase so my face doesn’t get contaminated in the night.

I fall asleep but jerk awake at six, pre-period horny. I try and forget about the cigarette burns in the Desert Inn sheet and get down to some homework. I think, Oh God, I hope it’s not going to be the horrible glossy- haired man at the gas station. But when I close my eyes, there he is, being rude to the friendly snowbird. Then he’s in the motel with me, making me suck his dick. Virginia is in the back of my mind in all this. The sucking gets boring so I lie on top of him, but that reminds me of what I do with Hadji. And then something lights up. A red and silver chrome Kenworth truck. Three steps up into the leather passenger seat. A driver sits next to me with his ratty ponytail. A flash of calloused hands and a red velvet curtain. It feels glamorous to be sitting up here, high in a black capsule with a dashboard of glittering lights. There’s a blur of gearsticks, a jangle of buckles, the tug of old leather and a cock that feels like velvet as it knocks against my growing clit. The truck driver pulls me to the mattress behind the cab’s red curtains and luckily there’s no sense of smell in this trucker dream world. In the Desert Inn motel, I’m lying on my front, head in my white T-shirt over the pillow, the right side of my face drooling onto a sheet whose whiff I’m not aware of any more.

Sex Drive: On The Road To A Pleasure Revolution by Stephanie Theobald is published by Unbound.