IN 1957 ALBERT CAMUS WON THE Nobel Prize for Literature, Ian Fleming published From Russia With Love, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night was staged in New York, and Samuel Beckett wrote Endgame.

On Alderley Edge, that strange and ancient part of the Cheshire landscape, the Lovell Telescope first pointed its radio receiver into space. Jodrell Bank was beginning its life where Sir Gawain had almost met his end under the axe of the Green Knight. The telescope belongs in the mists and mystery of Alderley Edge as much as the 14th-century poem does. Cheshire is one of the earliest known human settlements in the British Isles; it feels ancient and of long lineage. Our ancestors must have spent a lot of time on Alderley Edge looking up at the stars, and there is a symmetry in the fact that we still do.

Alan Garner, the author of The Owl Service, whose house looks straight at the telescope, understands a thing or two about deep symmetries. If you visit Jodrell Bank in winter, and see the telescope appearing suddenly and unexpectedly from a thick mist, it is as awesome and uncanny as Stonehenge. The telescope is only 50 years old, but there is no doubt that it belongs to the landscape and serves to connect us with our own history, as well as to the remoter history of the Universe.

Fifty years is a pinprick in space-time, but for us bipeds with short lives and increasingly shorter attention spans, it is useful to find some hand-holds in history. The days of the Cold War seem like another planet – or they did until President Putin’s recent remarks. The telescope had a covert role tracking Sputnik 1, and listening in on what the Soviet Union was up to in space. Then, as now, nationalistic posturing depends on a gas cloud of rhetoric. The real situation happens in secret; whispered, with the microphones off.

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Background

• Phase by Joanna Clark

• First word: Erica Wagner

• Her word: Jeanette Winterson

Related Internet Links

• First Move Festival blog

The Lovell is a radio telescope; it listens. Exciting though it is to read about its Cold War discoveries, the true excitement of the telescope is its quiet eavesdropping on the languages of stars. In the Universe, you can’t switch off the microphone. The archive of space-time is like a digital library – but never in one place. The work of the telescope is to track this archive, picking up signals like a message in a bottle, clues thrown out across the Universe. In the beginning was the Word.

So it seems appropriate that this weekend Jodrell Bank holds its first literary festival – First Move, celebrating that triumphant tilt of the dish in 1957, and making much of the connections that join together all human endeav-our. Human beings are, after all, transmitting and receiving devices.

Books are transmitters, not only of ideas and culture, but of the energy that shifts the cosmos. Dante called that energy “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”. You may feel that such energy is more usually the power of destruction – and there is plenty of that in the Universe, as it forms and reforms in spectacular struggle, yet whenever we are moved, starlike across our own sky, by the power of something we have read, we would have to put it on the side of love – if love is the one force in our lives that can do as much good as the mindless damage done elsewhere.

If a book is a transmitter, writers should be above-average receivers. In a society that invests billions in artificial intelligence – from voice-activated computers to interactive robots – the bundle of neurons that is the human brain must do the best it can on reality television and a partial education. Thank God for books – far from being outdated, they are one of the last places allowing people to sit down and think and feel for themselves The human brain is not just a computer made of meat; it is something hard to define, called consciousness. What is uniquely human should be protected and enhanced. It helps no-one if humans become coarser and simpler, while machines become more complex and sensitive. It is wonderful that we can build and use the Lovell Telescope in our quest to understand the secrets of the Universe. But I believe that books and art are vital means for keeping our transmitting and receiving equipment in good order.

That’s a challenge for the next 50 years. The festival runs until tomorrow evening. The programme is at www.jb.man.ac.uk. Book tickets on 01477 571339 or 01477 571321 The Times is the media partner and the festival is part funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

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