In Unearth Kāla I uncover dead time. Kāla, or time, personifies the force destroying all things. This series of letters is there to remember them. This time: The “Planetary History” of the Krishna-Prometheus Project.

“Mankind is now moving into the era of the conquest of outer space”. Space technology is used for war on Earth, or to escape Earth from war, but far less often to prevent war. Yet the aim of the 1962 Krishna-Prometheus Satellite project was precisely this: To prevent our “descend downward and deathward toward collective insanity and mass suicide”. In 1962 at a now-forgotten yet revolutionary anti-nuclear conference, the Accra Assembly, “The World Without the Bomb”, Project Krishna-Prometheus was proposed by Julie Medlock and Oliver Reiser. Oliver Reiser was a philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh; Julie Medlock an evolutionist of the Aurobindo sort who had just quit her role as Bertrand Russell’s literary agent after a trip to a branch of the Aurobindo Ashram, and was now engaged in several active peace projects. The Accra Assembly was initiated early in 1961 by the “consideration” of Kwame Nkrumah, then president of Ghana. Its aim was concisely “summed up in its title ‘The World Without the Bomb’”. There was a truly global attendance at the conference, with speakers and participants like president Kwame Nkrumah, “father of radar” Sir Robert Watson-Watt, historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Nobel Prize winning physicist Abdus Salam, and antinuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat. They were insistent that this meeting against atomic warfare could not be “negative”, its aim had to be “positive”: to offer solutions forward into a more peaceful world without weapons of mass destruction. More will soon follow on the Accra Assembly by PhDers Henrike Vellinga and myself. For this “History Foundling”, I wanted to give a glimpse and focus on what was perhaps one of the most bizarre solutions proposed at the Assembly: The Krishna-Prometheus project

The project requested the UN to reach out to the Soviet Union and the US to jointly authorize and host a satellite project called Krishna-Prometheus. This satellite project would bring worldwide education to everyone’s fingertips. Although the primary aim was peace on earth, it had other “cosmic” humanist aims in terms of education and the eradication of poverty. The authors expressed an intense sense of urgency fearing that we otherwise might “lose the battle of man”.



The satellite would host educative television programs focusing on key personalities of the “East” and “West”. These key personalities were major thinkers, religious figures, or inventors, such as “Krishna, Akhenaten … Tagore, Gandhi, Bhave, Sri Aurobindo … Newton, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, and Russell”. It was “in this manner that a good part of the planet would be covered: we would ‘put a girdle ‘round the earth’ - as Shakespeare foresaw eventually to bind the members of the human family into the form of unity.”



Although utopian, naive, and progressivist toward what they called “backward” peoples, the project was nevertheless revolutionary for its time. To redirect “the conquest” of outer space toward the union and perfection of the human race was laudable, and an early response to stil quite novel technological developments. At the time, satellites and space technology were still new, state controlled or subsidized, and often military-oriented. Hosted in June 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis just around the corner, they showed Promethean foresight! 



Although it is sill unclear to me, it is unlikely that the proposal was taken up at the United Nations or had any other afterlife (TBC…). It seems that Oliver Reiser went on to pursue other philosophical questions, while Julie Medlock went back to Pondicherry to join the newly emerging Auroville. Their Krishna-Prometheus project meant to bring “fire and light from the heavens above to the teeming billions of people here on earth”. Besides its hubris, the size of the Tower of Babel, I think it is telling that Julie and Oliver also remained silent on the sensitivity of the Greeks to the fate of Prometheus. A careful reader of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound knows that to bear Prometheus’ “yoke of punishment”, inflicted by the tyrant of the new gods for giving humans light, demands not only foresight but equally the perseverance of his “foolish stubbornness”!

Just for fun (and further reflection): Hermes vs. Oceanus giving advice to Prometheus… Hermes: for stubbornness standing alone is the weakest of all things in those with foolish minds (1254-1256) Oceanus: well, let me fall ill from this disease, for someone truly wise profits most when he is thought a fool. (484-486) I wonder what Krishna might have advised to our not so despondent Prometheus, Medlock, and Reiser!