The connection of inner and outer space with a technological utopia had already been described by Felix Aderca in his 1932 novel Orasele innecate (Drowned cities). In this dark novel, Aderca drew a picture of a future mankind living on the bottom of the ocean. Life on the surface of the earth was no longer possible, because the sun did not produce much light anymore; therefore mankind had to colonize the sea floor and to built cities there in order to survive. The submarine volcano, which had delivered energy to these cities, seems to have ended. Just two possibilities were left to mankind to survive: either build a rocket and colonize a star or invent a new way of producing energy. Aderca put a quote of Friedrich Nietzsche at the very beginning of his book:
”In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of ”world history”yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature.”
Bio-Space-Politics 