What Stoppard also feared was that the moon landings would undermine human values and philosophies, plunging the world into a relativistic crisis, a kind of planetary nervous breakdown. "I know this sounds whimsical," he explained to an interviewer when the play was revived by the National a few years ago, "but roughly what I imagined was that, if one was standing on solid ground looking back at Earth, one would realise that our universal absolute ideas about what is good and what is bad might begin to look like the local customs coming from a finite place and, once this idea dripped through to the bottom, people just wouldn't carry on. They, of course, did. Their behaviour was just as bad before and after."

Against such an elegantly reasoned backdrop, it might seem melodramatic to be bandying about the words "new low", but this week something happened on the final frontier which appeared to symbolise simultaneously the zenith of humanity's achievement and the nadir of its aspiration. To wit, early on Thursday morning, Russian astronaut Mikhail Tyurin boldly went out through the hatch of the International Space Station. And teed off. Yes, in a collaborative stunt between the Russian Space Agency and a Canadian golf equipment firm, Tyurin took up a gold-plated club and struck a ball into outer darkness. Who says dreams are dead?

It is rather difficult to know where to begin with one's enthralled reaction to the news, but you may care to learn that he had been provided with a couple of extra balls in the event that something went wrong with his stroke. Two mulligans! To underline the point: teeing off in the thermosphere's forgiving absence of an out-of-bounds rule, with no green to aim for, in gravitational conditions which ensure a speed off the tee of 17,500mph, and with the only potential hole being of the black variety into which it is famously rather difficult to avoid being sucked, a human was given two potential extra chances in case he made a Horlicks of it. What a chastening indication of our species' sense of self-worth. Indeed, if the Union of Persian Storytellers is still operational - and the region could use a little escapist fiction at present - this may be the point at which they finally lose heart and disband.

Even by the standards of the Russian Space Agency's insistence on coming up with lucrative initiatives - do you recall the rocket decked out in Pizza Hut logo which delivered pizza to the space station, or the giant Pepsi can which they permitted to float outside it? - the golf stunt seems to mark a watershed moment. For all the fact that one of the Apollo 14 crew hit a couple of shots on the moon back in 1971, the sheer grasping fatuity of this latest mission forces the question: where now for space?

Since the end of the space race, the cynics have waxed with sarcastic enthusiasm about the many benefits in stay-dry clothing and desiccated fruit technology which trillions of dollars of investment have bought us (space exploration's role in the creation of Teflon pan coating is, unfortunately, just a myth). These days space's chief draw seems to be that of a somewhat unethically reached future holiday destination for Richard Branson and selected millionaire friends.

Two years ago the exploration of our solar system appeared to have been seized upon by George Bush as a means of drawing attention away from less successful forays into areas of our own planet, prompting a spirited exchange between two characters in the brilliant internet cartoon strip Get Your War On. "Seriously," demanded one, "why are we still going into space? To find out if broccoli can grow upside down in zero gravity?... You need to shut down Cape Canaveral and fix Earth, goddammit!" "C'mon," countered his friend. "I bet if you asked people in Africa if they wanted us to go to Mars, they'd say yes - because it's important for humanity to reach ever upward. It's inspirational."

It would seem rather churlish to accuse these chaps of facetiousness when this week Nasa's flight director for the golf-based spacewalk declared of the mission: "The crew is taking this very, very seriously." Most inspirational. With many inhabitants of the planet working off scientific knowledge gleaned largely from movies, we are given to understand that in space, no one can hear you scream. But if there were any intelligent life forms - presumably rather more intelligent than us - watching Tyurin tee off on Thursday, one hopes rather desperately that they might understand many earthlings were very, very seriously embarrassed by it all.

marina.hyde@theguardian.com