Good Riddance to the Handshake

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Uncharted, a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.

In February 1958, Science Digest, inspired by the launch of Sputnik and the consequent hastening of the space race, asked a question that was both timely and absurd: What will space people look like? Consulting unnamed scientists, the magazine concluded that extraterrestrials would likely “bear a strong resemblance to the man next door”: an upright posture, two eyes, two arms, two legs. The planetary neighbors would act like humans as well; the Digest supplemented its story with a drawing of two visitors arriving, via flying saucer, on Earth. One of them, smiling, extends its hand to a man who awaits them—a being so humanlike, in body and in culture, that it, too, uses handshakes as a gesture of greeting. Take comfort, Earthlings, the article suggested: Whatever mysteries might swirl in space’s inky unknown, there is no need to fear. Space people will be just like us.

Handshakes, historically, have often been invoked in that way: as signals of easy equality, as hope for a friction-free world. Their mathematical simplicity—hand to hand, flesh to flesh—implies the dissolution of the differences that might otherwise separate one person from another. In practice, however, the gestures have been much more fraught. And today, as a global pandemic brings a new round of anxious questions about what it means to be a last month, explaining how efficiently handshakes can spread illness. In April, Gregory Poland, an infectious-disease expert at the Mayo Clinic, : “When you extend your hand, you’re extending a bioweapon.”