This piece is by my brother John. It is heartfelt and correct. We are forced into the microcosmic nature of our lives at the abandonment of the macrocosm of our humanity.
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Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, has passed. One by one, these heroes of the Apollo program are dying of old age. One of this country's greatest technical accomplishments (and I would argue moral as well) is passing into memory. We can't even put our own astronauts in orbit any longer, relying on the Russians, and sooner or later, private corporations.
While Apollo was born of the patriotism and competition of the Cold War, it was a total human achievement. Many of our allies contributed to the cause, and without the pressure from our worthy colleagues and competitors in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, we might never have reached so high and so far. For even 10% of the amount of money the US spends on defense in a single year we could probably fund an expedition to Mars, or at least a huge chunk of it. An achievement even greater than the moon waits -- all we have to do is reach out and take it.
The objections to space exploration are legion, and not entirely without justification. “We've got problems here.” “It's not worth it.” When we look out the window (at least here in most places here in the US), chances are we see a paradise of relative safety and comfort. It's expensive, and there will be casualties.
But our planet is fragile. We live in an ephemeral wisp of gas clinging to a mostly-barren hunk of rock, one that just so happens to have some green stuff growing on the outside. We can't even survive without difficulty on the surface of our planet in some places without special equipment, and go up or down 20,000 feet, or even down one inch into an ocean, lake, or river, and we need incredibly complicated equipment to survive at all.
And maybe even greater than survival, human purpose is out there. The space race brought out the best in us -- the natural human desire to explore, to learn, to figure out new things. Mysteries remain here on earth, sure, but the greatest ones are not of this world. They lie in ice hiding in the shadows on Mars, under the clouds on Venus, searching for life in the ice-crusted oceans of Europa, finding the mysterious theoretical ninth planet. The future of of humanity is out there. Waiting. The stars may well forever be beyond our grasp, but the planets are there for the taking. Space is there. And we should climb it.
Of seeing the earth from space, Edgar Mitchell remarked:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
I love quotes by astronauts. While it's not a universal effect, the words inspired in those men and women fortunate enough to take in the sum of all humanity, all life as we know it stretching back billions of years in a single glance are incredibly wise. The things we scrabble over here on earth are important in small ways, but are ultimately rather insignificant. Bill Hicks put it rather well when he said, "It's a round world last time I checked." We're all in this together. I wonder if a unified push of humanity into outer space is perhaps one of the only things that will bring us together as a species. Who knows, really. Not me. But if our nature or our DNA were ever going to unite us, it would have happened long ago. If it was art, or religion, or good works, the utopia would already grace us with its presence.
Time to try something new.
o get by is human. To know is divine.
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