Forty years ago tonight, two men from this planet walked on the surface of another heavenly body for the first time.
The enormity of that task still amazes me.
It’s quite literally incredible, it strains the bounds of credulity – the number of technologies they had to invent, the number of things they had to do for the very first time, the number of things that could have gone wrong – and it happened almost flawlessly.
I can think of no greater testimony to human ingenuity, human drive, and human effort than that.
The thing that astounds me is that they did it all with 1969 technology. I currently have on my lap a computer with 1000x more processing power and a million times more storage space than the computers they had aboard Apollo 11. They couldn’t run the LEM through a thousand computer simulations to see how it would handle on the moon’s surface – it was all pencils, papers, slide rules, and drawing boards. They strapped three guys onto the top of a Saturn V rocket and said “go” – and they went, and they landed, and they walked, and they took off, and they made it back.
But the first moon landing was 40 years ago; the last was 37 years ago. Since then, no human being has left low-earth orbit. Sure, we’ve launched the Space Shuttle, learned how to live in space for an extended period of time, seen the beginnings of the universe with Hubble, and put robots on or around every planet except Pluto, but we haven’t stretched out our wings. We haven’t gone back to the moon; we haven’t seen Mars. It was like we had that one inspiring moment and then decided that mediocrity was fine just the same.
The problem is, we’ve got problems. An economy in the crapper, 42 million Americans without health insurance, rampant inequality, world poverty, climate change, pollution – a million reasons not to go back. A million reasons to say “let’s fix the problems here first.” And that argument works, for a time.
But when the economy turns around, and when President Obama is reelected in 2012 – I think it’s time for us to take the next step. Not just go back to the moon, but settle there, begin our first halting steps to the obvious next stage in the evolution of our relationship with the universe – finally freeing ourselves from being a one-planet species. First we settle on the moon, then begin the thousand-year project to terraform Mars, then we start mining the asteroid belt… the next step. Progress, expansion, evolution.
We have the technology. We will have the resources. All we need is the will… because we’ve taken a few steps back from that “one giant leap for mankind.”
