But that quintessential human being is a myth, those challenges unmet. There is a distinction to be made between the people of earth and the people from earth. In that gap, the most expendable cease to exist. Rather than sparking inspiration, it speaks of blatant fatalism about what is worth saving, a preference for the lofty and unpopulated that rewards cognitive dissonance with delusions of innovation and heroism.
The concept of space as a clean slate comes with the caveat that only a select few are worthy of salvation, that escape will lead to freedom, that whoever builds the future will have learned from the mistakes of the people they left behind, that all of this will justify the costs needed. How condescending. Days after, eight people, six of them Asian women, were murdered in a spa in Atlanta. The gap between science fiction and reality has often been seen as a marker of human progress, technology as the slippery Promethean knowledge through which every problem might eventually be solved.
Part jobs program, part science cash cow, the American space program in the s placed the funding halo of military action on the heads of civilians. It bent the whole research apparatus of the United States to a symbolic goal in the Cold War. Given this outlay during the s, a time of great social unrest, you can bet people protested spending this much money on a moon landing.
Many more quietly opposed the missions. Space historian Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum has called attention to public-opinion polls conducted during the Apollo missions. Here is his conclusion:. Consistently throughout the s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.
We've told ourselves a convenient story about the moon landing and national unity, but there's almost no evidence that our astronauts united even America, let alone the world. Yes, there was a brief, shining moment right around the moon landing when everyone applauded, but four years later, the Apollo program was cut short and humans have never seriously attempted to get back to the moon ever again. I can't pretend to trace the exact process by which the powerful images of men on the moon combined with a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era of heroes combined to create the notion that the Apollo missions were overwhelmingly popular.
That'd be a book. But what I can do is tell you about two individuals who, in their own ways, opposed the government and tried to direct funds to more earthly pursuits: poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron and the sociologist Amitai Etzioni, then at Columbia University. Heron performed a song called, " Whitey on the Moon " that mocked "our" achievements in space. The song had a very powerful effect on my historical imagination and led to me seeking out much of the other evidence in this post.
Though I still think the hunger for the technological sublime crosses racial boundaries, [the song] destabilized the ease with which people could use "our" in that kind of sentence.
To which America went the glory of the moon landing? And what did it cost our nation to put whitey on the moon? Many black papers questioned the use of American funds for space research at a time when many African Americans were struggling at the margins of the working class. An editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel , for example, argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated if at all.
This is, of course, a complicated story. We can discover more about how the universe was created and why it exists in its current state. These discoveries could then help to improve life on our own planet as we seek out others to explore.
It drives innovations in numerous fields. According to the Year Starship Program, the technologies that were created for and made possible because of space exploration have helped to shape, permeate, and are an integral part of who we are today. To travel the stars, we must be able to store large quantities of energy. We must develop closed-loop support systems. Advances in agriculture, computing, artificial intelligence, and manufacturing must happen as well. The framework needed to explore space improves the socioeconomic frameworks we have at home.
It can be something that we do at home. According to information provided by the Goddard Space Flight Center, there are over 2, active satellites in orbit around Earth right now.
One of those satellites is the Hubble Space Telescope. This technology has allowed us to explore our solar system from right here at home. In , this telescope discovered that a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, name OR10, has a moon that was previously unknown. True space exploration requires international cooperation. This treaty forbids placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit, installing them on the moon, or any other location in space.
The treaty also disallows any nation from claiming a celestial resource as a national appropriation. The political structures of managing space exploration are already in place. According to Wired, a multistate body that is supported by nations approves the orbits of items that are currently in space.
It is called the International Telecommunication Union and it has been in place since the s. With their protocols helping to create a push deeper into space, exploration could become a future way of life. It could allow other civilizations to know about our own.
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