Man on the Moon

Stephen Hawking says in the introduction to a new book commemorating the Apollo 11 Anniversary that now is the time to redouble efforts toward space exploration.

In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Christopher Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet, the discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old. Sending humans to the moon may yet prove to have had an even greater effect. It changed the future of the human race in ways that we don’t yet understand and may have determined whether we have any future at all. It hasn’t solved any of our immediate problems on planet Earth, but it has given us new perspectives on them and caused us to look both outward and inward.

...What are the possible sites of a human colony in the solar system? The most obvious is the moon. It is close by and relatively easy to reach. As illustrated in this publication, we have already landed on it and driven across it in a buggy. On the other hand, the moon is small and without an atmosphere or a magnetic field to deflect solar radiation. There is no liquid water, but there may be ice in the craters at the north and south poles. A colony on the moon could use this as a source of oxygen, with power provided by nuclear energy or solar panels. The moon could become a base for travel to the rest of the solar system.

...There are approximately a thousand stars within thirty light years of Earth. If 1 percent of each had Earth-size planets in a Goldilocks Zone, (where the requirements for life are “just right) we would have ten candidate new worlds. We cannot reach them with current technology but we should make interstellar exploration a long-term aim. By long term, we mean over the next two hundred to five hundred years, and by exploration, we mean with humans.

The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilization began about ten thousand years ago, and the rate of scientific and technological development has been steadily increasing. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.

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The Daily Kos makes a similar call to action.

In WW2, as American troops participated in the final rush towards Berlin to end the Nazi Empire, American soldiers, looking around them at the enormous resources and energy being focused on this goal, were heard to remark: “if only we could put this amount of effort into making our country better at home.”

The anniversary of the Moon landing should remind us all of the great things we Americans working together collectively can accomplish if we put our minds to it.

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Not everyone saw the breakthrough as a groundbreaking moment, Krushchev’s son, Sergei, recalls a carefully engineered shrugging-of-the-shoulders by the USSR upon hearing of the lunar landing.

Of course, you cannot have people land on the moon and just say nothing. It was published in all the newspapers. But if you remember [back then] when Americans spoke of the first man in space, they were always talking of “the first American in space” [not Yuri Gagarin]. The same feeling was prevalent in Russia. There were small articles when Apollo 11 was launched. Actually, there was a small article on the first page of Pravda and then three columns on page five. I looked it up again.

...It was very similar to feeling among Americans when Gagarin (the first man to go into space) went into orbit. Some of them tried to ignore it, some of them were insulted. But I don’t think it had a strong popular effect. First of all, the Soviet propaganda did not play it up or give too much information. I remember I watched a documentary on this. It was not secret, but it was not shown to the public. The Russian people had many problems in day-to-day life, they were not too concerned about the first man on the moon.