But, despite the pun, my topic this week is serious. In fact, it may be the most important thing I ever write on this blog. The inspiration was a documentary, or rather the kickstarter trailer of a documentary in the making, which will discuss why the US space program is in a long, terrible decline. The reality of it breaks my heart. So, I am going to take a break from my normal, lackadaisical, semi-scientific, semi-sarcastic approach, and really speak plainly. Honesty is something we don't see too often these days, and I think it is time for some.
We need hope. But right now, we do not have it.
At this moment, I am speaking of America, as an American, so for any international readers, I apologize, but this might not really pertain to you.
America needs hope. We can delude ourselves with lies about our own greatness for only so long before the delusions stop working, and we must face reality. And that reality is that we are a nation fallen from glory, a glory once undeniable, once the envy of the world, and the source of our pride as men and women. In the past, we could be proud, because we were part of something great. Now, America is not great. It's not even good, unless we are generous, or blinded to reality by the mythology we are taught our whole lives.
Honesty. I promised I would give it. So here it is: I have no patriotism for America, at least not as it is now. In fact, as recently as last week, I was considering renouncing my citizenship and immigrating to someplace else permanently. And the simple reason is that I think America is going to fail, to crash and burn because it grew too used to living rich, and forgot how to work for its money. America has forgotten the most important thing it ever knew: How to dream.
There was an America though, once, which knew how to dream, and dream big. I never experienced the 1960s and 70s, so I don't know the full depth of the fervor, the patriotism, and the true, honest belief that American hard work, innovation, and ingenuity could carry mankind off of this world. But, I have seen the look in my father's eyes, on days when he remembers it, and that is enough. From that look, I know the dreams he held. I know from his recollections of his school days how he wished to be a scientist, how as a boy he dreamed of being an astronaut. I know from the Buck Rogers stories he told me at bedtime, when I was young, that the dream of space was buried deep in him, and that it had never let go. It was a dream he passed to me, wittingly or not.
I also know he was not alone in his fervor. During the space race, millions of children wanted to learn science and engineering. Why? Not because it was important to their country, or they had good career opportunities, but because they wanted to go out into the night sky and see what was there. Kennedy's dream of landing on the moon lit a fire in the hearts and minds of the whole nation, a fire that fueled the technological advances of the next two decades, keeping America on the razor edge of advancement.
And then they reached the moon, said the immortal words "A giant leap for mankind," and etched in the memories of the world an event that would never be forgotten. We left our planet. We succeeded. Surely, nothing would prove impossible for us, and a new era would dawn. With baited breath, mankind waited for that future to come....
And it didn't. We made the giant leap, we found a cold, dead rock, and then we leapt right back again. And then, nothing. We didn't try to tame the rock, not even to live on it. After a couple short walks, we left and never returned. And that fire in the hearts and minds of America burned down, to a sizzle. In the younger generation, the fire was never planted. Instead of scientists, they became investment bankers. And slowly, we lost our technological preeminence, and our pride went from a well-earned right to stand tall amongst our fellow men to hollow platitudes.
We need that fire again. We need a project that inspires us to be better than normal human beings, that drives us, instills in us a passion and a belief in the possibility that humanity, and America, truly can be great. We need another goal, a new symbol for the strength and resilience of our people, a symbol that shines in this dark night of our country and says that even now, from the pit of our woe, we have within us the strength to touch the stars.
Mars can be that symbol. Not walking on Mars and coming back, but living on Mars. Staying there. Making Mars a place for humanity. And not just Mars, but all of space! We should be on Deimos, on Io, mining asteroids, building space stations at the opposite side of the sun from our orbit. The solar system is ours for the taking, and all we need to do is grasp it. That is a dream that people, no matter their political affiliation, can agree on. A dream to light a fire in their hearts, the way this picture did, almost half a century ago.
What stands in our way? Two things. First, money. Politicians win few votes by giving NASA money, and therefore they seldom do so. As a result, NASA gets only half a percent of our tax dollars, and still some argue it is too much in a time of economic crisis. As Neil Degrasse Tyson says in this keynote speech, there are a bunch of arguments for going to space (I talked about many of them in my first post), but they are tired and old, and people don't listen to them very well. They take more than an elevator ride to explain, and people these days therefore don't have the attention span to hear them
The second problem is the root of the first: we don't think past our own lives. As human beings, we concern ourselves with the here and now, think fuzzily a few years into the future, but past a decade we don't make any plans. That mistake leads to the argument that "There are problems on Earth. We shouldn't worry about space until those problems are solved." Why not? The fact that one problem exists doesn't mean we shouldn't solve another. Humanity needs to become a planning species, a species that controls their own fate, homo evolutis, the human that determines the next step in his own evolution.
Is this happening? Slowly. We have the environmental movement. We have people realizing that the actions of the last hundred years are going to drastically affect the realities of the next hundred. People are starting to see the need to be careful about long term effects. But with regard to space, people aren't thinking of it as the excellent investment that it is, they are thinking of it as a waste. Politicians are mocked for suggesting that we can live on the moon, when we could have done it twenty years ago if we wanted. Government in the USA deprioritizes the space program. The shuttles are gone. The budget gets cut as costs increase. People are still more concerned with the here and now than what the future will hold, when the fact is that the current here and now was determined twenty years ago by the way people then thought about (or didn't think about) the future.
The same will be true as time goes on. We can't fix the present, because the present is an effect of the past. So we should stop trying. What we can do is fix the future. Our decisions now will affect the fate of humanity for millions of years, which is a great responsibility. Will they look back on us as uncivilized fools who didn't even know enough to plan a century in advance? Will they look back on us as the technologically stagnant era of man between our initial forays into space and the beginning of widespread colonization? Or will they not exist to look back at all, because we did not build a place for them to survive if Earth dies?
Not if I can help it.
No comments:
Post a Comment