Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [74]
The Moon was a metaphor for the unattainable: “You might as well ask for the Moon,” they used to say. Or “You can no more do that than fly to the Moon.” For most of our history, we had no idea what it was. A spirit? A god? A thing? It didn’t look like something big far away, but more like something small nearby—something the size of a plate, maybe, hanging in the sky a little above our heads. Ancient Greek philosophers debated the proposition “that the Moon is exactly as large as it looks” (betraying a hopeless confusion between linear and angular size). Walking on the Moon would have seemed a screwball idea; it made more sense to imagine somehow climbing up into the sky on a ladder or on the back of a giant bird, grabbing the Moon, and bringing it down to Earth. Nobody ever succeeded, although there were myths aplenty about heroes who had tried.
Not until a few centuries ago did the idea of the Moon as a place, a quarter-million miles away, gain wide currency. And in that brief flicker of time, we’ve gone from the earliest steps in understanding the Moon’s nature to walking and joy-riding on its surface. We calculated how objects move in space; liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big rockets, telemetry, reliable electronics, inertial guidance, and much else. Then we sailed out into the sky.
I was lucky enough to be involved in the Apollo program, but I don’t blame people who think the whole thing was faked in a Hollywood movie studio. In the late Roman Empire, pagan philosophers had attacked Christian doctrine on the ascension to Heaven of the body of Christ and on the promised bodily resurrection of the dead—because the force of gravity pulls down all “earthly bodies.” St. Augustine rejoined: “If human skill can by some contrivance fabricate vessels that float, out of metals which sink … how much more credible is it that God, by some hidden mode of operation, should even more certainly effect that these earthly masses be emancipated” from the chains that bind them to Earth? That humans should one day discover such a “mode of operation” was beyond imagining. Fifteen hundred years later, we emancipated ourselves.
The achievement elicited an amalgam of awe and concern. Some remembered the story of the Tower of Babel. Some, orthodox Moslems among them, felt setting foot on the Moon’s surface to be impudence and sacrilege. Many greeted it as a turning point in history.
The Moon is no longer unattainable. A dozen humans, all Americans, have made those odd bounding motions they called “moonwalks” on the crunchy, cratered, ancient gray lava—beginning on that July day in 1969. But since 1972, no one from any nation has ventured back. Indeed, none of us has gone anywhere since the glory days of Apollo except into low Earth orbit—like a toddler who takes a few tentative steps outward and then, breathless, retreats to the safety of his mother’s skirts.
Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?
The scope and audacity of John Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, message to a joint session of Congress on “Urgent National Needs”—the speech that launched the Apollo program—dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived, navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order to send a man to an unknown world—a world not yet explored, not even in a preliminary way, not even by robots—and we would bring him safely back, and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth orbit.
As a newly minted Ph.D., I actually thought all this had something centrally to do with science. But the President did not talk about discovering the origin of the Moon, or even about bringing samples of it back for study. All he seemed to be interested in was sending someone there and bringing