Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [93]
We had an expansive run in the ’60s and ’70s. You might have thought, as I did then, that our species would be on Mars before the century was over. But instead, we’ve pulled inward. Robots aside, we’ve backed off from the planets and the stars. I keep asking myself: Is it a failure of nerve or a sign of maturity?
Maybe it’s the most we could reasonably have expected. In a way it’s amazing that it was possible at all: We sent a dozen humans on week-long excursions to the Moon. And we were given the resources to make a preliminary reconnaissance of the whole Solar System, out to Neptune anyway—missions that returned a wealth of data, but nothing of short-term, everyday, bread-on-the-table practical value. They lifted the human spirit, though. They enlightened us about our place in the Universe. It’s easy to imagine skeins of historical causality in which there were no race to the Moon and no planetary program.
But it’s also possible to imagine a much more serious devotion to exploration, because of which we would today have robot vehicles probing the atmospheres of all the Jovian planets and dozens of moons, comets, and asteroids; a network of automatic scientific stations emplaced on Mars would daily be reporting their findings; and samples from many worlds would be under examination in the laboratories of Earth—revealing their geology, chemistry, and perhaps even their biology. Human outposts might be already established on the near-Earth asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.
There were many possible historical paths. Our particular causality skein has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it is far inferior to what might have been—and what may one day be.
“TO CARRY THE GREEN Promethean spark of Life with us into the sterile void and ignite there a firestorm of animate matter is the very destiny of our race,” reads the brochure of something called the First Millennial Foundation. It promises, for $120 a year, “citizenship” in “space colonies—when the time comes.” “Benefactors” who contribute more also receive “the undying gratitude of a star-flung civilization, and their name carved on the monolith to be erected on the Moon.” This represents one extreme in the continuum of enthusiasm for a human presence in space. The other extreme—better represented in Congress—questions why we should be in space at all, especially people rather than robots. The Apollo program was a “moondoggle,” the social critic Amitai Etzioni once called it; with the Cold War over, there is no justification whatever, proponents of this orientation hold, for a manned space program. Where in this spectrum of policy options should we be?
Ever since the United States beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, a coherent, widely understood justification for humans in space seems to have vanished. Presidents and Congressional committees puzzle over what to do with the manned space program. What is it for? Why do we need it? But the exploits of the astronauts and the moon landings had elicited—and for good reason—the admiration of the world. It would be a rejection of that stunning American achievement, the political leaders tell themselves, to back off from manned spaceflight. Which President, which Congress wishes to be responsible for the end of the American space program? And in the former Soviet Union a similar argument is heard: Shall we abandon, they ask themselves, the one remaining high technology in which we are still world leaders? Shall we be faithless