45 years ago today mankind set foot on another celestial body for the first time. This was the culmination of our species’ ongoing urge to see what’s over that next hill, across the next river and around the bend in the road. We are explorers by nature. In many ways this is the one characteristic that has both forced on and been caused by our evolution the most. We innovate, we invent, we tinker and we explore.
On May 26, 1953, some damn fool decided he wanted to see what’s on top of Mount Everest and so he and a buddy got on with it and climbed where they had no business being at 8,848m (29,029ft). Ohhhh and by the way, the news hit the world and the ears of a young woman named Elizabeth Windsor who later in the day would be crowned Queen Elizabeth II of England.
Another idiot thought he’d take a chance and see the deepest part of the ocean so on January 23, 1960 he and another lunatic dove 10,916m (35,814ft) below the surface of the Pacific Ocean and saw….well actually they saw nothing cause there’s no light but hey….
Then on July 20, 1969, after almost a decade of feverish activity initiated by a since assassinated President, mankind again took it’s next step into the unknown. Three guys sat on top of then the world’s most complicated and certainly biggest bottle rocket, flew 250,000 miles in a tin can, landed on the moon barely (they almost crashed and had to use almost all their onboard fuel to prevent the crash) and then came home by way of a fiery re-entry followed by a high altitude parachute drop into the middle of the damn ocean…..
It is said that the live broadcast of Neil & Buzz on the moon was watched at the time by more humans than anything else in history. Our species had taken its first step into a vast ocean. Everyone, everywhere was stunned into both silence and cheers. The world of men literally stopped! This was the biggest thing humanity had EVER DONE. In fact, scientists who’ve studied remote tribes deep in the Amazon and in New Guinnea report that these tribes with little to no contact with the outside world, who don’t know a Phone from an Umbrella, are aware that man has set foot on the moon.
Freakin’ bushmen with no concept of technology, television or telephone have heard from missionaries or the occasional scientific party that
“Yup…we’ve been there…..”
While the feats of men like Edmund Hillary/ Tenzig Norgay (Everest 1953) or Jacques Picard / Lt. Don Walsh (Challenger Deep 1960) are heroic, epic and inspiring, they don’t quite have the same ability to just AWE everyone on the planet.
Unless you’ve seen Everest in person, it’s hard to put into perspective just what a feat it is to climb a bloody rock that big or just what it is to dive deeper underwater than a 747 flies above it. These are incredible achievements but they remain abstract without a common frame of reference.
But walk outside at night, look up and you immediately grasp the sheer immensity of what those men in the Apollo program achieved. Every human who was alive then and will ever be alive can look up at the moon and say
“We’ve been there and that looks a long way away…..”
But then it all stopped. Sure, we went back a few more times to gather rocks and plant flags but our interest faded. Television ratings dropped and with them so did the public backing required to go even further. We had achieved what 50 years previously had been thought impossible. We were comfortable in our ability to push the boundaries and then kind of gave up.
I’m not denying the risks faced and the benefits earned in our continuing use of the International Space Station but seriously, that’s not exploring…. that’s the exploratory equivalent of going out to the shed in the back yard where you won’t disturb the neighbours with your experiments.
It seems as if our best and brightest have co-opted themselves to the Silicon Valley money machine. We have interesting and occasionally useful inventions that sometimes even improve our day to day living but they don’t push boundaries anymore.
Where’s the next “Holy shit…..that’s awesome!!!!!” step in Human exploration? We’ve sent robots to do the heavy lifting. They’re cheaper and safer I guess but isn’t that also a sign of us becoming more and more timid? Granted, cost is a limiting factor but consider the following. In 2011, the US military spent more money than NASA did in the last 50 years……..
God knows we need explorers now, probably more than ever. If only to show us that we’re capable of a lot more collectively. Maybe we need explorers now to re-kindle that spark of fascination and wonder that we all had as kids when we started out exploring the world for ourselves. Maybe we need explorers to show us that there is more out there than we currently know and that tomorrow is going to be better than today.
We need to climb back out of the cave and start exploring again no matter how comfy, safe and convenient the cave has become because after all, we’re human and are meant to be out there, not safe in here………
Portable Musings (a soapbox is cheaper than therapy...) 