Category: science

On the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, why should we care about the space program?

On a warm summer evening in 1979 – we are told by Joshua Zeitz – some 7000 violent fans rioted in a Chicago baseball stadium, leaving it in tatters. ‘It wasn’t bad pitching that incited the mob to storm the field between games,’ he quotes from a newspaper account, ‘It was disco.’

It seems that a local media celebrity had proposed “Disco Demolition Day” which would feature physically blowing up a pile of disco records on the playing field during intermission. Egged on by the local media, fans brought along their vinyl for destruction, which they used in part as frisbies (or projectiles) to assist in the build-up of escalating tensions, which also included waving protest banners, storming the field and tearing out the batting cage, setting off firecrackers and starting fires; and ultimately inciting a riot that led to dozens of arrests and injuries. Ultimately, Zeitz concludes of this particular demolition sentiment:

“… An obvious explanation for the Disco Demolition Night riot might center on the desire of white, working-class baseball fans to strike out against an art form that they associated with African Americans, gays and lesbians, and Latinos. A long decade of stagflation, conflicts over busing and affirmative action, fallout from the Vietnam War, and popular anxieties about relaxed sexual mores left working-class whites desperate to put a human face on the impersonal, highly disruptive social changes that were reordering their world. Disco, which claimed its roots in urban black and gay neighborhoods, and which celebrated a libertine approach to sex and personal expression, was a perfect target for white rage.”(Zeitz, 2008)

A generation after the Disco Demolition movement, we observe a much larger, vocal and potentially dangerous groundswell that has been building over the intervening years. We now see a large voting bloc of disaffected US whites who face a choice: to vote for a President out of a spirit of fear and anger, seeking to destroy everything that they perceive as a threat to their privilege; or to vote more wisely for temperance and democracy. This situation is reminiscent of “Nightfall”, an old science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov, about a world that faces darkness once every era, when an eclipse covers their world, with the resultant societal panic and chaos causing the downfall of civilisations.

How does this relate to the space program? Aside from the obvious loss of science and scientists in any upcoming Christian Taliban Dark Age, there are lessons that western leaders and culture have failed to learn from our science and its history.

Learning for Life

“If I could travel back into time, it would be to the Library of Alexandria, because all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those marble walls. The destruction of the library was a warning to us 1,600 years later: we must never let it happen again.” – Carl Sagan (Ovenden, 2020).

In Cosmos, Sagan spoke about the loss of the Library at Alexandria, repeating a common myth about the methods and forms of its disappearance (O’Neill, 2017; Ovenden, 2020). However, one thing that he did explain accurately: the loss of the Library was a tragedy to the world’s literature, sciences and history. We must avoid a repeat of the social conditions that led to its disappearance, so as to avoid a repetition amidst our modern forms of libraries, repositories and archives – plus all the networks, educational centres and opportunities they represent. As I write this, the world is recovering from an outage that disrupted some elements of the world Internet. Can we ever afford to lose it all, even for a short amount of time? Or what would a fascist Gilead era do to our accumulated wealth of knowledge today? Or for that matter, if the great unwashed white hordes with their pitchforks and torches descend once again on Washington DC after the upcoming November Presidential election, who will speak for civilisation?

Sagan made one final observation about the fall of the library: that its loss did not appear to make a splinter of difference to the world as it was at the time. Why was this? Because the scientists and scholars in the library did not apply their knowledge to the outside world. Expert knowledge about agriculture or ploughing, for example, might have been left inside the walls of the Library and not shared with the farmers outside – hence its loss made no difference to the huddled masses.

We must be careful to avoid a repetition of this cultural failure. Education (including public television education) is needed. Perhaps this is where we need to have fewer Kardashians and more Cosmos; less Survivor and more Sesame Street. We need to point out to anti-science conspiracy theorists and Moon landing deniers that they live in the modern world, replete with space age technology – ranging from their smart phones and GPS tracking to the CAT and MRI scanners that may have saved their lives. We need to educate them about how much of the modern world – ranging from agricultural and food refrigeration techniques, from satellite weather forecasting to bushfire and flood mitigation, from air traffic control to vaccine storage technology, from the Internet to social media – have impacted their lives after being invented or assusted by the space program.

This to me is NASA’s greatest deficiency: not because they failed to return to the Moon for fifty years, but because they neglected to inform the masses during the last five decades of how their spinoff technology has changed and improved our lives forever. They forgot to remind us all about space spinoffs beyond astronaut ice cream, gravity defying pens, and space blankets. To me, that’s like Christopher Columbus returning from his voyages of exploration, invasion and conquest, and informing Queen Isabella that the future of the Americas might be extrapolated as providing paltry farming land for corn and a few forests of firewood – but little else.

The Apollo program provided the largest injection of cash and funding into non-military science in history. Its offshoot so far is over 2000 spinoffs and ongoing technological development that is worth at least $469 billion today.

Against this reality, NASA’s greatest failure of imagination was not failing to anticipate and prevent the Apollo 1 disaster, but neglecting to fully exploit its own proven potential to change and save our future. The best is yet to come.

“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” — astronaut Bill Anders.

In 1968. astronaut Bill Anders photographed ‘Earthrise’ from lunar orbit (see photo at the top of this article) and this spearheaded the greatest environmental movement in human history. NASA’s subsequent ‘Mission to Planet Earth’ became the vanguard for a movement to utilise space technology and research to focus on improving our lives on planet Earth, that pixel of colour in a cold, largely dead cosmos. This included using space and satellite data to warn the world about the hole in the Ozone layer, motivating world governments to fix the problem. The same opportunities exist today to mitigate against climate catastrophe.

This is the greatest reality we overlook: that despite our insular wars, even refugees have access to space age mobile phones that link them to the outside world; that satellites are documenting our escalating climate change crisis; and that it is becoming increasingly difficult for dictators and monopoly news media to censor and oppress nonconformist voices. This is the genuine dissent that conspiracy theorists promote without any real understanding of its true potential: we are the world; we can shape and change our future thanks to space. Science can get out the word if we make it a priority.

Radio personality Casey Kasem, is known for the sign-off signature of his radio program: “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.” Such a metaphor summarises our daily challenge: to keep striving for betterment through the space sciences while remaining firmly grounded in reality. This may yet prove to be our ultimate calling as a species.

References:

Burtel Edison, 1985, “Mission to Planet Earth”,
Science (New Series) Vol. 227, No. 4685, January 25, p. 367. (JSTOR)

Tim O’Neill, 2017. “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2 July.

Richard Ovenden, 2020. “The Story of the Library of Alexandria Is Mostly a Legend, But the Lesson of Its Burning Is Still Crucial Today”, Time, 17 November. (JSTOR)

J. Zeitz, 2008, Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s — Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October), pp. 673-688. (JSTOR)

©2024 Geoff Allshorn.