A bright sun, low in the western sky, streams through a gap in the trees above the houses. A mourning dove coos nearby, and is answered by another in the distance. A jay squawks.
There isn’t a flutter of the new leaves, and it’s blessedly quiet. A little dog barks, and a voice calls out. The day ends.
Intrinsically the earth is a sacred place. However many planets and moons with life there are in the Milky Way, our planet is surely one of the most beautiful.
There’s been a lot of schlock from cable news hosts talking about the Artemis II mission — how much “awe” (a religious feeling) they felt at the power of the rocket at launch, and how the mission is “unifying humanity.”
But for older folks who remember the Apollo missions, the emotionless masculinity and America-centered nature of those moonshots has gratefully given way to a more gender-balanced and Earth-centered vibe from the Artemis crew.
However, even for those whose worldview was deeply informed by literally the world view of the moon missions, reality intrudes.
As one pundit wrote, “There can be no point other than prestige in sending humans to the moon, which is why more than 50 years have passed since they last went there. Robots can perform all we need in space. Returning the Iranians to the stone age is a different matter.”
There were exceptions to the testosteronal Apollo missions, such as with Mike Collins, the guy who orbited in Columbia while Armstrong and Aldrin made the first footprints on the moon, and who was labeled as the “loneliest man” in the world.
In his droll way, Collins put that canard to rest by writing, “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.” But he said that he enjoyed the solitude and felt happy, “the opposite of lonely.”
Collins also spoke eloquently about how everywhere the Apollo 11 astronauts went on their triumphal world tour, “people said, ‘We did it,’ not, ‘You did it’ or ‘America did it.’” That made planting the flag on the “magnificent desolation” of the moon all the more ridiculous.
Fifty-four years since the last Apollo mission, I’m glad girls and boys are excited about this slingshot around our lifeless sister planet (as the moon would be called from afar, since it’s almost the size of Mercury). But it’s hard to get excited about a mission that replicates the flight of the ill-fated Apollo 13.
Especially since Artemis II’s main claim to fame in a “free-return trajectory” is taking it just a few hundred miles further than Apollo 13, and getting no closer than 4000 miles (6500 km) to the moon. Even Apollo 8, carrying the first humans to leave earth’s gravitational sphere, orbited a tantalizingly close 60 miles (about 100 km) from the moon’s surface.
Artemis II’s astronauts are oohing and aahing at the moon’s dark side from 6500 km away before returning to a world completely eclipsed by man’s darkness. By the time they get back, if Trump gets his way and the entire world is at war, they’ll probably wish they could have kept going.
The crew is doing its best to make people feel better on earth. “You are on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe,” intoned Victor Glover, as he spoke from biblical belief on Easter.
It was a dim echo of the spine-tingling sensation Apollo 8’s crew gave people on earth by taking turns reading parts of Genesis as they circled the moon on Christmas Eve 1968. Without mentioning the Bible, the passages spoke to all humanity.
Glibly describing the universe as “a whole bunch of nothing,” Glover struck a jarring and contradictory note even from a biblical perspective, since according to his belief system, “God created [both] the heavens and the earth.”
From a scientific perspective, how could the earth and all the life on it emerge from “a whole lot of nothing” anyway? As incomprehensibly vast as it is, the universe gave birth to the earth, so it must be conducive to life.
“Trust me, you are special,” Glover proclaimed. “In all of this emptiness, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity to remember where we are and who we are. And that we are the same thing, and we got to get through this together.”
Fine sentiment as that is, there’s a lot to unpack, as philosophers say, in his little sermon. Insisting that the earth was “created to give us a place to live in the universe” is straight out of the Christian creation myth, a fairy tale that parents tell children when they ask why we’re here.
We must grow up as humans. There is no separate deity that placed the earth in its orbit like a marble on a game board. There is an inseparable mystery and immanent intelligence suffusing the cosmos, but humans aren’t a “special creation.” And we’re rapidly destroying this beautiful planet, crashing the climate and decimating the creatures with which we share the earth.
The intriguing comment in Glover’s remarks intimates at what’s between the lines: “We got to get through this together…” That says a lot, without actually saying what “this” is, much less why it is.
Even from the bygone belief in the special creation of humans, people don’t ask (or merely give pat, childish answers to the question), why does darkness rule the world?
There is no supernatural answer in theological fabrications of a cosmic battle between good and evil. There’s only our lack of self-understanding as humans.
The next day, the early morning sun is already warming the air, but the damp, green grass under bare feet feels cool and thick. It’s good to stand on the ground in bare feet when the seasons permit. It anchors one to the Earth.
We don’t need to go into space to see and feel the beauty of the earth. The entire earth and all humankind are in one’s backyard if one knows how to look and listen.
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“Robots can perform all we need in space.” This is definitely not true. Robots are great but incredibly limited in space exploration. Robots take years to do the work that a human could do in an afternoon. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars 14 years ago, has only traveled 22 miles and collected only 40 shovelfuls of dirt during its entire mission. A person on Mars could do that comfortably in 1-2 days. This is due to the incredible sophistication and engineering complexity that comes with designing robots, not to mention the great time delay over space distances. It will take many years until robots match the physical capabilities of humans in space exploration.
Your opinion about Artemis 2 is very strange. You mock people who marvel at seeing the Earth and Moon from space, and then call on humanity to fight climate change, end war, and walk barefoot. However, space exploration is a critical part of climate science. Glaciers, ice caps, sea level rise, greenhouse gas levels, atmospheric temperatures, etc. are all monitored through space based system such as NASA’s Earth System Observatory. The fact that we know that the climate is changing is due to space exploration. Furthermore, exploring the Moon explains how the Earth and other planets were formed. This knowledge serves not only the United States, Canada, or the ESA, but is the heritage of all mankind. This knowledge provides scientific explanations of Earth’s origin besides than the religious myths you seem so upset by.
It’s a rather malign misreading of my column. I wonder why. I wasn’t “mocking“ anyone, just pointing out the falseness in the astronaut’s slipping in stuff about our “special creation“ during Artemis II’s Easter message.
Nor am I deriding space exploration per se, just pointing out the hype and sentimentality surrounding this duplicative mission.
To uphold science, and at the same time, the myths of civilization’s faltering childhood is a strange contradiction, especially in light of what humans are doing to the planet and each other today.