Waking up this morning, I turned on the radio and was greeted by the news that on this very day, 50 years ago, Sputnik ushered the world into the space age.
For me, Sputnik is something I learned about in history books. I learned that a basketball-sized metal orb made people hide underneath desks, and my mind vaguely associated it with a potato (Sputnik = Spud). The fact of Sputnik was grouped into other random names, dates, and phrases I had to remember for the eventual multiple-choice section on the test.
But this morning the 50th anniversary news was followed by a commentary who described Sputnik’s launch as a seminal event in his life. The commentator, Andrew Chaikin, is a “space journalist” who wrote A Man on the Moon, which was the basis for the Tom Hanks HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon. He waxes nostalgic and wraps it up as such:
I know people still ask why space exploration is important, why we need to keep going. After all, the Cold War is long over. But the story that began 50 years ago is about something more important than national prestige or politics. It’s about the very essence of who we are. We are made to be explorers. We’re meant to make discoveries.
As someone who continually asks why space exploration is still important, I am not comforted by Mr. Chaikin’s answers. It’s the very essence of who we are? We are made to be explorers? That somehow doesn’t add up for me. His justification sounds seriously philosophical for a quest that’s supposed to be about science. Space is about science, right?
Then why does it seem like space exploration today is more about recapturing the excitement that used to exist about space exploration? Why are we going back to the moon? Because it was exciting the first time? Because people are nostalgic about how exciting it was?
I wasn’t alive for all the excitement of the space age, but I don’t doubt that it was very, very exciting. It makes sense to me that such a strong sense of excitement could inspire many people to work at NASA and spend many hours gazing up at the sky and following the space program. But I still fail to grasp why space exploration is important - or more accurately, why it’s worth spending so much money on, or why we’re returning to a place we’ve already been, or why the need for exploration outweighs the need for earth-observing satellites?
We’re facing pretty huge challenges here on our home planet, and a big need for science (and those earth-observing satellites). Regardless of whether or not we find life or traces of life on Mars, and whatever clues that might unlock about how life began, Mars is not going to give us a clear answer of how to save life. Although Chaikin’s commentary was full of hope about what “today’s kids might witness in the next fifty years in space,” I think I’ll be too busy witnessing what will happen in the next fifty years on Earth. And I’d like to be hopeful about that.
I like Earth, a lot. I don’t want to leave it. I’m quite content to be Earth-bound. The idea of the Ecological Footprint shows us that we could use a few more Earths, but when it comes down to it, we’ve only got one, and a colony on Mars just wouldn’t feel the same. Rather than asking why space exploration is still important, we should ask at what cost are we pursuing our “essence” on the assumption that we were made to be explorers. Weren’t we made to live on Earth?
50 years later and we’re making all our fears come true. The cold war may be over, but you couldn’t tell it from the headlines: we’re sending weapons into space, China’s shooting weapons out of space, Russia’s sending weapons into space in retaliation. It seems that we need to do a little more exploration - of ourselves. When we get to Mars, aren’t we just going to militarize it, too? And then won’t we just need four Earths and four Mars after it’s colonized? Where does it end?
I’m sorry, Ms. Patterson, but I must disagree. I was alive and in elementary school when Sputnik went up, and we all realized on that day that the exploration of our universe was about to take its first steps off our planet. Since then, both with spacecraft and with telescopes, we have discovered that Venus is unimaginably hot, that Titan has lakes of liquid methane, that we inhabit this universe with over 100 billion other galaxies, that Europa may have a gigantic ocean of liquid water beneath its icy sheath–perhaps harboring life–and that Mars once flowed with rivers and seas. This information makes up part and parcel of who I am now, and I believe my intellect and my spirit to have been immensely enriched by it all. When I was a child, neither I nor anyone on the planet knew anything about these wonders. And though we were not diminished by our ignorance, it was still ignorance. And that is something that we have always sought to dispel in ourselves. Dozens of satellites gaze upon Earth every day, looking for pollution, changing weather patterns, forest growth and decline, etc. Some of our greatest scientists devote their lives to the problems of energy, waste management, disease control, and population growth. And I thank them for that. But others (and there are enough talents and resources available to do it all) devote their careers to helping us to look outward, to dream among the stars. We will likely never colonize the moon or Mars in any meaningful way; the costs are simply too staggering to contemplate. But we can send our optical and robotic emissaries to the farthest reaches of space, and they can fuel our imaginations as the great explorers of the past did when they reached the South Pole or the depths of the Amazon jungle. Don’t decry these efforts because they don’t address problems here on Earth. In fact, they address the stagnation of imagination, and in every generation that is one of the greatest threats we face.
I have to agree that we were meant to explore, but I agree also that we need to protect our home planet. The second is the most important and should take precedence over exploring the rest of the universe, but we can and are doing both.
Michael Steen, thank you for contributing your thoughts. You make a very interesting argument. I agree that the Space Age that launched with Sputnik brought about innumerable advances in science and technology which have added immensely to our current knowledge. I’m not trying to deny that space exploration has a place in science, or say that we shouldn’t keep looking into the skies and widening our imagination.
But in my opinion, it’s time for a shift in where we focus our full attention. There’s no reason why a similar burst of science can’t happen here, first, on Earth. There’s no reason why Earth can’t stimulate the imagination and drive innovation. Earth is a stunningly beautiful place - I would argue more so than the distant and inhospitable environments of other planets - and right now, it’s plagued with problems that need creative solutions.
Challenges that we’ve always thought about, but never have been able to solve, are becoming increasingly critical, and the pace is picking up. The great thing about Earth is that everyone who lives here can get involved, and wonderful inventions, ideas, and designs are being created to make life better for the entire world. Take solar power, for example. We’ve always known that the sun is the greatest source of energy for our planet, and we’ve done a good amount of research and development, but it’s never really taken off. But now it seems like every other week scientists come up with some new technique on the path to making solar energy cheap and flexible. If there was more attention on making usable solar power - rather than the equally realistic return to the moon - maybe we’d be getting somewhere fast. And still, designers and inventors are coming up with cool, imaginative tools everyday - just look at the INDEX awards.
If we couldn’t find ways to fuel our imagination on Earth, we wouldn’t be very creative. But there’s a higher premium on creativity now than ever before. And we need it here, very badly, on Earth.
bravo lindsay, could not agree with you more