Ignoring the Nay Sayers-Why we must return to the Moon and Forge Ahead to Mars and beyond

Hello Gang,

What follows is a draft of a blog I am developing for publication later in the week. I welcome any helpful comments.

Alex

"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds."

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

"If God wanted man to become a space faring species, He would have given man a moon." - Krafft Ehricke

Ignoring the Nay Sayers

Why we must return to the Moon and Forge Ahead to Mars and beyond

If Man were meant to fly he would have wings.

If Man were meant to sail the seven seas he would have had rudders.

If Man were meant to venture breath the waves he would have been given gills.

And, if Man were meant to fly into space he would have had a rocket stuck up his rear end.

Despite all these doubts man has gone on and accomplished all that and more. Human progress has always been a story of how a precious few individuals have gone on to achieve the seemingly impossible and ignored the Nay Sayers. Notwithstanding all the critics and all the doubters space travel and the prospect of colonizing space can no longer be dismissed as mere science fiction.

Much of what we take for granted in todays world was once the stuff of science fiction. Our very world is the substance of science fiction of generations past. How jaded we have become to the wonders of todays modern world. We live in a world of almost instantaneous global communication. We fly across the oceans to exotic holiday destinations reminiscent of the voyages of Odysseus and the Sinbad. Men routinely ply the seven seas bringing fresh produce and unusual products from these exotic ports of call. A dozen men have walked on the surface of the Moon. Our space probes have ventured to the very edge of the solar system and beyond. How anyone can refer to our prospect of returning to the Moon and Mars and vision of colonizing space as mere science fiction is beyond comprehension and almost laughable in our modern age.

People have pointed to the technical challenges these goals present. But, these are engineering problems not the limitations imposed by science, the laws of nature, or constraints of our biology. To quote Jacob Bronowski from The Ascent of Man Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape - he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home on every continent." Our species has ventured out of the savannahs of Africa and conquered the entire planet. We have even made our home on the frozen and frigid wastes of the Artic Ocean. Humans have even learned how to exploit ice itself as a building material for his shelter.

Man is the accomplished alchemist only he can transmute the vision of the minds eye into concrete reality. The only limits facing the human species are the limitations he imposes on himself- the failure of imagination and nerve.

We will colonize space. Our long term survival as a species depends on this. Humankind faces an Extraterrestrial Imperative Colonize space or die. And, with our passing the light of human reason and thought will have been extinguished from the Cosmos forever. We can argue about cost and engineering until we are all blue in the face. We may be as cynical about the goals and motivations behind our current plans to return to the Moon and forge ahead to Mars all we wish. But, the fact remains that space exploration- both robotic and manned is vital to our long term survival.

This isnt a religious conviction but, a fact of nature revealed by the science of our age. The entire solar system bears testament to its violent legacy. All the planets and moons bare the scares of a tumultuous history. None of them have gone through their lengthy existence unscathed by the violent impact of asteroids and comets. Uranus was toppled on its axis and its moon Miranda is a jigsaw puzzle world that had been torn apart and reassembled.

Mars is a world that was murdered in its early infancy before it had any chance of completely fulfilling its promise of becoming an abode of life. Most of its crust and atmosphere were flayed and ejected into space.

The Moon, a world of on our very doorstep, provides a clear warning for all to see that the world is living on borrowed time. Towards the late 19th and throughout the 20th centuries some 150 impact craters have been discovered on our own planetary abode. In the twentieth century two impacts occurred in Eastern Russia. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometerswhen an object some 70 meters in diameter impacted the Siberian region of Tunguska with the explosive yield of 1000 Hiroshima bombs. On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the last century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok in a rain of iron and stone. On August 1972 the Earth survived another near direct hit an escaped with a mere flesh wound when a meteorite over the state of Wyoming grazed the upper atmosphere and bounced back into space before thousands of eyewitnesses. Its blazing trail was even captured on film.

In the early 1980s evidence slowly accumulated that 65 Million years ago the reign of the dinosaurs ended with a huge bang and ensuing fire storm and before that violent mass extinctions occurred like clockwork throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth.

In the chronicle of Gervase an eyewitness account was given of a massive impact on the eastern limb of the Moon that occurred on June 25th, 1178. Evidence is also coming to light that June, despite our fondness for this month because of weddings and the promise of summer holidays to come, holds potential dangers for humanity. The Taurid beta meteor shower is once we must study in detail. In the late 20th century archaeological evidence has come to light that many late Bronze Age civilizations met their demise in a rain of fire from the sky. Back in July, 1994 during the week of the 25th anniversary marking man's first steps on the Moon the heavens provided a massive fireworks display of its own to mark the occasion. The planet Jupiter sustained 20 individual impacts from the fragments left over from the disintegration of the comet Shoemaker Levy 9. Any one of these impacts would have been sufficient in itself to wipe life off the face of our globe in a real Extinction Level Event (E.L.E).

Yet despite all this accumulated evidence the human species continues to go about its humdrum worldly concerns, abandoning our attention to the heavens and the dangers that lurk in its local celestial neighbourhood. We face the celestial equivalent of a 9/11. Humanity can no longer ignore the objective reality that its long term existence is imperilled. We either become a spacefaring civilization or face the fate of the dinosaurs.

The technologies that will make this possible are being developed now by the men and women who are following a long tradition of proving the Nay Sayers wrong. When people say impossible someone comes always comes along and proves them wrong.

A group of people at the recent X-prize cup events of last October are forging ahead to make this dream a reality. There efforts are reminiscent of the early rocket experiments of Robert H. Goddard. Many Nay Sayers laughed at him also when he talked about flying to the Moon and where also proved wrong. These inventive and innovative men and women who took part in the X-prize cup are creating the technologies that will ensure the long term survival of the human species. Nay Sayers be dammed.