Neil Armstrong’s death should be a wake-up call for the world

Neil Armstrong lands on the Moon

Nobody born since 1935 has stepped on another world. Neil Armstrong’s death is a reminder that we have been screwing about for too long now – it’s time to go to Mars.

Nobody born after 1935 has walked on the moon. Nobody since the nineteen thirties. The children of eight decades since have still not made it back there, or reached further to touch the red dust of Mars.

Neil Armstrong’s death means that the first man on the Moon will never meet the first man on Mars. It is a chilling reminder that we are unlikely to reach another planet in the lifetimes of any of the surviving Apollo astronauts. It may not happen in my parents’ lifetimes. I’m beginning to lose faith that it will even happen in my lifetime. How have we allowed this to happen?

Sometimes I think about how far I’ve traveled compared to my distant ancestors. In the last twelve months alone I’ve flown around 25,000 miles – once around the Earth – covering more ground in a single year than most of the humans who have ever lived did in their lifetimes, scurrying around their local villages and regions. I’ve always assumed that my travels would seem similarly unimpressive to my star-hopping descendants.

As a child of the eighties, that’s what I learned to expect, that each generation travels further and faster and better than the last. By the time I was a grown-up we would be whizzing around in bullet trains and hypersonic jets, and I’d honeymoon with my wife on the sandy shores of the Sea of Tranquility. All music would be synth pop, and hemlines would have risen to somewhere around the belly-button.

I’ll be 31 years old next month, and pretty soon I’ll have to come to terms with the fact that I am a grown-up. Born just after the first Shuttle mission, I find myself trapped in the world of First Great Western trains, flying on aircraft designed in the sixties, watching my generation struggle to bear the brunt of an economic crisis, trying to find sense in a culture where Big Brother losers are given more press coverage than Olympic athletes.

There was so much optimism in my old sci-fi books, but now all we seem to hear are people droning on about how shit things are, how much shitter they’re going to get, and whose fault it is that they got shit in the first place: the tedious drumbeat of the cowardly and insidious ‘Broken Britain’ mentality. I’m probably as guilty of that as anyone: it’s easier to shout at things than it is to stand up and do something about them.

I’m angry though, I really am. The science fiction books and TV shows I devoured in the 1980s promised me a world – no, worlds – of exploration: spaceships and aliens whizzing around a galaxy of possibilities where anything could happen in the next half hour. Now, in 2012, I have to face the possibility that I could live to be an old man in a world where the only memories our civilization has of planetary exploration are a few grainy, black and white images, carefully preserved from a century before; dusty footprints and scraps of metal abandoned in a place we never go.

Well I’ll be buggered if I’m going to let go of the childish things: awe and ambition; eating cookies in bed; imagining sleek space ships and lush alien worlds, or green-skinned alien goddesses come to whisk me up into the night sky, free to drift among infinite jewels spinning slowly in the dark. Some nights I catch myself staring up at the moon, wondering if I’ll ever reach it. And guess what: I still believe I can.

I don’t give a damn if robotic probes make more sense. I don’t give a damn about the views of academic committees or health and safety. I don’t give a damn about the supposed costs – money spent on space exploration is invested in science and technology right here on Earth, and has paid for itself many times over. There’s no point having a great civilization if all we do is sit on our little rock and just survive.

Read the rest, with full links, The Guardian here

The first step onto the Moon by Neil Armstrong on Sunday 20 July 1969 ~ for the denizens of eastern Australia the time was 12.56pm Monday 21 July NASA image

The Passing of Neil Armstrong
======================
Kim Peart

Neil Armstrong did something that no one else on Earth had ever done before.

He stepped onto another world.

No explorer had ever ventured further to plant the flag of their nation into another land.

Lief Ericson found the Americas, but the Vikings were driven back by hostile denizens of the New World.

Columbus found the New World, launching a tragedy for the indigenous people of the Americas.

Neil Armstrong found the Moon and there were no hostile lunar occupants to drive the Earthlings back to Earth, nor any to harm.

The Apollo explorers were the spearhead of an army of 500,000 workers who solved every problem to open the way beyond Earth, including former enemies such as Wernher von Braun and his amazing rocket building team, who built the mighty Saturn V rocket that made the mission possible.

Like the Vikings in America, was it just a bridge too far, to keep going, to build a Moon base, to explore Mars, to rally to Dr Peter Glaser’s 1968 vision to build solar power stations in space, to respond to Professor Gerard K. O’Neill’s proposals for orbital space settlements in the early 1970s?

Delay in expansion beyond Earth may prove more costly than anyone on Earth can even now imagine.

By not making the transition from an Earth-trapped carbon economy to a space-liberated stellar civilization and in a timely fashion, we have burnt too much fossil fuel and squandered too many precious resources for no real gain in our basic cosmic survival needs.

No responsible householder neglects their insurance cover, but Earth has no insurance policy to protect us against a cosmic disaster.

Like the asteroid that sent the dinosaurs into oblivion 65 million years ago, another cosmic monster will arrive one day to kiss the Earth.

Even a giant solar flare from the Sun could prove to be a killer blow to our civilization, by melting the electric wires we depend on for power.

Most concerning of all may be the tragedy that we have burnt too much fossil fuel to drive our progress on Earth, instead of using this precious resource to lift our game beyond Earth and connect with unlimited stellar energy from the Sun with our expansion among the stars.

Now the carbon from dead life released into the biosphere as carbon dioxide is heating up the air and sea, melting the ice, changing plant biology and turning the oceans acidic.

Now there is an underlying fear in the world that we are without hope, that humanity will remain trapped on Earth and should environmental crisis lead to an economic slide, there will be no stopping the plunge into oblivion.

Rather than shed tears at the death of Neil Armstrong, we can applaud his triumph and the success achieved by all around the world involved in our Apollo moment of discovery and potentially ~ the next step in human cosmic evolution.

We can best remember Neil Armstrong, by deciding that his first step onto the Sea of Tranquility will not have been in vain, if enough people on Earth will rally to recapture the Apollo moment and demand action on building our cosmic survival insurance policy.

We can still use the resources of the Earth to build those solar power stations in space, to gain direct access to the Sun’s unlimited stellar energy, to launch industry beyond Earth, to build Earth-gravity orbital space settlements, to explore Mars and begin some rather amazing stellar exploration.

We would also be in a position to win back a safe Earth and send poverty into history, as with unlimited energy, anything will be possible. [1]

If it takes ten million people to rise up and demand action on human survival, then ten million people will need to rise up and demand a new Apollo moment in human history ~ creating our stellar future.

Space Pioneers have developed a way for any number of people to be directly involved in a space program in the virtual world, organising globally and acting locally toward building celestially. [2]

The key objective beyond Earth must be the building of the first orbital space settlement, as this will open the way to safe human occupation of space in an Earth-gravity environment. [3]

O’Neill worked out that the Asteroid Belt alone had enough raw material to build orbital space settlements with a land area 3000 times that of Earth. [4]

If ten million people were to mobilise and act, we would build a memorial to Apollo on the Moon and a fitting tribute to the memory of Neil Armstrong.

NOTES ~

[1] See Liberty Line under Toward a Solar Economy in ‘Creating A Solar Civilization’ ~
http://www.islandearth.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=64

[2] See ‘The Birth of the VOSS’ ~
http://www.islandearth.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=63:the-birth-of-the-voss&catid=49:voss&Itemid=74

and also ‘Driving the VOSS Vision’ ~
http://www.islandearth.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70:driving-the-voss-vision&catid=49:voss&Itemid=74

[3] See Cities and islands in Space in ‘Creating A Solar Civilization’ ~
http://www.islandearth.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=64

[4] P.16, ‘The High Frontier’ by Gerard K. O’Neill, 1977

A new generation of NASA scientists are fighting back with rhythm with a YouTube ~
‘We’re NASA and We Know It’ ~