Lunar Redux

-


 

I've expressed doubts about modern space exploration programs and the underlying motivation behind most of them in these pages probably many times, now; but the Artemis mission has rekindled in me some of the wonder that I first experienced when the first astronauts made it to the Moon back in my early adulthood back in the late sixties. From the start of this mission, there has been a real sense of voyage to it, not mere remote, robotic interference, but exploration in the truest, most human sense of the word. And the key here is the word human, with all its manifest and manifold semantic depths laid out in the form of one actually quite simple quest. The complexity of science and technicality underpinning that quest cannot be ignored, but the goal of the enterprise, ultimately, is still simple and visceral: '... to seek to find and not to yield...' . Which is so unlike the billionaire tech bros and their dick-waving contests and colonial instincts: this mission is founded on that enduring human instinct to discover the unknown, without fear, favour or bias. To learn and teach. To understand and create; rather than exploit simply for financial gain.

Pallab Ghosh, the BBC's science correspondent, put this into words today; that instead of robots blindly scanning the Dark Side of The Moon, there were four pairs of eyes and four enquiring human minds out there, seeing and experiencing what no-one has seen or experienced before in such detail. The technology was secondary and merely an aid to perception. The true insights that we will glean from this first Artemis mission will have come from these fellow human beings; and the motivation to explore further should and hopefully will emanate from the same place in the human heart; not from some profit and loss calculation or hideous colonial motive. I've got a warm feeling from this enterprise and know that we need to prevent the tech bros from despoiling the solar system rather than seeking genuine human knowledge from it. Long may NASA do its stuff in the way that it does, just as fifty years ago, when I watched people walk for the first time on the moon, on black & white TV in a terraced house in Winson Green. Remember this image of our fragile little planet, distant in space: it is a gestalt of great significance to us as a species...

Comments

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more