Boldly going and gone

Forty years ago today, people landed on the moon. The next day--forty years ago, tomorrow--Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the lunar module, The Eagle, and took a little stroll. It was probably a day after that--forty years ago, Wednesday--that some paranoid asstard began wheeling his arms around and screaming, "Fake! Fake!" but to hell with that guy.

I wasn't around at the time, so I can't regale you with tales of sitting next to the flickering black-and-white hearth and breathlessly watching the events of 1.28 seconds in the past. When I was a wee little kid, though, I wanted to be an astronaut (not that unusual a childhood fantasy, I know), and so I was fascinated with all of it six or seven years in the past. I had an Apollo 11 record, I recall, that reproduced the audio feed and had some cheesy tribute music to go with it, light jazz instrumentals, that kind of thing, and I played the tracks that were just the Apollo 11 audio 'til you could see daylight through the vinyl. (Okay, that last part's exaggeration, but you get the gist.)

It was an epic thing, humans boldly going where no one had gone before. And at the time it still seemed that humans would keep boldly going--the idea of moonbases and space stations didn't seem that far-fetched if you were a naïve little tyke in the mid-'70s, oblivious to the realities of politics and budgets and such. Heck, I think adults probably fell for it, too: I mean, consider the 1968 classic, 2001. Eight years later, you sort of have to shake your head at how far off some of the movie ended up--no moon bases, no bigass wheels in the sky, no Pan Am--but at the time (a year before Apollo 11) the things Messrs. Clarke and Kubrick threw up on the screen had to be pretty straightforward linear extrapolations; land a man on the moon circa 1969 and surely you can have a permanent station there in thirty-two years, hell, that's about how long it took to go from a crude biplane made from bicycle parts to the Heinkel He 178(thirty-six years, to be exact), at which point we were well into the age of flight in general, trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, trans-Arctic, you name it.

If we were in space for the right reasons, the epic reasons, I think we'd have all the awesome stuff. But we weren't, not really. I hate to take some of the sparkle away, but let's face it: we were mostly on the moon not as a species achieving its destiny as we were there as Americans telling the Soviets to eat it. I'm honestly not trying to piss on the party--the lunar landing was a human pinnacle despite some of the baser motivations; no, it's that the baser motives are (I think) a big part of the reason we haven't had a parade for the returning Discovery astronauts back from their Jupiter rendezvous--once we'd rubbed the Soviet Union's face in it, there really wasn't a good reason to spend gazillions on going back again and again, and we ended up scaling back the plans for a permanent space station until all that was left was a delivery vehicle with no real mission and a disturbing tendency to explode. The Space Shuttle is, sort of ironically, kind of an example of why I'm not sure we physically belong in space.

See, we didn't exactly follow the linear projection Kubrick and Clarke sketched out; we got ourselves into politics and budgets and all that, and we never really had all that good a reason to go in the first place, and so we didn't make any sort of straight progression from those early unmanned Apollo flights that were in progress while 2001 was being made to Pan American spaceplanes taking bureaucrats up on routine business trips into the sky. And I guess where I'm going with this is that while my heart is with all the people who want to finally go back to the moon and to Mars for the right reasons, for the epic human adventure and the romance of discovery, my brain keeps telling me that we've set ourselves too far back to really justify the expense and risk to human life.

One of the funny things about the way the manned space program got sidetracked into a sort of oblivion is that various agencies never gave up exploring the universe and boldly going where no one had gone before and all that. But they didn't send people to do it--people who need to cart their food and water and precious air, people who can die of up to about a dozen different things at once if abruptly exposed to the intensely hostile environments of deep space or the lunar or Martian landscapes. We have these doughty explorers with names like Voyager, Ulysses and Cassini, Spirit and Opportunity, and they're doing good science and witnessing exotic vistas for us, and bless 'em but if they all died tomorrow the grief would be fleeting because we can build more.

I was thinking about this last bit this morning while listening to Buzz Aldrin for a few minutes on NPR. He was talking about getting a critical mass of humans onto Mars, and made the point that the people who got off the Mayflower didn't sit around waiting for the return ship to take them back, they were there to stay and live, and it's a good point as far as it goes. Buzz Aldrin is a hell of a guy, and if I disagree with him, which I sort of do, it's a disagreement filled with respect and admiration, and even envy for what he's seen and done. I agree with him that it would be neat to have humans living on Mars, there to stay and hopefully prosper. It would certainly give the species a shot if we Earthbound humans manage to wipe ourselves out or get creamed by a celestial event like the rock that beaned the dinosaurs but good sixty-five million years ago. The problem is that I think the comparison to the Puritans falls through when you consider that all the ways they could have died en route or upon arrival would have been individual, slow, and not inevitable, with the exception of their ship sinking in bad weather at a particularly inopportune place (and bear in mind there are places the Mayflower could have sunk with a decent probability of survivors washing up on one shore or another). A gasket blows at Mars landing and pfft, literally pfft, there goes everyone in a puff of sweet, sweet air.

For the money and trouble we'd spend trying to keep them from suffocating on vacuum or their own waste gas, or starving or dying of thirst or from exotic cancers caused by insufficient radiation shielding--for all that, how many 'bots could we scatter through the solar system and eventually the galaxy? I'm not immune to the romance of human feet kicking up the dirt of an alien place, but I also have to wonder why the seeds we scatter shouldn't be made of metal and silicon? We could be boldly going not merely where no one has gone but where no one could go, not if they were human-sized and human-shaped and needed to breathe and eat and drink and find something to do with their piss and shit.

A common objection to this line is that humans on-site can respond and react to events more quickly. This is true at the moment, let's concede; the time-delay in a round-trip radio signal to Pluto, at its very closest, is around ten hours. We could exchange news with our little friend twice-a-day, basically, and if something happens in the meantime who would know? The bitch is, of course, that the same thing would be true if it was some guy out there instead of a robot. If we put people on Mars, there will be around a three-minute delay in each direction, more than enough time to listen to a perfect pop song. But, more significantly, I think we're on a better track when it comes to smart machines than reliable manned space travel; I don't know if we'll ever create an AI or if true AI is even possible, but we are making strides every day in building software that can react to changes in the environment and make and respond to predictions with surprising accuracy. Our 'bots are going to take increasingly better care of themselves with less intervention from us.

I don't know. Like I said, my heart wants to go. But my head says there's no need to do it person.