Mooning

On Wednesday, India became the fourth nation to land on the moon. This comes with some qualifiers, of course. India's landing was the fourth country to make a soft landing on the lunar surface. Four decades after Russia became the first country to hit the moon in 1959. It took another seven years for them to touch down lightly, allowing the Luna 9 to do something just a few months ahead of the Americans, whose Surveyor settled down lightly in June of 1966. China came in third, decades later in 2013, when they put a rover up there. It should be acknowledged that India managed their probe, Chandryaan-3, onto the south pole of the moon. Lunar landings have been primarily restricted to the equator until now. 

So there's some history there. Like the story of the first humans to land on the moon back in July of 1969. That was the United States. We got so good at it that we did it six more times. It would have been seven, but Ron Howard needed to make a movie about something, so we let Tom Hanks drive. And that almost ended in disaster. And even with that setback, the United States kept putting men on the moon until 1972.

Why did we stop going? Why didn't any other country send humans up there afterward? It could be that after Americans had driven all over the place with their dune buggies and even stopped to play a little golf there wasn't much mystery left. It might also have something to do with the way things were here on Earth at the time, and if you can imagine it, the public was getting bored with these astronomically priced missions (if you'll pardon the pun). 

As it turns out, the moon is a pretty desolate place. Plenty of rocks and dust, but not much in the way of atmosphere or ambience. It does have something going for it that a lot of other galactic destinations do not: distance. Current propulsion technology allows us to make the trip in about three days. Compare that to Mars, at about seven months, and you'll understand why human beings continue to reach out for a slice of that apocryphal green cheese. The Indian lander hopes to search the southern pole of our rocky satellite for traces of water, ice to be precise. Water molecules can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, thereby increasing the possibility of using lunar resources to breathe and create more fuel which happily can be created by recombining hydrogen and oxygen. Science!

Which drops me off here: Science is good. Science is important. We have cellular telephones because once upon a time we went to the moon. We can still figure out more things like how to get a social media app that truly supports free speech and how to get ketchup back in the bottle. But first we need to respect the science that we already have. We need to recognize when, after all those years of thinking that we lived on a dinner plate, suddenly we're a tennis ball. And what we do to our world matters so that we don't have to rely on other worlds to save us. These revelations are additions to our knowledge, not topics for debate. Chandryaan-3 did not land on a hunch. That was real. 

I saw it on Al Gore's Internet.