SPACE/ Did humanity really lose its capacity to be amazed?

July Fri 24, 2009

Maria Elena Monzani

I was a child during the last years of the Cold War. I grew up amidst the fear of the nuclear war, but also the marvel from the images of the man on the Moon. In first grade, I spent several weeks trying to build a paper model of the Apollo Lunar Module. All these experiences were pivotal in my very early fascination with space and in my later decision to become an astrophysicist.

Last June I traveled to Cape Canaveral, in order to attend the launch of the satellite I work on, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. I finally came to fulfill my childhood dream, and visited the Kennedy Space Center with some colleagues. I relived the excitement of the countdown, the adventurous landing of the Lunar Module, the trepidation of the first steps on the Moon. I walked besides the 363 feet of the Saturn V rocket, and marveled at the courage of these men, sitting in their minuscule and fragile capsule on top of a 7 million lbs rocket in controlled explosion. But as soon as we left the Visitor Center, one of my colleagues expressed his disappointment: “And now they are even talking about going to Mars! What a waste! We should use that money to cure cancer”. I agree, finding a cure for cancer would be great. And yet… Why does the idea to give up on the space exploration program sound so unbearably sad?

Back from Cape Canaveral, I had lunch with a dear friend, who was a young physicist at the time of the Moon landing. He shared with me his memories from that night, when the world literally held its breath while watching the last phases of the Apollo landing and Armstrong’s first steps on lunar soil. “The whole world stopped in wonder that night. But now, is there something that would amaze us in the same way”? The hypothesis that humanity may have lost its capability for amazement sounds chilling, but unfortunately not that unlikely (and by the way, not only would this bring about the end of space exploration, but the death of science altogether).

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Peggy Noonan poses the same problem and offers a fascinating explanation. “[The moon landing] was an epic moment in history, though its memory is accompanied by an unsatisfied feeling, as if Columbus came to America and then no one followed. People will ask again why we've stopped visiting other places and have instead spent the past few decades watching the space shuttle orbit the Earth. The space program of the past 32 years unconsciously mirrored a change in American psychology. Now, in the age of soft narcissism, we just circle ourselves. Which is what the shuttle does. We should take our eyes off ourselves. We should go someplace again”.

Space travel is one of the inherent dreams of humanity: all literary traditions and mythologies tell the story of some hero or god who manages to escape the physical laws of this world to explore the firmament (very often they end up on the Moon). But once we realized this dream, it started looking like a capricious whim: we are not planning to go back to the Moon anytime before 2020, and as Buzz Aldrin recalled in a recent article for CNN, “this new race has failed to ignite the imagination of young Americans -- or their leaders”.

In the same article, Aldrin talks about his experience of falling into a deep depression once he got back from the Moon: “I felt lost and without a purpose. Nothing I did seemed to have meaning or motivation for me. I left the Air Force, the space program, and was adrift”. It’s a good rendering of the psychological conditions of today’s space travel program: we went all the way to the Moon and still weren’t happy. Where else could we go now? The generation that was born after the space race grew up thinking that everything was possible, but at the same time not worth the struggle. And so we put a lot of effort into trivializing our desires, reducing them to a set of instinctive drives: we stopped thinking big, even in our dreams.

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