It’s been a bitter-sweet year for space travel enthusiasts.
We noted the passing of the first moonwalker and marked the forty-third anniversary of that giant step for mankind, almost to the day of death of the man who took the one small step.
Around the same time the Americans successfully landed a robot called Curiosity on Mars.
Which begs the question, “Has curiosity killed compassion?”
Now before the reader gets much further and works it out I will confess to the stark raving obvious. I don’t have an astronomic bone in my body or scientific brain in my head.
My younger daughter once wrote on the front of a science exam paper, “Dear Science Teacher, I just want to inform you that no member of my family has a background in the sciences and I think you should take this into account as you mark my paper.”
Apparently my former life as a cheesemaker didn’t count. But I leap to my own defence. I did learn a little about the microscopic but nothing about the telescopic and macroscopic.
With that disclaimer, let me address the question. Was landing a man on the moon a giant step forward for mankind? Or was it more like a giant exercise in grandstanding and getting one up on the Russians? Did it make the world a healthier and safer place? Was it less about good scientific investment and more about a feel-good exercise because everything going on over in Vietnam was making the Americans and the rest of us feel full of dis-ease?
Even forty years ago the protest lyricists and songsters were asking the simple but hard questions that few would articulate:
Black boy in Chicago,
playing on the street,
Not enough to wear,
not near enough to eat.
But don’t you know he saw it,
on a July afternoon.
Saw a man named Armstrong,
walk upon the moon.
Young girl in Calcutta,
barely eight years old.
The flies that swarm the market place,
will see she don’t get old.
But don’t you know she heard it,
on a July afternoon
Heard a man named Armstrong,
walk upon the moon.
And now we have Curiosity; a robot crawling along the surface of Mars like a centipede, turning over a few rocks, taking nothing but readings and pictures and leaving nothing but tyre tracks.
Will someone please give me a cost/benefit analysis? Perhaps someone who has a background in the sciences will do it for me, because I don’t get it. In fact, I’ve never got it.
What have been the gains from landing a man on the lunar? Will the scientific data collected from Curiosity, costing squillions of dollars, make this world a better and safer place?
Will it halve the number of children who are dying every day from preventable causes that I keep banging on about? Will it put food into starving stomachs? Will it provide medicines for dying babies?
Are we likely to get data that will help us understand more about climate change and leave a legacy of scientific knowledge to our grandchildren who may have to inhabit the earth long after we’re gone? Now there’s something that the sceptic and the concerned can both be curious about.
Is not looking after the welfare of the people of our own planet, and the welfare of the planet itself, a more honourable priority and pursuit than being curious about the cosmos?
Yes, yes, I know that putting a man on the moon and a machine on Mars must have provided scientific benefits. We wouldn’t be where we are today in terms of satellite communications and surveillance from space without this cumulative knowledge. But we may have achieved the best of these things with more modest ambitions and budgets anyway.
And I’m not saying that curiosity isn’t commendable. If it was a matter of being able to afford both I’d be all for it. But resources are limited. People are starving. People are suffering. People are dying. Millions of people. Let’s get our own house in order.
Curiosity in space by the scientific community isn’t the only direction this discussion could go. We know that it won’t be long before the filthy rich, who have done everything else to indulge their senses on this planet, will start paying obscene amounts of money for commercial space travel. Or they will keep doing outlandish space to earth things, like Freefall Felix recently, to get in the Guinness Book of Records.
And what about the globetrotting adventure-travelling middle class? How many once-in-a-lifetime trips around the world do we need to satisfy our insatiable appetite for travel, our curiosity about cultures and our desire for discovery? How many continents do we need to traverse, countries do we need to visit and exotic frontiers do we need to explore? These are all good things in and of themselves. Sure, we have the economic power to do it. But does that justify our self-indulgence to the neglect of serving the people living in poverty?
Has curiosity killed compassion? And ultimately it’s not about how you and I would answer that question because ultimately it’s not about you and me. How would Jesus answer the question?
SBS has a tag-line for its news that goes like this:
News from home if you live in the world
So let me ask this age-old question in that context:
Doesn’t charity begin at home?
