exploration

I wasn’t alive when Apollo 11 reached the moon forty years ago today. I was alive for Apollo 16 and 17 but less than a year old so my memories are dim. I do remember reading The High Road by Ben Bova from 1981 and dreaming of becoming an astronaut. That dream was never fulfilled and I’ve become less infatuated with space travel as I’ve aged. That seems sad. I don’t see many signs of optimism for the future of mankind today.

At the beginning of “An Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore shows the audience two iconic Apollo images, Earthrise and Blue Marble. I remember seeing those pictures as a teenager and feeling the shock of scale. There we all were, every last one of us. Human beings living on a fragile blue globe suspended in the middle of nowhere. And all of history has happened on that tiny rock. As an aside, the link to Earthrise above has some interesting history of the image.