It is now fifty-four years since I made this laconic entry in my diary: “Watch the first manned landing on the Moon on TV, by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.” It was 20th July 1969 and was an event I shall never forget, as I shall never forget where I was at the time and who with. I’m sure something similar is true for everyone who was around at the time. Not everyone was excited about it, though. Some questioned the expense and said the money could have been better spent here on the Earth; that the space programme was uneconomic, impractical, wasteful and vainglorious. Others, more positively, said the science and technology involved would have long-term benefits quite apart from what we would learn about the Moon. And this has proved true enough. Quite apart from the oft-cited non-stick frying pan, our modern global communications and our present knowledge about our own planet – not least about the effects of global warming and climate-change – owe almost everything to the space programme of the 1960s and ‘70s. There is a downside of course – such as the cluttering up of the near-Earth orbit with space junk and the possible use of space for war and aggression – but still I cannot regret the excitement of that night in 1969.
I suppose I was one of the romantics, inspired by science fiction in books, films and television series like ‘Star Trek’. Not that I thought it was very likely that we would ever meet those ‘little green men’ or, indeed alien races of any size, colour or gender, but the idea of exploring the universe was attractive and seemed to me – as it still does – to reflect something about the human spirit. The urge to explore, to discover, “to boldly go where no-one has gone before” (to coin a phrase!) is something fundamental to human nature and has been ever since some remote ancestor decided to find out what was on the other side of that range of mountains or that seemingly boundless sea.
It is true, of course, that his or her motives would probably have been practical, as so much exploration has always been, with the search for new hunting-grounds, new pastures and new resources predominant, but sheer curiosity and a desire for knowledge has usually been a part of it too. It is a part of who we are and when we neglect it something essential is lost, and we risk retreating into a deadening closed-minded complacency. It was people who didn’t want to know - and didn’t want anyone else to know either - who imprisoned, burned or otherwise tried to silence the explorers and the scientists. Those who questioned the received ignorance were branded as ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’. As they still are by the ideologues of reaction.
The excitement over the Moon landings soon faded for many and the Apollo programme came to a premature end, but the curiosity did not. The desire to know more persisted. Although the Moon has remained unvisited for fifty years, and although Mars has yet to feel a human footfall, all manner of unmanned probes have added immeasurably to our knowledge of the Solar System, and space telescopes of unimaginable power have enabled us to study the countless stars and planets in our own and other galaxies, and not only to look across the universe but to look back in time towards its beginning.
And all this has raised questions about things we once thought of as eternal. We now know that the Earth is finite – that it had a beginning and will have an end, as will the Sun and the stars and, it seems, even the universe itself, albeit many billions of years from now. Even the great cycles of creation and destruction may not, it seems, go on for ever – and we certainly won’t! But we do have our own more human-scale relationship with time and space. When I think back to that night watching the first Moon landing I don’t only think about cosmic questions of space and time. I think of what has happened to me in space and time, here on the Earth, in the past fifty-four years. In fact not long after that night my own life nearly came to a premature end very far from home, which would have changed the lives – even the existence - of many more people than just me. Some who are alive today would never have existed, others who might have come into being, never did. And since then so many of the people I knew then – family members, good friends and lovers – have either died or been lost, at least, to me. There is nothing eternal about our lives, even if we do, in the words of Unitarian poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “leave footprints in the sands of time”.
But our lives do matter and what we do with them matters, and they matter because it is now that matters. Time does not determine the value of what we do. A kind, loving and courageous deed is not devalued by the fact that we may die tomorrow or that the Sun will burn out in a few billion years from now. It matters now and it is part of the eternal now – it will always have happened and so it will always be there. To be eternal doesn’t really mean everlasting or extending endlessly through time, it means being outside of time, A kind word said today will not be erased even when it is forgotten – it will always be a kind word said today.
Acting lovingly now matters regardless of the future. “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces”, said Martin Luther, “I would still plant my apple tree.” And talk of planting brings us to Lammas, when we remember the seemingly eternal cycle of seedtime and harvest on which we are utterly dependent. We should give thanks for the first fruits of the harvest as our ancestors did for these things are just as fundamental to our existence, even though we may scarcely give them a second thought as we trundle round the supermarket loading up our trolleys. But maybe we should give them more than a second thought because perhaps the good times are coming to an end.
The climate-change and global warming, which the satellites in space have enabled us to chart on a planetary scale, make for a grim story that we ignored for too long – about fifty years or so, in fact. We may not be able to rely on the cycle of seedtime and harvest as we once did; we won’t be able to regard it as ‘eternal’ in a way that our ancestors did. True, they had to face the vagaries and unpredictability of nature, and prayed to be spared from storm, drought, blight and famine – often in vain – but, generally speaking, these things were not their fault, even if they thought they had angered the gods or the spirits. But we have created a situation where famine, drought and famine are increasingly our fault as weather patterns are disrupted, seas warm, ice melts, forests burn and the planet heats up to unprecedented levels. Plant and animal species go extinct, human life is disrupted, people flee from spreading deserts; disputes over water and fertile land threaten to bring conflict and war. We know, unless we choose to close our minds – as some do – that we are in a mess of our own making.
I suppose, in a sense, we have angered the gods – or God – if by that we mean getting out of sync with the mysterious creative power which brought us into being and which sustains us here on what astronomer Carl Sagan called our “blue dot”. Our past ignorance was forgivable, our present arrogance and hubris are not. In the language of religion and myth our ancestors acknowledged their dependence on nature, on earth and water and what lives and grows in them, and they recognised the wisdom and necessity of being good stewards. As the Book of Genesis puts it, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and look after it” (Genesis 2:15) But somewhere along the line we discarded that wisdom and became consumers, gobbling up the Earth and polluting its pure sources. The Earth will roll on for a few million years yet, of that we can be pretty certain, but we can’t be sure what our place on it will be over a much shorter timescale.
We can’t appeal to God to save us, even though our spiritual traditions point the way. We can engage with the ancient and the eternal to live well in the now. You might say that, in the language of religion and myth, God has already shown us the right path. Maybe not precisely what to do, but rather how to be in this world: humble and respectful before the Great Mystery and the wonders we did not create and have no right to destroy. We are, in a sense, still on our own, but we do have each other, because human beings can not only be very clever, we can also be wise, loving and compassionate.
We do have the knowledge to head off the worst effects of our folly and bequeath a beautiful and fruitful planet to our descendants. We are waking up to our predicament. But do we have the wisdom and the will, including the political will, to act now for the sake of the future of life on earth – both human and otherwise? Let us not only hope so, let us resolve to make it so. Then, maybe thousands of years hence, when those aliens finally turn up as travellers from a distant star system come to explore ours, they will find that the third planet is still richly green and blue with abundant life and inhabited by a wiser, more peaceful and more united people than it is now. But for that to be so, our decisions now matter and let’s hope that our successors are more sensible than we have been.
(CMR040723)