What a terrific moment today when Curiosity Mars Explorer landed successfully. The people at NASA involved in this project must be very relieved and extremely proud. Lets hope the results from this achievement spur humanity on to greater efforts to explore the solar system. Maybe the example of CERN and the LHC will serve to show what can be achieved working together and that the international community will finally get together. I’d love to see humans stand on the surface of Mars.
While writing about great endeavour and achievement it is great to see all these Olympic athletes (winners and other competitors) giving their best efforts. As someone who has worked at my various sports for all my life I understand the effort and sacrifice. Having watched rowers finish a race, to see how much of themselves they have given and the disappointment and feeling that they had somehow let people down, this upset me when I then thought about the ignorant,arrogant waste of space students I often encounter at work.
Finally I was saddened to see that Neil Armstrong had died recently. He was one of my hero's and an inspiration. One of my first memory's was getting up early in the morning to watch that first moon landing on the TV. Just think that in the whole history of humanity only eleven people have stood on another planet and looked back at our small and insignificant dot that we call home. Neil Armstrong was the first human to ever stand on another planet (well moon actually), what courage must that have taken. Yet when he returned to Earth he remained the quiet, humble man he always was. Maybe we could do with more like him, maybe we could do with people asking why we have not moved further after all it was forty years ago when the last man Eugene Cernan stood on our moon (it's all politics and it's all garbage - mankind needs more than our small planet to survive and to do that we need to be together and the thing holding us down are politics, greed and relgion.)
Here are some quotes from Neil:
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.
I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.
I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.
All of these quotes say something important: humanity can be great, certainly so much more than we are, when we allow ourselves to be. That we live on a small part of the Universe, nothing special and that we need to reach for more. That we have not allowed ourselves to move on from those days of Apollo.
