I’ve been thinking a lot about NASA’s “mission to bomb the moon” and our woeful lack of healthy stewardship of the Earth. What makes us so arrogant as a species, to believe that we are pursuing a “new frontier” by being destructive to another celestial body? I read that the United States is trying to see if Homo sapiens could live on the moon. Why? We cannot take care of what we already have (spending the money on global population control makes more sense).
While I understand, on an intellectual level, the urge to know, to stretch ourselves to heretofore unknown heights (or is that depths?) but what I cannot reconcile is the fact that we have been singularly poor stewards of nature here on Earth. What will make us better stewards of the resources there than we have been here?
The missions demand a tremendous amount of money, time, energy and fuel, pollution, emissions, litter, and trash left in space and on the surface of the moon. In other words, we take our dirty, polluting ways and inflict them upon another place. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
I prefer my moon in the night sky, untrammeled for decades (and forevermore)—a source of mystery and romantic dreams, a guide by which to plant garlic, an eternal influence on the ocean’s tides.
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