"Remember when the whole world looked up...?"

[anghara]

We went to see a film yesterday.

It was all about science fiction, and fantasy, and magic.

It was true.

I was six years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on our moon, and living in a country far away from the United States. If they showed the moon landing where I was at, I certainly don't think it was live, and I for one don't remember it - and being who I am, who I became, I would have remembered it. So I never saw it, not really, not these images as set out on the screen, not the build-up to it, none of that. And yet, now, almost forty years later, I watch the crowds on the stands on launch day, I see people instinctively surging to their feet as the countdown reaches 25 seconds, I see cameras being lifted to snap the liftoff, I see people's eyes fill with tears, and I know that somehow my heart was there that day, my spirit was, because forty years later the tears still come when I see it and my heart beats hard enough to break when I watch it all.

These old men, now - men who were once young, the only human beings to have set foot on another world - they have been changed by this experience. They have - you can see it in their eyes. You can see it when the camera goes in close and you glimpse the glint of tears, or when the eyes suddenly go unfocused and you know that the man who is being filmed is seeing not the present but the distant past, or when the eyes slide away from the close-up camera because they are afraid of showing too much emotion to be safely shared. I hear it in their voices, which tremble slightly when they speak of seeing the Earth hanging there in the black nothing, when they speak of that "jewel", of the fragility of it all, when the photos they took of Earthrise above a sharply curved moon horizon are shown on the screen. One of them returned to embrace a conventional religion, Christianity, but ALL of them had looked upon the true face of God - and knew the great truth that G'Kar of Babylon 5 once wrote down - we are one. We, and the stars, and everything that we have ever seen or done or made. We are one.

They show the men stepping off the lander, and bounding up and down the lunar dunes, and driving the lunar rover at breakneck speeds down steep dusty slopes of this new worldlet, and picking up rocks for the folks back home to pore over (with voices overheard in the background where one or the other of the astronauts wanders off lugging this boulder and muttering something about this one being "a beauty"). It's heart-stopping, it's dicing with death (they showed the speech which had already been prepared and which would have been read in the event that the Armstrong/Aldrin duo had had to be abandoned on the Moon), it's awesomely beautiful and it defies understanding or comprehension, it has to, when you're hanging up there with your home planet dangling at your feet and that thing which on the surface of that planet is mild spring sunshine blasting furnace heat at you from a big ball of light in the sky - one of the astronauts said that he never complained about weather again when he returned to Earth, he was just grateful that there WAS weather. They show the stark white craters etched against a black sky, and then they cut to a fern frond trembling in the breeze or a branch full of golden autumn leaves reflected in a puddle, and then they show Mike Collins (who is a leprechaun) talking about patting the Pacific when they got back down and muttering something about "Nice ocean you have here!" and how utterly, unspeakably, completely miraculous it is to be floating there in that deep dark blue water teeming with hidden life under a bright sky flecked with white cloud - how suddenly THAT is science fiction, this fragile little oasis that we have, how we are, as one of the guys put it, truly living in the Garden of Eden compared to what the rest of the real estate out there looks like or has to offer. And, tragically, how little we apparently care.

They were changed by their encounter with the moon. They changed me. They changed, just for one brief shining moment, this world that we all share - a moment where they were greeted by people who were French, Chinese, Mexican, African, and they all said, "WE did it." Not YOU did it, not AMERICA did it, but WE. The people of Earth. The human race.

That such a moment is possible, that such a moment happened, has already changed everybody.

Several times during this film I was in tears - but I wept hardest when, at the end, the screen flashed these words at me:

"We went to the moon nine times. We never went back."

Remember when the whole world looked up?

Why are there so few of us left who still do?

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I've forgotten who said it: "I hoped I'd live to see the first man on the moon. I never imagined I'd see the last."

[rugor.livejournal.com]

I have to see this movie. I have to own this movie, even though it's one of the saddest things I will ever see. We need to go back, we need to go on, we need to go outward.

[halspacejock.livejournal.com]

Have you seen 'The Dish'? The extras include a fair bit of original launch & news footage from the time.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I expect there to be another manned Lunar expedition within the next ten years.

I don't expect it to be American.

[kaichi-satake.livejournal.com]

I was almost 4 years old when Armstrong made his moonwalk. I remember very clearly standing in front of the tv, completely spellbound, watching it. And I also remember what I was feeling about it. Overwhelming envy. I still feel that envy any time I see something about space missions, because I know now that I'll never get to be on one. But now, mixed in with the envy, is a sense of pride at what we were able to do with the still-developing technology of the time. I think people will walk on the moon, again, someday. It won't be in my lifetime, but I'm grateful to have been able to watch the broadcast of the first one.

Probably the reason so few look up, now, is that people are so very easily jaded. We're surrounded by wonders, every day, things that most of us couldn't even imagine 20 or 30 years ago. The world changes, fast, and people lose their sense of awe just as rapidly, from technological overload. Simple air travel used to inspire awe in people, until it became commonplace. Space flight has become common, and most people no longer pay any more attention to it than they do the flights of commuter planes. It will likely take some huge discovery--alien life or something as dramatic as that--to get regular folks interested in space, again.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

It's sad that it's become fashionable even for technically-minded intellectuals and science fiction writers to deride manned space exploration these days. I think the old visionaries might have been right the first time, that it would take centuries for us to venture out, and the late-twentieth century spurt was an anomaly.

[kaichi-satake.livejournal.com]

I think you could be right. Our leap into space may have been premature, especially when one considers how much of our own planet remains unexplored and unknown, even to this day. If it truly was an anomaly, I feel doubly grateful to have witnessed it!

Sadly, it seems many people are not even moved by earthbound discoveries. I feel just as excited over the discovery of some previously-unknown sea animal as I do over the discovery of water on planets once thought of as "dead." I suppose a consuming love of learning is what the jaded and bored ones lack, the thing that causes them to fall into such negative attitudes toward space exploration. Perhaps they've become comfortable and snug in the security of empiricism. The technically-minded intellectuals and the science fiction writers who are so derisive about manned missions really ought to know better than that.

They need to remember that science isn't about stating absolute facts and standing by them, like some old disciplinarian chanting out the rules of grammar; it's about holding on to the child's sense of wonder and continuing to ask questions, even when they think they know the answers. It's about never being satisfied with a neat and easy explanation, or one that seems to be exactly what is desired. It's about not settling for a view of the universe that can't be challenged. It seems like a lot of scientists, writers and laymen have forgotten that science is supposed to be an ongoing process, and never a completed work. When they remember this, perhaps we can earn back our collective awe and once again lift our eyes upward with pride and joy at the miracles our kind continuously fashion from our dreams.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you and Deck wrote about this movie, becase I didn't know about it.

If you ever want to do something really depressing, go study the history of space exploration. Learn how many actual scientists went to the moon (answer: 1). Learn about all the many interesting unmanned missions that were planned and then canceled by Congress (lots). Read about all the proposals for space stations, with their firm conviction that there would be real habitats up there, with people living in them someday very soon ('soon' being by, say, the end of the 1970s) and compare them to the tin can we've finally put up.

However, there is some very good news: have you heard about the latest X Prize? The criteria is to do a soft landing on the moon, drive a short distance and return video. At least 7 groups have submitted intentions to compete including Carnegie Mellon. Google is sponsoring the prize, which makes me want to go buy stock (if it wasn't at some absurd prce per share).

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Stop it, you're making me cry and ruin my reputation as the office hardass.