I just found a huge cultural difference between me and my students. They think that one of the most crucial events of the XXth century was the walk on the Moon. To me, this makes zero sense. It wasn’t even the first trip into outer space. And who cares, anyway? As of now, space exploration has not led to anything significant and has proven to be a major waste of money.
I attribute this to the success of the Cold War propaganda that, I’m guessing, probably touted the walk on the Moon as something hugely important to mask the frustration of lagging behind the Soviet Union in every aspect of space exploration.
Based on this and on the Princess Diana comment, I’m starting to get a feeling that my students fail to grasp the difference between the sensational or the hyped up and the truly important.
Clarissa's Blog 
“As of now, space exploration has not led to anything significant and has proven to be a major waste of money.”
http://spinoff.nasa.gov/
It’s doing something for the sheer wonder of it, where the profit motive may be nothing but scientific advancement. Some of it doesn’t seem useful now, perhaps it will be at some later point in time. In any case, it’s expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, which is a noble goal in itself.
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If at some later point we see benefits, I completely agree that we should put it on the list of crucial events of the XXth century. For now, however, I can list a lot more important scientific advances.
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I wasn’t disagreeing with you on the ‘man on the moon’ comment. I’m sure there are more scientific advances more important than that.
I was objecting specifically to your statement that I quoted above, that space exploration has not led to anything significant and is a waste of money.
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I would disagree that benefits are in the future – we have been seeing a lot of benefits already. A lot of everyday stuff was actually based on things that were invented for the space exploration. For example, bluetooth networks, which are in every mobile phone nowadays, are based on the need that various devices on board of the spacecraft needed to talk to each other without interferring with the rest of the communications – so the engineers invented bluetooth connectivity and that spread itself out to “normal world”. Other examples include everyday materials (teflon) and medical/surgical devices.
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I have to say it’s much more promising an answer than the Princess Diana one – as you pointed out above, it can be read as emblematic of the Cold War (and indeed the whole century of war), of the technological advances and unintended consequences… and it wasn’t gossip column material but actual news, and news about science and engineering, which has to be a little encouraging
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Seeing people walk on the moon was probably the most profound emotional experience of my life. It was something I had dreamed of my entire life. I was really disappointed that it was turned into a political stunt. The only sad thing is that we did not continue to explore and send ever more people to the moon.
As to the space program having had no beneficial effects, this blog would not be possible without it. The need to miniaturize computer electronics for spacecraft led directly to the dramatic reduction in cost of computers. If computers cost millions of dollars apiece as they did in the 1950’s, many of the things we take for granted would not exist at all. Intercontinental phone calls in the 1960’s cost $500 an hour or so. In the late $1970’s, I paid over $150 for an hour-long call to Poland from the U. S. With communication satellites they have become far less costly.
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“The need to miniaturize computer electronics for spacecraft led directly to the dramatic reduction in cost of computers. ”
– The need to sell consumer goods is far more responsible for this development, in my opinion. Just look at the explosion in tablets.
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Your timeline is off a bit. Tablets became possible only after decades of government sponsored development for space purposes. I was ridiculed in 1964 by one of my professors when I suggested that the time might come that we could own computers as individuals.
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Of course, I know that tablets came much later. But I do believe they would have been invented any way because they are such a great money-maker. The Kindle was meant to be!!! 🙂
Off-topic: I just saw a teenage girl of about 14 cycling down the highway!
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As I think about it, I realize that my attitude to space exploration is heavily influenced by the very Soviet resentment against the military-industrial complex that ate all resources and was developed at the expense of everything else for the purpose of sticking it to the US. We were so persecuted with these space achievements that every mention of them annoys me.
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I agree with you that the moon-landing by itself wasn’t so much, but I’ll have to agree with David about the impact of the space programs on modern technology. Making computers small and usable took a great deal of very expensive research, and most of this research was done in universities and funded and supported by government agencies who were interested in their application to space.
Of course there is a great consumer need for small devices, but the amount of research that was needed to actually make the technology to build such devices was enormous, risky, and very long-term. No company would ever fund this kind of research. I know many people who do R&D in companies, but such R&D is always short-term. Now that some of the technology is available, many companies are doing the research to make it better, but without the government stepping in back in those days, we wouldn’t have laptops and iPads and iPhones.
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Ok, I’m now convinced that space research did produce good scientific advances. I guess the cold war bore some good fruit.
I’m still kind of indifferent to the Moon landing, though.
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Are the pyramids important? Hamurrabi’s obelisk?
The moon buggy will be up there long after the aforementioned are dust.
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The pyramids are beautiful. I don’t know if the “moon buggy” is because this is the first time I’ve heard of it. 🙂
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The moon buggy was the battery powered car that was taken to the moon on at least one Appollo mission. The comment was made at the time that explorers always take the trappings of their culture with them if they can; in this case, it was an automobile. In the case of nineteenth century English explorers of Africa, it was formal dress for dinner each day.
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” In the case of nineteenth century English explorers of Africa, it was formal dress for dinner each day.”
– Have you read this beautiful story by Somerset Maugham about a colonial official who always dresses for dinner and is appalled with a younger colleagues who doesn’t?
That’s a tradition I can really identify with. 🙂
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I think inventing the Pill and women rights movements in different countries can be listed at the level of World-Wide Important events.
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I’m happy to report that EVERY SINGLE one of the 49 students who completed the assignment listed the women’s rights movement!!!
All but 2 students listed the end of segregation and the movement for racial equality!!
And one student listed “the achievement of complete equality for gay people.” This student is probably a traveler from the future.
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“…probably a traveler from the future.” NEARLY PEEING MY PANTS WITH LAUGHTER
Sorry for the shouting. I had a shitty day and the laughing feels grrrrrreat.
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I’m sorry you had a bad day! But I’m glad you laughed at these posts.
I’m still trying to get into the working rhythm, and I don’t even know what’s funny any more.
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@El, I agree the invention of the pill has to be the cause of the biggest change in social history. It is the enabler for half the worlds population to have real lives with choice. I cant see any space program having that much effect on that many people.
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None of the students mentioned the Pill. This is especially strange given that 80% of them are women.
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I think the invention of the Mirena device far surpasses the invention of the pill, although it is on a continuum with it. Mirena basically means you can forget about reproductive issues for five years at a time. The hormones are released into the uterus. In Australia, the total cost for the device and insertion was around 30 dollars.
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Oh I think man journey in to space is incredibly important and moving. It’s the contemporary sublime. As David says, we probably have gotten really practical benefits from space travel but I think that beyond the practical space travel represents mankind’s journey towards discovery. Symbolically, the moon landing represented an entirely new epoch for mankind and I think it’s a shame that we haven’t gone back.
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I’d possibly somewhat understand this if we were talking about the first journey into outer space ever. But what makes this one special other than that it was done by Americans?
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I think it’s the fact that it was the Moon–something tangible– a specific body that we gaze at every night. For me, it’s exhilerating to know that humans walked on it. I am not remotely patriotic so it’s not an American thing for me personally. It’s a humankind thing.
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I think that it’s a lot more important that a woman went into space. And she didn’t have to wait until all the male cosmonauts go to get a chance.
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Yes! The first woman in space was hugely important. While you needed to be a really well trained pilot with a military background to fly in space if you where an American, a Russian woman who worked on a textile factory production line could fly to space in 1963 (still 6 years before the moon landings). Better yet she conducted experiments on herself to discover the effect of space flight on the female body.
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Taking a long view of history, I’m actually inclined to say that space exploration may well be the single most important thing that has ever happened in the history of the world. I agree that prizing the moon landing above say, Sputnik is a little bit arbitrary but think of it this way:
Every single second of Human history prior to the mid-20th century took place exclusively on the surface of the Earth. Every single second in the history of life, from the first nutrient baths in the primordial oceans
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If the important thing is when human history first took place off the surface of the earth then the most important event in history is the day the first man flew in space. He was Yuri Gagarin put there by the USSR on the 12th of April 1961.
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Actually, if “Not taking place on the surface of the Earth” is the standard, the date should be in the 1780’s when the first hot-air balloons were flown.
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Yes, but so?
They went, they came back, where is the big deal?
I guess I didn’t get enough exposure to sci-fi as a child. 🙂 🙂
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(sorry, I seem to have accidentally posted that too early)
As I was saying…
Every single second in the history of life, from the first nutrient baths in the primordial oceans, through the evolution of microbes, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals across four billion years, took place exclusively on one little blue sphere in the middle of space. How many trillions of individual life forms must have lived through that? How many billions of species must have lived and died?
And then, there came a magical point in the middle of the twentieth century when the confines of life on Earth, however tentatively, were breached.
Has it had a lot of affect on our day to day lives? Well, discounting things like communications sattelites and technological spinoffs, probably not all that much. Yet.
But bear in mind that, effectively, we are measuring the first fifty years after space travel against the five billion years before it.
The day has already come when Princess Diana is just another dead monarch.
The day will soon come (in no more than one hundred years) when World War 2 is just another historical footnote.
Eventually, even the titanic global stuggles of ideology which characterized the entire 20th century will seem as quaint and esoteric as squabbles over the meaning of transsubstantiation in Reformation-era Europe.
But no matter how much time goes by, the first space-flights will always mark the beginning of life taking a fundamentally different course than any it has known before.
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“The day has already come when Princess Diana is just another dead monarch.”
NO NO NO! SHE WAS NEVER A MONARCH!!! HOW CAN YOU PONTIFICATE ON A LONG VIEW OF WORLD HISTORY WHEN SIMPLE FACTS ESCAPE YOU?
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Another dead heir to a monarchy, please! Thank heavens she never got to the monarch part…
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You think she’d be a bad queen?
I’m not arguing, I just never thought about it.
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Besides space travel is a dead end we need to start looking after this planet if we want somewhere to live in the long term.
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“HOW CAN YOU PONTIFICATE ON A LONG VIEW OF WORLD HISTORY WHEN SIMPLE FACTS ESCAPE YOU?”
Maybe irrelevent terminological distinctions are lost in the long view.
“Besides space travel is a dead end”
Citation needed.
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“Besides space travel is a dead end we need to start looking after this planet if we want somewhere to live in the long term.”
Space travel isn’t about the practical. It’s about the limits of human ability. Like I said earlier, it’s about the sublime. It’s aesthetic. It’s art.
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I wish I could see beauty in this but I tend to be too literal and somewhat insensitive about things. Unless it’s made of words or can be eaten, I often fail to see a purpose.
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“But no matter how much time goes by, the first space-flights will always mark the beginning of life taking a fundamentally different course than any it has known before.”
Astrophysics! And experimental astrophysics! We might not have launched the Hubble telescope if nobody had ever been launched into space. And if Hubble hadn’t been launched, a lot of astrophysics and cosmology might not have happened. And if that didn’t happen, then we might not be looking at nuclear fusion as a way to study the insides of stars. Or we might not have narrowed down the Hubble constant. I think. There’s so much more out there, and there’s so much that could be applied here on earth. Like nuclear fusion as a viable energy source, or magnetic monopoles.
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“I wish I could see beauty in this but I tend to be too literal and somewhat insensitive about things. Unless it’s made of words or can be eaten, I often fail to see a purpose.”
Have you ever looked through a telescope? I’m not being condescending or anything. I am just sincerely curious. I was 7 years old when my Dad first showed me the moon through a telescope and it was so moving and so amazing. It really changed my world. It’s partly a lovely childhood memory and partly I got this amazing sense that there was a UNIVERSE out there– not just a world. And that made me feel so small–but in a good way if that makes sense. I am not a particularly scientifically oriented person (which is why I am English professor) but I still understand that breathtaking moment where you must feel like you understand (or exist beyond) deep space and time. I realize I’m waxing rhapsodic here. I guess your post struck a bit of a cord. To me, space travel is like higher education and art: all add to the human experience.
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I was 7 years old when my Dad first showed me the moon through a telescope and it was so moving and so amazing. It really changed my world. It’s partly a lovely childhood memory and partly I got this amazing sense that there was a UNIVERSE out there– not just a world. (Evelina)
This was nice. I hope I have given my kids something like this to think about when they are older. 🙂
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The moon landing would definitively be on my list of most important events of the 20th century too. And actually in all of human history. Since the start of biological life on Earth, creatures have been influenced by the moon. Wolves howl at it. I think the moon holds an attraction to all lifeforms that can see it, maybe with the exception of Clarissa and a few other commenters here [… just kidding 🙂 ]. I think it is amazing that we are the first species on Earth to make it there.
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Yes, I’m a very strange lifeform, I agree. 🙂 And I only howl on the blog, never at the Moon. 🙂 🙂
On a serious note, I want to reiterate that I have not encountered anybody outside of the US who is even marginally excited about the Moon landing as opposed to the first journey into space, the first woman in space, the sputnik, etc. This makes me think that there is something deeply ideological at work here.
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Well, of course I’m not denying that the significance of the moon walk has been pumped-up compared to every other ‘first’ in space exploration, just so that the Americans can claim to have “won” the spacerace. But that does not mean that space exploration as a whole is not tremendously significant.
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Well, you are Canadian, so I’m not surprised that you are not that much into the Moon-landing itself. 🙂
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Clarissa, You are so right, the Apollo program was a huge waste of money. Nearly all the spinoffs from space exploration would have come without landing on the moon or sending men into space (which is the thing that is really expensive).
Many from the US cling to the idea that landing a man on the moon is important because it was the only thing the US did in space before the USSR did. (i.e., they believed the government propaganda.)
Ironically current NASA launch vehicles use old USSR designed RD-180 and NK-33 rocket engines because they are more powerful and efficient than US designed ones even 40 years after they where designed.
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Ha! I knew a non-American would agree with me.
I never heard anybody from anywhere in the world even mention the moon landing as anything special. People talk of sputnik and Gagarin’s first journey, yes, but anything after that doesn’t really occupy anybody’s imagination.
It’s a very interesting cultural phenomenon.
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Robot spacecraft do wonderful things, exciting things! I have a picture taken by Cassini as my cellphone wallpaper. However having people in space is a profound emotional achievement which is far greater. Every time I see my cell phone picture, it makes me a little sad that no one has ever seen the planet Saturn backlit by the sun firsthand, but only a digital image. Furthermore, having people on another world (the moon) Is so overwhelming that it is a tragedy that no one is there now, nor has been for almost forty years. It does not matter at all what country did it, in the long run. It is wonderful that there are people in space all the time now, and that the space station is an international project. But being on a space station is not the same as actually being on another world. Visiting Antarctica or the ocean floor is also wonderful, in the same way, but far less profoundly so.
I cannot grasp at all how anyone can be so indifferent to the truly great achievements of humanity. They are, ultimately, what makes life worth living.
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I suppose it makes sense that American students have studied and been trained to celebrate the moon landing more than other cultures. But my Ukrainian father (who is a scientist) finds the moon landing to be incredibly significant. And I would feel the same way (but even more so) if humans walked on Mars, regardless of the nationality. Like I said, I think it’s the specificity of it. The fact that you can look at it in the night sky and the fact that you can see it’s surface through a telescope. I think the first space flight is incredibly important (perhaps more important scientifically) but the moon landing has a certain symbolism that I personally think transcends nationality.
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“I’m starting to get a feeling that my students fail to grasp the difference between the sensational or the hyped up and the truly important.”
LAUGHING TO TEARS AGAIN! Oh, my dear blogger-friend, I do enjoy you. I read that in a sort of Steven Wright tone.
It really is disturbing though, isn’t it? The way people (Americans) think People Magazine (or whatever the equivalent websites are) give valuable “news.”
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It’s not like the Apollo rocket was designed by an american. Werner Von Braun is the father of the american space program. He came over to the states from the third reich and was the developer of the V1 and V2 rockets.
Russian or american design who cares? We have private industry attempting to put people into space, we have satellites which bounce signals back and forth allowing faster data transfer. We have space stations. Even if we take care of this planet one day a cataclysmic event will destroy all human life on earth. It may be trillions of years in coming but our survival as a species will someday be linked to colonizing multiple planets.
Not to mention the inspiration that people get from an achievement like that. How many people did that inspire to go into science?
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