“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
I’d be surprised to find anyone reading this article who doesn’t know who delivered that quote as part of a larger speech, but in case I am wrong — and I often am — President John F. Kennedy said that in 1962.
Since that speech was delivered, does any one individual or one quote spring to mind as embodying the same curiosity, the same drive to discover the limits of human potential, as that one does?
I don’t mean to present Kennedy as the aspiration for humanity. He had plenty of flaws, which have been thus far very well-documented; rather, I do believe he was the last best example of the human struggle to know, to discover and to improve.
It was almost seven years later — and after Kennedy’s death — that the United States finally put human beings on the Moon. It was done five more times since, the latest in 1972, and since then — in nearly 50 years — no humans have walked on another celestial body.
For the curious among us, and I know there are multitudes, such a fall from that pinnacle of achievement is agonizing. Digging for the reasons behind that fall makes it infuriating to boot.
You see, I recognize that there are more pressing issues facing humanity than sending people into space, especially in this age in which we live. I see and hear about the human toll those things that plague our species take every day: the wars we wage, most of which have seen the United States either at their forefront or playing a supporting role in the past several decades; death by starvation, which claims millions of lives globally each year; homelessness, which afflicts over half a million people in the United States alone; and the list goes on.
Even less immediate and severe problems contribute to our state as a species, like a severely lacking system of education and the inability to afford to see a doctor to deal with issues of personal health.
What contributes to all of these problems, even our loss of motivation to discover the mysteries of space, is our allocation of resources. There is more than enough food to feed every human on our planet, but it isn’t provided to them because there is no profit to be earned in giving food away. In 2012, there were over 18 million vacant homes in the United States according to the U.S Census Bureau, but even a fraction of those will not be given to homeless Americans, so they can sleep under a roof because there is no profit to be earned in giving homes away.
Healthcare, education and space exploration, among a myriad of other systems, suffer from a chronic lack of funding. Money that could be used to bolster these systems and contribute to the collective welfare and knowledge of the human race instead finds itself facilitating the making of war.
Even the specific wars in which our country finds itself engaged are issues of money. Since World War II, nearly every major conflict — the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War — has been waged as a battle between economic systems, namely capitalism versus communism. The western “democracies” of the world simply could not abide other sovereign nations assuming communist governments.
This is not advocacy on my part for communism — I believe the debate regarding the validity of discrete economic systems is too complex to broach here in one article — but it is an acknowledgement of the abject failures of the capitalist system. Was it truly necessary to wage war, to kill and maim a number of people that is truly beyond comprehension, simply because we disagreed with their choice of government? Is that the role the United States and other western capitalist countries were destined to play on this planet of ours?
And once the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and communism was finally defeated, once the capitalist class around the world finished crying out in triumph at the demise of that great evil, they realized: war was good for business! So governments — once again, mostly western capitalist governments — continued to dump trillions of dollars into making war. Private military contractors began to pop up and sell their ability to conduct warfare, and nations were invaded under false pretenses (hello, Iraq) in order for more money to be made.
All the while, we, the people, continue to suffer. We, the people, a species capable of complex thought and deeds that could reverberate through the ages, continue to live in squalor compared to that which is within our reach to achieve.
But how could we concern ourselves with space when we are faced with so much pain on Earth? The conditions in which we live that see so many of us starve, fight and die serve to continually beat us down and rob us of our human spirit of discovery. The only way we will ever return to that state of wonder and curiosity is if we can first save our neighbors from the suffering they endure now.
And we can do it; we are capable of more! If we were to reallocate our resources, make our lives on Earth better, more worth living, we could achieve all the exploration of space and advancement of technology we could possibly imagine, and more.
I think often of the science-fiction genre. I think of all the wonderful and mystifying and otherworldly things that have been conceived by authors across the decades and centuries of literature. I know that if these things can be conceived, they can, eventually, be achieved. You may believe that to be a simple point of view, and you are entitled to that. But I will always choose wonder over complacency, optimism for what we can do and where we can go over pessimism.
Unfortunately, because of our existence right now under the system of late capitalism, rather than embodying the legendary quote from President Kennedy that I used to open this piece, we may more embody this eerily prophetic one from the great inventor Nikola Tesla:
“You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
Kyle Gombosi is a senior Music: Elective Studies major with a minor in journalism. KG806059@wcupa.edu