A BILLION YEARS TO REACH THIS MOMENT
‘By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap, to pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon.’
HOTSPuR’S words, in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV Part 1, were meant to be ironic.
But not even our greatest playwright, let alone all those who over the centuries have spun fantasies about men voyaging through space, can have truly believed that what has just been achieved would ever come to pass. How could they?
We are all children of our time, and though there are few limits to human imagination, it would have needed a vision not possessed by men, not even by the great explorers, polymaths and innovators — Columbus, Leonardo, Euclid, Einstein, Goethe, Galileo — to predict this moment.
‘The first time’: yes, but not first as our finite imaginations usually understand it: not first like the first time Everest was climbed, the first time the mile was run in less than four minutes, the first time the atom was smashed, the first time America was reached by men from Europe.
GREAT TRIUMPH
All the great triumphs of exploration and discovery have hitherto been extensions of previous achievements. Other mountains, nearly as high as Everest, had been climbed, the mile had been run in just over four minutes.
Armstrong and Aldrin, with Collins, have done that which has never been done before. Nothing remotely compares to it in the entire history of the human race.
Force your mind open and imagine. For hundreds of millions of years, perhaps thousands of millions, the Moon has spun, silent and inviolate, in the heavens.
Long before man appeared on Earth, before his most remote ancestors crawled from the primal seas, before the lowliest lichen adhered to the oldest rocks, the Moon was there, shining down on an empty Earth.
The slow, faltering steps of evolution began; the long ascent of man started, slowly and painfully, through centuries of darkness and ignorance, cruelty and intolerance. Man pushed on: for every four steps he took forward, he took three back; for a Montaigne there was a Torquemada, for a Saint Louis a Charles IX, for a Milton a Cromwell, for a Lincoln a Hitler, for a Churchill a Stalin.
Again and again, through his long history, man has disgraced his nature, and played such fantastic tricks before high Heaven as makes the angels weep.
And yet within him there was — and always will be — a spark of fire that burns away the dross as fast as he renews it, that heats his soul and lights his mind and drives him on in two quests that distinguish him from his animal cousins: the search for freedom and the hunger for knowledge.
Now the second of those quests, conceived in the first (I do not believe it is an accident that these voyagers came from the united States, most free of all the world’s nations), has taken him to a world other than Earth.
I cannot understand those whose imagination is so shrivelled, thin and bloodless, that they are not moved by this achievement. I cannot understand them, but I can pity them. For if they miss the sense of excitement and wonder at what has just happened, they also miss a great surge of faith in the ability of man to solve the problems of his own planet.
THE GULF
There has always been poverty on Earth, and cruelty, barbarity, selfishness, greed and war, though there have also always been glory,
beauty, truth, knowledge virtue and abiding love. And often it has seemed that only despair would fit reality, that the gulf between man’s possible goodness and actual badness was too great ever to be closed.
It must have seemed so in the Dark Ages, during the wars of the Reformation, in Hitler’s Germany It must seem so today in the concentration camps of Russia or amid the spiritual genocide of South Africa.
And yet the monks went on
copying manuscripts in the Dark Ages; the great instrument of tolerance was being forged even while men were exterminating each other in the name of Christ.
In hitler’s very headquarters, a gallant Christian gentleman was plotting to rid his country of the poison. In Russia and South Africa, as I write, men and women are working, as well as suffering, for the dawn that will come.
NO LIMITS
And today, in an achievement that dwarfs all the triumphs of exploration throughout history, man has served notice on the doubters and fearers that there are no limits to what he can accomplish, no boundary that he recognises to knowledge, no frontier that he many not cross.
The landing of men upon the Moon does not solve the problems of earth, but restores our faith in man’s ability to solve them.
I find it a profoundly comforting thought that at this very moment men are planning the first voyage to Mars.