Apollo 11 could well be the greatest achievement of humanity. WHY? Keep reading.
No early man actually created fire, for lightning no doubt started it all, but we had the smarts to domesticate it. Note that chimps or ants or any other specie are yet anywhere close.
The wheel? Farming? Cities and governments? Internet? Language? Religion? Music? Art? They all evolved over time.
These certainly were outstanding accomplishments: Einstein's theory of relativity, Darwin's evolution, medical breakthroughs, nuclear power, 4-minute mile, reaching the peak of Mount Everest, discovery of the Higgs Boson, human genome, United Nations. But is one of these the greatest?
A case can be made for the Manhattan Project. While the horror that followed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the continuing prospects of a cataclysmic nuclear winter still hovering, if Hitler beat the USA to the atomic bomb, the world today would most likely be totally different.
You can search the worldwide web for the absolutely greatest achievement of humanity, and there is no dominant candidate, although the Apollo Project seems to keep getting mentioned. I will make a case for Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon as #1, maybe mostly because I had a close brush with both.
It was the summer of 1969 when I was a graduate student at Louisiana State University. Friends joined Pearl and me for a drive from Baton Rouge to Florida and back:
Pearl and I had this close encounter with Camille nearly half a century ago. Earlier that summer, we had accompanied Marie and John Laing on a road trip from Baton Rouge to Florida taking the coastal road past Biloxi. Three years later, Pearl's mom and dad were with us when we noticed that the road by Biloxi had disappeared. Here are before and after photos of Hotel Richelieu.
Click on THIS for those photos.
That was an aside, for the timing was just right for us to see on the pad the Saturn rocket that would in a few days take Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon. Incredibly enough, 50 years later, Saturn remains as the most powerful machine ever built. NASA recently announced Project Artemis (who is the goddess of the hunt and twin sister of Apollo) a mission to send women to the Moon in 2024 (50 years after our final departure). The new Orion spacecraft will then become the most powerful rocket ever.
Let's face it, two Nazis were most responsible for Project Apollo: Werner von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, who in 1984 left the U.S. to avoid prosecution for war crimes and returned to Germany.
von Braun, of course, was the brains behind the V-2, which haunted the British, although he intimated that his dream was Mars, not London. There is a further darkside to his Nazi membership as an SS officer. He and a thousand of his fellow scientists and family were the first team, and they surrendered to the U.S. Army at the end of WW2. The Soviets got the second team.
In the mid-70's, my major professor at LSU, Barry Greenberg, had moved to the University of Cincinnati, where he became a colleague of Neil Armstrong in their college of engineering. On my planned visit to see Barry, he mentioned that he would set up a lunch with Armstrong. Something came up and he had to be out of town during my short stay.
We did not create the Apollo Project merely to expand our knowledge. The USA was embarrassed by Soviet success in space: Sputnik in 1957 and in 1961 Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space. Democracy was falling behind Communism! John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, and provoked by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, made that fateful speech on March 25 of 1961:
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.
What followed in 1962, the year I graduated from college, was the Cuban Missile Crisis. We just had to best our enemy, and, amazingly enough, Neil Armstrong did walk on the Moon on July 20, 1969. What makes Apollo 11 potentially the greatest achievement of humanity is that this technological accomplishment and, more importantly, political victory, provoked the Soviet Union to spend even more for space adventures, in time bankrupting the country. On October 11 and 12, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev met with Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, reaching accord on ending the Cold War. It took another five years for this most dangerous period in human history to diminish the specter of nuclear doomsday.
For some reason that eludes me, there are today reasonably sound minds still romanticizing over the need to continue horrendously expensive and dangerous space adventures. They miss the compelling point that there is no need today to spend so much money to invade outer space. Hopefully not, but there can still come a point in the future when another cold war erupts, requiring something like a new Apollo 11 solution.
Perhaps an incoming asteroid will serve to unite an effort to divert it. Otherwise, funds can today better be spent in the foreseeable future on global warming remediation, infrastructure, education and a whole host of other higher priority needs.
But if you must, what about upgrading the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? At a fraction of deep space ventures, you just might intercept Encyclopedia Galactica. Or, just take photos of space, as I did of the full moon last night:
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