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"My dominant feeling every day is one of great ignorance," he said. 
NYT 
The Man in the Moon 
Lydia Netzer 
August 27, 2012 -- MOST technological advances are actually just 
improvements. One thing builds on the next: from shoddy to serviceable, 
from helpful to amazing. First you had a carriage, then a car, and then an 
airplane; now you have a jet. You improve on what is there. Technological 
advances are like that. 
Except for the one that involved landing on the Moon. When a human 
went and stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth, that was a 
different kind of breakthrough. Nothing tangible changed when Neil 
Armstrong's foot dug into the lunar dust and his eyes turned back at us. 
We didn't get faster wheels or smaller machines or more effective 
medicine. But we changed, fundamentally. What had been unknown, was 
known. What had been unseen was seen. And our human horizon popped 
out 200,000 miles. Forever, we would see the Earth differently, because 
we had seen it from someplace truly foreign. 
This is why Mars is important. When we get a human to Mars — in the 
next few decades, NASA has predicted — our horizon will expand 1,000 
times farther, and it will never go back. 
Watching the first images from the rover, Curiosity, which landed on Mars 
early this month, I was reminded of a short story by Ray Bradbury called 
"Mars Is Heaven!" In it, Mars is populated by aliens who fool visiting 
Earthlings into thinking they're in a familiar environment before 
murdering them. It's about how stupid nostalgia is, how it tricks us into 
wanting things that were never that great in the first place. What strikes 
me about the story is that, just over 60 years ago, someone could seriously 
write about aliens on Mars. 
Can you imagine what it was like then? Mars was an impossible frontier; 
we wouldn't even have decent pictures of the planet until almost 20 years 
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after the story was published. Now it reads like a fairy tale in which the 
moon is made of cheese, or the sun is a horse-drawn chariot bearing a 
god, or the stars move in crystal spheres around the sky. 
When humanity was in its infancy, we thought the universe revolved 
around us. Then, with Copernicus, we aged into heliocentrism, became 
aware we were one of a family of planets inside the walls of our house, 
the solar system. Nearby stars gather like a town, rotating through the 
galaxy, our country. Clusters are like continents. We realized in stages that 
we were very insignificant. And then, almost like grown-ups, we pulled 
our boots on and began to try to leave a significant mark anyway. 
We don't get anywhere by staying home from Mars. By pushing our little 
mine carts around the earth and making speedier mine carts, by 
connecting long pipes to communicate with one another and then creating 
better pipes to shout down, louder ways to shout. All of our squabbles 
with other humans and all of our possessions here on earth, the things we 
make faster, easier, smaller, really mean very little. How could they, when 
the universe is so big? Significance is in science — not the science that 
leads to better mine carts and more efficient shouting, but the science that 
leads to more ideas. 
Remember Plato's allegory of the cave. In the cave, the people look at 
shadows moving on the wall. They watch the shadows move, and they 
think that's living. What if they could go outside and see the sun? That's 
us, moving from the Earth to the Moon. That's Neil Armstrong, who died 
at the age of 82 over the weekend, standing on the Moon, and looking 
back at Earth. 
The thing about the cave is, it's not just one cave. It's more caves, and 
more, all nested within one another. The Moon was our first cave; Mars 
will be next. And then there will be another cave, and another. 
When people scoff at sending humans to Mars, and say that pictures of 
wheel marks on a red desert are not worth the trouble when there are so 
many things here at home that we could be spending money on, it makes 
me claustrophobic. It's as if we're trying, out of guilt or shame, to crawl 
back into the cave and watch the shadows on the wall. We're trying to 
stay children in our parents' house, knowing that the road leads to town, 
and then to another town. We're saying, "Look, we made a really great 
toilet that flushes itself! Remember that printing press? That was pretty 
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neat. We even made pyramids — those things are huge! Can't we just be 
happy with making a great toilet even greater? Do we really have to go to 
Mars?" 
But Mars is waiting. It spins now outside our human reach. We must 
realize that the work of growing up is not something we can cut when the 
budget gets tight. It is mission critical, for the intellectual life of the 
species, for the future of humans, not to stagnate, not to wither, but to 
stretch, and reach, and always to expand. 
Lydia Netzer is the author of the novel "Shine Shine Shine. " 
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