We learned the origin of the earth and moon and NASA invented a few good gadgets … But I don’t see how those outweigh the cons of the Apollo program.
It’s a lot broader and more subtle than just the origin of the Earth and Moon. Apollo rewrote your geology textbook. Not the lunar geology text - the one for Earth. And not just the chapter about origins. This tends to get obscured because there was another revolution going on in Earth science at the very same time - a little thing called plate tectonics.
Direct results from Apollo, corroborated by old Soviet and modern Chinese automated landers:
Planets are born hot, and their insides stay hot, for a very long time
The threat from impacts (asteroids/comets) is real, pervasive and ongoing
Planets don’t stop evolving (their surfaces change, sometimes dramatically, and rather suddenly in geologic terms) for a very long time after they’re born
Indirect result from Apollo:
Earth is part of a larger natural system that affects it every single day - larger even than the solar system; let’s call it the local Galactic environment
Of the three direct results, two sound obvious. Naturally Earth is hot inside; where does lava come from? Of course space rocks can bang into us; what would stop them? None of this, however, was evident certain to a huge number of geologists, physicists, or chemists in the 1960s (or '70s, or even '80s… some people never change their minds. They just die). And when most workers in a given field are against you, progress tends to be rather slow. Walter and Luis Alvarez had a hell of a time convincing people that an asteroid strike could have ended the Cretaceous, not to mention the dinosaurs - I mean, there isn’t even a crater in the Yucatan, it’s flat down there! (LOL That debate still isn’t over, even today…)
As far as I can see, direct result #3 (about planetary evolution) hasn’t entered the zeitgeist yet. Yes, people are (wisely) alerted to climate change, but that’s just a little tweak compared to the immense environmental changes that we know took place on Venus, Mars and Earth - and I’m just talking about the ones that have occurred since complex life emerged here, not the ones from billions of years ago.
And that indirect result? I still know a number of scientists who hem and haw and won’t quite agree that Earth’s environment doesn’t suddenly end 100 km up. The Voyager probes show us how bad the radiation is when you get far enough away from the Sun, and I don’t know if you even do Voyager without Apollo. But Apollo, uniquely, shows you something else - the Sun hasn’t always protected us from that bigger dose of cosmic radiation that the Voyagers see. Sometimes that heliospheric shield shrinks, and the planets get a lot more radiation than we do today. And that’s just one of the synergistic results, there are more.
IMO the primary lesson we learn from geology is that environments change in time. Please note my use of the PRESENT TENSE in this reply, because none of what I am discussing is forever confined to a remote past - all of the planetary evolution processes I’m talking about can still occur today, and are certain to recur in the future. Geology left the silo to become a much more interconnected science partly because of Apollo - and the thing is, it became a science about THE FUTURE as well as the past.
Apologies for the overly long reply. Apologies to my science people for oversimplifying here.
Nah I get what you’re saying. Those are all good things and I agree with pretty much everything in your other comment. I just think that the Apollo missions and other space missions, despite bringing about good, did not occur because of good intentions.
But yeah you’re right that by learning about other planets we learn a lot about our own and how to move forward. A part of my brain just refuses to recognize most of the good in space exploration because the common attitude towards space exploration is similar to our attitude toward colonization.
Why when people describe living on the Moon or Mars do they use the word colonize? To me it implies that these spaces are only useful if we can extract profit. And now there’s talk of exploring other space rocks (sorry for broad term) because they contain precious metals we’re running out of on earth. It’s just gross to think that the only way space can be explored or properly funded is if it makes more money and ends up exploiting someone.
Science reply:
It’s a lot broader and more subtle than just the origin of the Earth and Moon. Apollo rewrote your geology textbook. Not the lunar geology text - the one for Earth. And not just the chapter about origins. This tends to get obscured because there was another revolution going on in Earth science at the very same time - a little thing called plate tectonics.
Direct results from Apollo, corroborated by old Soviet and modern Chinese automated landers:
Indirect result from Apollo:
Of the three direct results, two sound obvious. Naturally Earth is hot inside; where does lava come from? Of course space rocks can bang into us; what would stop them? None of this, however, was evident certain to a huge number of geologists, physicists, or chemists in the 1960s (or '70s, or even '80s… some people never change their minds. They just die). And when most workers in a given field are against you, progress tends to be rather slow. Walter and Luis Alvarez had a hell of a time convincing people that an asteroid strike could have ended the Cretaceous, not to mention the dinosaurs - I mean, there isn’t even a crater in the Yucatan, it’s flat down there! (LOL That debate still isn’t over, even today…)
As far as I can see, direct result #3 (about planetary evolution) hasn’t entered the zeitgeist yet. Yes, people are (wisely) alerted to climate change, but that’s just a little tweak compared to the immense environmental changes that we know took place on Venus, Mars and Earth - and I’m just talking about the ones that have occurred since complex life emerged here, not the ones from billions of years ago.
And that indirect result? I still know a number of scientists who hem and haw and won’t quite agree that Earth’s environment doesn’t suddenly end 100 km up. The Voyager probes show us how bad the radiation is when you get far enough away from the Sun, and I don’t know if you even do Voyager without Apollo. But Apollo, uniquely, shows you something else - the Sun hasn’t always protected us from that bigger dose of cosmic radiation that the Voyagers see. Sometimes that heliospheric shield shrinks, and the planets get a lot more radiation than we do today. And that’s just one of the synergistic results, there are more.
IMO the primary lesson we learn from geology is that environments change in time. Please note my use of the PRESENT TENSE in this reply, because none of what I am discussing is forever confined to a remote past - all of the planetary evolution processes I’m talking about can still occur today, and are certain to recur in the future. Geology left the silo to become a much more interconnected science partly because of Apollo - and the thing is, it became a science about THE FUTURE as well as the past.
Apologies for the overly long reply. Apologies to my science people for oversimplifying here.
Nah I get what you’re saying. Those are all good things and I agree with pretty much everything in your other comment. I just think that the Apollo missions and other space missions, despite bringing about good, did not occur because of good intentions.
But yeah you’re right that by learning about other planets we learn a lot about our own and how to move forward. A part of my brain just refuses to recognize most of the good in space exploration because the common attitude towards space exploration is similar to our attitude toward colonization.
Why when people describe living on the Moon or Mars do they use the word colonize? To me it implies that these spaces are only useful if we can extract profit. And now there’s talk of exploring other space rocks (sorry for broad term) because they contain precious metals we’re running out of on earth. It’s just gross to think that the only way space can be explored or properly funded is if it makes more money and ends up exploiting someone.