Ciao!

Man as a heroic being

Bill Whittle, an amazing blog essayists, wrote a very long piece on the value of confidence and its role in American foreign policy. This is but a very short excerpt (but the whole thing is amazing in its power and intelligence):

Next time you look at the moon, challenge yourself to think of something: there are footprints up there. Footprints, and tire tracks. Also three used cars, and one golf ball.

Why are they there? Because we decided to go to the moon, that's why. What a typically arrogant, unilateral, American conceit! Damn right it was, and that footprint -- you know the picture -- will still be there, unchanged, a million years from now. In ten million years, it might begin to soften a little around the edges. But in a billion years -- a thousand million summers from this one -- it will still be there, next to glistening pyramids of gold and aluminum junk decaying under the steady cosmic drizzle of micrometeorite hits.

Eventually, in about five billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen and start burning helium. When it does, it will begin to swell, consuming Mercury, then Venus as it enters its Red Giant phase. The forests will burn to ash, the oceans boil into steam and then be blown into deep space along with the rest of the atmosphere. Life will have been long gone.

But on the moon, there will remain six scraps of colored cloth. Red and white stripes peeking out from the dull grey lunar soil; perhaps a star or two on a faded blue field as the sun reaches out to reclaim her children. Very likely, they will be the last, best preserved monuments to our presence as a species on the face of the third planet now burning to a cinder below.

But eventually, they will burn too. The sun will contract to a white dwarf, the inner solar system nothing but black cinders, the outer planets shrunken and frozen corpses. Perhaps fifteen billion years from now, a time as far in the future as time goes into the past, there will be nothing here except a burnt-out and cold white dwarf.

But somewhere out there, somewhere, there will be four battered, unrecognizable hunks of aluminum and titanium and gold, spinning through deep space, their names recalling the spirit in which they were hurled into the abyss: Pioneer, and Voyager. And the day before the Universe dies, you'll still be able to dimly make out the stripes and dotted square, and read the words in the ancient language, from a dead race in the far distant past, when the stars were young and alive: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

There are at least five nations on the earth that had the technical skill, not to mention the money, to do something as grand and noble -- as immortal -- as this. Yet only one has done so. Why us? Why not them?

Posted by Miguel at 05:08 PM