Joan Ball is a business professor at St. John’s University in New York and the author of Flirting with Faith: My Spiritual Journey from Atheism to a Faith-Filled Life.
Not content with the
destruction on our own world, we now lob explosives at other celestial bodies. What
a piece of work is man.
Just kidding. I think
it’s marvelous we’re studying water content on the moon, and I’m excited about
space exploration as the next person. But, as I said in a prior
post, I’m concerned about the costs. And now I’m concerned about our
methods.
Why must we use such
crude forms of observation to get our scientific data? The moon may be our
nearest neighbor in the solar system, but who says it belongs to us? If there’s
water on it, who’s to say there aren’t also some strange, unimagined new forms
of life — that we’re potentially destroying with our little bomb?
Anyhow, I’m totally exaggerating here, but my point stands (sort of). If the only way we can explore is to cause destruction and damage to the very place about which we want to learn more, might we not want to wait a little while longer until our technology is such that we could… I don’t know… perhaps land gingerly on the surface of the area we want to study, take a less elephant-gun-to-swat-a-fly approach to grabbing a sample, and lift off without doing harm to the surface of the moon?
NASA’s LCROSS mission FAQ page says the impact will do no more harm than any other meteor striking the moon’s surface, but I wonder, do we have the right to add one more? I mean, it only took one to kill off the dinosaurs, if you believe popular scientific theory.
I’m just asking. The moon’s our satellite, but it’s not our plaything.
Or is it? Are you watching the NASA moon bombing video?
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posted October 9, 2009 at 4:35 pm
You should try to do some more homework before criticizing scientific work. No animals were hurt, and the moon is hit by small objects like this about 5 times a year at least. It may be a bit crude but it is certainly not vandalism.
posted October 9, 2009 at 4:43 pm
To put this in perspective, this is not really a “bombing”, just a high-speed crash of part of a spaceship (weighing about the same as an SUV) into moon dirt. The crater caused by the deliberate crash is estimated to be at most 20 meters (66 feet) wide and 4 meters (13 feet) deep, inside a natural crater 98 kilometers (60 miles) wide. It’s a tiny, tiny event for the moon, where impacts of this size occur naturally about 4 times a month. The moon has survived much, much more devastating impacts, like the one that left a crater 2,240 kilometers (1,392 miles) across and 13 km (8 miles) deep in the past. Plus there is no air (atmosphere) or liquid water to pollute – any dust or rocks thrown up will just fall back down onto the surface. Plus the impact will occur in one of the coldest spots in the solar system, around -238 degrees Celsius (-397 Fahrenheit) – incredibly cold, even ice would be as hard as steel. So the impact site has no atmosphere, no light, is incredibly cold, one of the most unlikely places to find life in the entire solar system, so I think you can stop worrying about killing even one bacteria with this impact!
posted October 9, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Stepping on an ant or killing a fly or mosquito has got to have more moral implications than this!
posted October 10, 2009 at 7:18 am
Perhaps less damaging methods could be used.
But that would cost more money. NASA, along with many of our government departments and institutions has been pretty effectively starved of money, thanks to the deliberate actions of the conservatives in our country.
BTW – this effort to find relatively large sources of water is for our future return and prospective colonization of the moon. Even that step, obvious and expected as it may be to at least tens of millions of Americans and others remains in jeopardy due to the conservatives actions.