Why Now? Why Us?
So we can do it, and it should be done, but why should we be the ones to do it? Why, at a time like this, with the nation at war, with new menaces threatening to appear in various corners of the globe, and our allies drifting away, should the United States government expend serious resources on such a visionary enterprise? In my view, such considerations simply make the matter all the more urgent.
While I would not deny the necessity of military action in certain circumstances, in the long run civilizations are built by ideas, not swords. The central idea at the core of Western civilization is that there is an inherent facility in the individual human mind to recognize right from wrong and truth from untruth. This idea is the source of our notions of conscience and science, terms which, not coincidentally, share a common root.
Both our radical fundamentalist and our totalitarian enemies deny these concepts. They deny the validity of the individual conscience, and they deny the necessity of human liberty, and indeed, consider it intolerable. For them, conscience, reason, and free will must be crushed so that humans will submit to arbitrary and cruel authority.
Against this foe, science is our strongest weapon, not simply because it produces useful devices and medical cures, but because it demonstrates the value of a civilization based upon the use of reason. There was a time when we celebrated the divine nature of the human spirit by building Gothic cathedrals. Today we build space telescopes. Science is our society’s sacred enterprise; through it we assert the fundamental dignity of man. And because it ventures into the cosmic realm of ultimate truth, space exploration is the very banner of science.
If the United States is to lead the West, it must not only carry its sword, but the banner of its most sacred cause. And that cause is the freedom to explore on the wings of human reason. The French may sneer, with some cause, at our fast food restaurants and TV sitcoms, but the Hubble Space Telescope can inspire nothing but admiration, or even awe, in anyone who is alive above the neck. A human Mars exploration program would be a statement about ourselves, a reaffirmation that we remain a nation of pioneers, the vanguard of humanity, devoted to the deepest values of Western civilization. But even more, it would be a declaration of the power of reason, courage, and freedom writ clear across the heavens.
Now, more than ever, we need to make those statements. Now, more than ever, we need to sign that declaration—in handwriting large enough that no one will need spectacles to read it.
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