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Dateline July 20, 1969: My immediate family was ensconced in the UK, visiting our grandparents, aunts, uncles and sundry other long-lived relatives and friends before they kicked off, and happy to belong to the tribe that Mr. She would--decades later--come to refer to as the Dúnedain, because of our long-livedness and generally extraordinary compos-mentisness. (A few failures along the way. You can't win 'em all.)
At the same time, the United States was, in an effort to fulfill JFK's promise, about to put a man on the moon. My Dad, who was--just like the late Mr. She--a gadget freak extraordinaire, was fascinated and we rented a television for the summer for the singular purpose of watching the moon landing. (Just to clarify, Mum and Dad kept the house they bought in the Worcestershire countryside shortly after their 1950 marriage for £1,800 until their deaths. So we always had a place to land when we went "home.")
At that time (1969) many homes in the UK didn't have a television at all. Just as they didn't have a telephone. My parents had the first phone in the neighborhood, and for a couple of decades we had a piggy-bank on the shelf by the phone, and neighbors who came round to use it would feed the money into the slot to cover the bills. DROitwich Three-Oh-Double-Two, if anyone wants to check.
So late at night, July 20, 1969, we--and quite a few of our neighbors who didn't have a TV of their own--gathered in front of our rented television for a party and celebration. It's a fond memory, one I'll never forget.
Fast forward, about forty years.
Dad has been dead for two years. Mum has--effectively--lost her marbles. And the only close family member who remembers that night is me. (Or "I" as the grammar Nazis might posit.)
My sister, God bless her, has taken Dad's slide collection and had the thousands of them digitized into JPG format. I wish we'd done it several years before and could have gone through it with him before he died. (Just a thought for you all.) The pictures were impressed on a CD, and--on a subsequent visit to the UK--I got my own copy and, when I got home, loaded them onto my PC photo editing app.
"Hang on," I thought while I was going through them. WTH are these? Mistakes? (Why are we paying for mistakes???)
There were these, and several more.
Eventually, the memory.
Dad, taking photos of the television screen. Dad, running outside with his camera at the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon (surely--if you look hard enough--you can see him, stepping onto the moon, in the first photo above? I know I can).
Dad, excited like a small child. That was the best of him.
That was then.
Decades later I came to discover that others shared such memories with me, including my eventual husband and his children who celebrated the fourth birthday of his oldest son--and their older brother--that same night.
Soon, all of us who remember that event will be dead. And it'll be up to the intelligence of the ages, either real or artificial, to decide whether it was real or not. I'm hoping, and voting, for reality over artifice.
But--although I'm pretty clear on reality--I'm not sure it will prevail.
What say you?
Note: Photo at top of post was taken by Armstrong, of Aldrin, on the moon on July 20, 1969 and is in the public domain. See here.
Discussion (36)
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The anniversary of the moon landing reminds me of a film made by North American Aviation in 1964, which puts the space program in the context of the American history of exploration and development. Music, a mix of traditional and composed, is by the Kingston Trio, with the new songs composed by John Steward. The film is on YouTube, here.
The cultural gap between the America of 1964 and the America of today is clear.
(edited to actually include link to the video)
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I would have been in 1st grade that day, and have no memory of the moon landing.
The next landing occurred during 2nd grade and the teacher brought in a small TV. I knew what was happening but I couldn't make anything out of the small picture. Your father's last slide looks better than what I recall seeing.
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That very picture, in this very room.
It was hard to tell who was jazzed the most; my father or me.
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I chastised My Parents for years for not getting Me Here in time to witness the moon landing.
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"And it’ll be up to the intelligence of the ages, either real or artificial, to decide whether it was real or not. I’m hoping, and voting, for reality over artifice.
But–although I’m pretty clear on reality–I’m not sure it will prevail.
What say you?"
Oh, I think most people will believe it was real, to the extent that they think about it at all...I'm more worried about how many people will view it as important, rather than 'why did they want to do that?"
There's an old science-fiction story…“Ambition,” written by William Bade in 1952. The idea is that a scientist working on space travel finds that he has somehow been brought by time-travel to an era hundreds of years in the future. He is thrilled, because he assumes that the people of the future will have developed space travel to a high degree, and that he will actually be able to fulfill his dream of journeying to the planets. “Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus…Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars!”
And he finds that the future civilization indeed has created vehicles that would easily be capable of such exploration…but they are used only as super-airliners. Nobody has any interest in traveling into space, indeed, they can’t imagine why anyone would want to do such a thing. A sympathetic woman explains to the protagonist that “this is the Age of Man. We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists…are studying human rather than nuclear reactions.” There appears to be no thirst for adventure in a form likely to be recognized by a 20th-century man. (Indeed, it seems that the reason the future people chose the protagonist as a research subject is that they found his interest in going to the moon and beyond to be so bizarre as to be worthy of psychological investigation.) The story’s subtitle is:
To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail!
So…when a society reaches a certain level of wealth and sophistication, does the desire for adventure tend to die out? I’m reminded of a passage from another SF story, this one by Heinlein, in which a Martian is asked why he and other members of his species just sit around all day, “growing together,” as they called it, never actually doing anything. The Martian’s reply is: “My fathers have labored, and I am weary.”
Is there psychological truth in this remark? Are many modern-day Americans and Europeans “weary” because of the heavy lifting done by their forefathers in creating civilization? To what degree has the desire for adventure and achievement been replaced by first, low-risk faux adventure (play a videogame rather than start a business, for example), and second, obsessively narcissistic self-focus?…and, to the extent this has actually happened, is it an inevitable consequence of a certain stage of social evolution?…or is it rather a consequence of certain current reversible social factors?
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