Lately there has been the provocative statement from the Nasa.com website: “We’re going back to the moon…” This is in reference to the Artemis II spacecraft. It is supposed to launch next month.
But I think the “going back to the moon” announcement is misleading. The last time we went to the moon was 1972, when two men landed on it and walked around. The Artemis II mission will only have astronauts fly around the moon, not land on it. I do not want to belittle this mission–all spaceflight is dangerous–but it does seem to me like we are lagging here.
From 1969-1972 we landed six spacecraft on the moon, with two astronauts per mission. Some of them even had a ‘car’ to drive, the lunar rover. So cool. Driving on the moon to expand the scope of the mission. Super impressive. And this was over 50 years ago! The world took note. Makes you proud to be an American. As a kid growing up the 60’s and 70’s I probably took more interest in it than most. My father was an engineer who had a hand in the project.
And now, 54 years after the last moon landing, our ‘going back to the moon’ consists only flying around it, not landing on it.
This long halt in moon exploration hasn’t stopped there from being a lot of visionary talk about going to Mars, and not only visiting it, but putting a permanent colony on it. And there’s more! Mars is supposed to help our human race last longer as we become a ‘multiplanetary species’. Elon Musk has been saying this. There’s been some talk from NASA along those lines too.
Call me skeptical but if we can’t even land humans on the moon again after 54 years, then I don’t think this ‘multiplanetary species’ thing is going to happen anytime soon. Maybe eventually, humans will visit Mars. Maybe even have a small research colony. But a permanent settlement as an alternative to earth? Have they seen pictures of Mars? It’s a big red desert! Worse, no oxygen. No air pressure. No protection from space radiation. Huge temperature swings. Questionable if there is water there, maybe at the poles. That planet is not meant for human habitation. Plus it is, on average, 140 million miles from earth. If something goes wrong, and things can go very wrong on complicated missions, especially in space, it’s a long way to get help.
Even the least-hospitable places on earth are infinitely preferable to Mars–the deserts, the polar ice caps, the ocean. These still have those building blocks, those things needed to sustain life (as mentioned): oxygen, air pressure, and protection from radiation. Food, water, and temperature can be managed more easily there because it’s on our planet.
I’m not anti-progress or anti-technology. I’m a fan of reasonable space exploration. I just think the visionary talk is exceeding our technology here.
But the main reason to dislike the ‘multi-planetary species’ vision is that it seems to ignore God, to leave Him out of the picture, and to ignore the fact that He designed the earth to be our home.
God gave us this world. Some would say we evolved to live in it. Better to say that we were created to live in it. We are suited for it. A careful reading of the creation account in Genesis 1 seems to point out that the earth was made for us, more than us for it. The earth is a gift to us: “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to man,” (Psalm 115:16).
The planets are not mentioned in the creation account; the stars are barely mentioned. But the main focus is on this earth as a good and suitable home for man, as well as the animals and plants.
Though scarred by the effects of sin and, sometimes, of human mismanagement, our earth is a good world. There is still a lot of goodness and beauty in it. And that should lead us to praise God.
Isaiah 45:18, speaks of the Lord who “created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited— he says: ‘I am the LORD, and there is no other’.”
There are three things in there to note:
- God created the heavens and earth. They deliberately came from His hand. They didn’t just happen.
- He created the earth to be inhabited. It is for us. It is our home.
- He reminds us that it was God alone who did it. No one else did it–no other gods. And, more applicable to western minds today, nothing (no-thing) else did it–no random processes.
This notion of ‘inter-planetary species’ weakens the distinctiveness of God’s giving us the earth as our home. It puts technology and human advancement in the place of God–as in ‘we will save ourselves’. There’s some arrogance there.
Is this a new version of a tower of Babel? A new human scheme of attempted godless accomplishment? It seems that way to me. It seems part of the trend to try and make human scientific achievement into a replacement for God. That’s ironic, and worse than ironic. Some took science, which was enabled by God-given human intelligence, which was supposed to be a way of finding out the intricacies of God’s creation, and abused the gift. They made it bigger than it was supposed to be, turning it into a replacement for God Himself. This is the ever-present temptation of idolatry throughout the ages: to take something the Creator gave as a gift and use that very thing to replace the Creator.
I wonder if these ‘multi planetary species’ promoters ever thought that, even if they were successful, that they might just be exporting the same problems to another planet. Human beings will still carry the faults and sins that they do now. Rather than attempting to inhabit other planets to solve our human problems, we would do better to settle down and acknowledge that “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it;” (Psalm 24:1).
This world was meant to be our home for whatever time we are given to live in it. And beyond that, there is the afterlife in heaven or hell. Mars is not the planet for us. Visit it, yes. Maybe set up a research colony. But earth is our home. Let us thank God for it.