Ah, the moon landing
Lie of the century, or a giant leap for mankind?
So this video has popped on my Facebook feed this morning:
I am sort of ashamed to admit this, but at some point of my life I was skeptical about the fact of Moon landing. I remember I was 13 or so when I watched this documentary _*revealing the truth*_ about one of humanity's biggest achievement so far.
Another thing I have to admit is I like reading detective novels, so such a conspiracy theory was an incredibly appealing piece of information. Besides hey, as a Russian of 13, I just needed to have a source of pride that is "Space is territory where Russia is dominating. WHOOOO, GO RUSSIA". Little did I know almost 15 years ago.
A couple of years back I came to read "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan. Needless to say that was one of the best, most interesting reads I have done so far, not to mention a very inspiring one. Think about it for a moment: when Sagan wrote this book in 1994, he could not even imagine just how different the space industry will be nowadays. Private company becoming a leader in development of space rockets? Reusable rockets? Too bad he did not live long enough to see that.
Anyways, going back to the moon.
At the time, it was a more of a political need, however it has served more than just that. Today the human kind is planning to use the Moon as a buffer zone of a sort during expeditions to Mars. Apart from that, over 20kgs of samples have been taken back to Earth for researches. Ultimately, if we do not even count the actual scientific valuables that came from that great adventure, think of the hundreds of thousands of people who got immensely inspired by it to join engineering and science programs.
Bottom line. Space exploration is necessary for our kind not only to ensure our further survival in case of global cataclysm. By studying the worlds around us, we get to know better that of our own. The very understanding of greenhouse effect in planetary scale has been learned from Venus expeditions.
But hey, now in this century, in the era of information, we have people crowdfunding projects to prove that the planet is flat and deny climate change. Needless to mention there are moon landing deniers :D
To conclude, I'd like to suggest you guys to go and check out one of my favourite Moon-related videos on Youtube: What if the Moon was a Disco Ball by Vsauce