New Moon

This is not meant to be a manifesto, but maybe it is one of sorts. 

Everyone is talking about the moon. 

While I’m here, I keep up with the news in a few different ways; there’s BBC world news, which if played for longer than half an hour will drive you mad with repetition; there’s the ABC breakfast news show which is great for keeping up with home politics and economics but again, if you watch the nightly news, 7.30report and foreign correspondent as well because that’s all there is, the same faces, opinions and sound bights are enough to make you turn off for weeks at a time! (It seems Australia is like a long running soap – you can tune in every couple of months and the only thing that’s different is some long lost politician is back from the dead by an improbable twist of fate.)  The other way I get my news is via the weekend Australian (delivered to the local ex-pat café a week late), through much coveted copies of the Guardian brought by like –minded visitors and of course via the net and my favourite on-line journals.  And as I said, this month it seems, everyone’s talking about the moon.

I guess it’s logical.  This month marks the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing – an event that captured the imagination of a generation.  Just, not really my generation.  The Eagle, one small step for man and the hype surrounding the greatest milestone to date in the space race, all happened three years before I was born.  

Still, for a long time now, I have been intrigued by the immense beauty and mystery of the night sky.  This is due in no small part, to my father.  At first, I remember him listening to Radio National space programs and getting out the dinky little telescope we had to show us the moon’s craters and particular constellations. Then, when Halley’s Comet showed itself in the Southern skies, we camped out and watched the heavens together as a family; all 3 kids inevitably disappointed in not seeing a hugely blazing comet tail lighting up the back yard.

It may well have been on one of these nights that the more existential conversations with my father first began.  Through discussions about space, my dad introduced me to concepts such as relativism and though I didn’t know it at the time, to the philosophies of Plato and Socrates.  I still clearly remember one conversation in particular.  Dad pointed to a star and said something like “I love stars.  The light from that star is taking years, maybe hundreds or thousands of years to reach us.  So in all that time, it may have burned out and ceased to exist.  We can see it, but it might not really be there." As a 14 year old, it blew my mind; it was so logical and yet it seemed like he must be lying! So it was that in discussions that started with stars, he taught me amongst other things, that truth is seen as a relative concept.  That its our perception and the meaning we ascribe to absolute truth that builds our world, constructs our ethics and defines our own truths.

And yet even through all this, still the moon sat; a silent, silver disk.  Beautiful, but silent nonetheless.

Aside from the aesthetics and romance of stargazing and my layperson’s appreciation of astrology, (which I love but only know enough about to get me into trouble in discussions with skeptics), my excitement and interest in space is especially peaked outside our own solar system.  

So, my personal ethical and spiritual framework is made from a grab bag of traditions; from Judeo- Christian philosophies to Buddhism, mysticism and a few things in between.  But I don’t think belief in a “creating force” precludes belief in a parallel world of sustainable life somewhere beyond our own.  And for a long time, I have believed it.  Mainly because a significant amount of stars have planets around them and scientists point out that some of those may exist in what is known as a “Goldilocks Zone” where conditions permit liquid water to exist which in turn, permits life.  Our nearest star is 4 light years away though some are billions of light years from here.  Clearly, though the capacity for the kind of inter-stellar travel that would mean reaching these systems hasn’t yet been invented, it may well be a long term goal for enterprising nations entered in the space race.

And here I come back to a set of perennial problems that have somewhat worsened for me since living and working here in a developing nation; questions about exploration, colonisation, development and resource utilisation.  As I was reading all of these articles on the moon- about the way in which it has peaked humanity's common interest in discovery and exploration- even I thought, surely resources are better spent here on earth than in persevering with the bare and cratered moon, landing a crew on Mars or endlessly photographing the universe. 

Stephen Hawking says that argument is unimaginative.  He says its akin to arguing prior to 1492 that no resources should be spent on expeditions to the new world.  His argument is that those expeditions shaped the future of the world in ways those involved could never have anticipated or comprehended at the time. So, it's as if the act of the lunar landing might itself have fumbled with the time/space continuum and locked future events in place.  And that’s my fear.  I can’t imagine the Native Americans, Chileans, Peruvians, Australian Aborigines or other Indigenous tribes everywhere being thrilled, had they been given the option of having their lands “discovered” and while on one hand, my visionary and imaginative self says "Yes, fund exploration!" On the other hand, I have a profound fear of our expertise at fucking up every environment we touch.

Which brings me (finally!) back to the moon.  In my more recent and growing engagement with the moon, it seems I find she is an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in green cheese.

It is said the cosmic collision that began the earth’s development also created the moon; that the moon is a piece of what earth once was- a snapshot of our former selves floating in perpetuity.  I never knew this (or if I did, I wasn’t paying attention) and it has stirred in me a poetic sense of loss.  If you personify the earth and moon, it is almost as if they were twins separated at birth.  One seems to have developed beyond measure- whilst the other has seemed to lie dormant – and yet the influence it exerts is profound.  For it’s claimed also that the moon’s influence on the tides helped to encourage the evolutionary process.  By creating a circular pattern of ebb and flow, water- based creatures may have learned to spend some short time on land before they were claimed by the safety of the tide- eventually making a full transition to dry ground and evolving into mammals, including humans.

And yet, the plan is to colonise her.  To use her as a base from which to launch expeditions further into space.  Here we go again.  The sons and daughters of the moon’s blue twin, set to colonise; to rape and pillage and plunder- using her for our own gain, perhaps not truly understanding the ways in which our actions will disturb the precise and yet divine nature of earth’s interaction with its twin soul.  The same way we have continuously ignored natural systems and complex environmental interactions for hundreds of years- at our peril.

I concede there are those that may well be able to calculate those interactions though – so about space exploration I am unresolved. But I know I fundamentally believe in knowledge- and the exploration of possibility.  So to that I say yes.  I don't want to believe that "there be dragons" out there on the periphery of our knowledge, so decision making about what to do with any newfound information can come later – and I hope with some wisdom and the force of lessons learned.

And now, after years of silver silence, the moon speaks to me and I’m captivated.  I note its influence on the earth and within each of its inhabitants but ultimately I’m captivated by its ever-changing beauty and its own mythical existence .  And of course if I connect to it, then I relate it back to love.  And it seems to me that love is like this new moon of my imagination; it can wax and wane, change shape and change colour with the atmosphere; but its always there, seen or unseen, pulling at our inner tides.