We Went to the Moon

Every once in a while you will see someone hold up their cellphone and say, this phone is 100 times more powerful than the computers NASA used to send human beings to the moon. They always say it with a smile to make the point of how fast our technology has come in the last fifty years.
It has never impressed me.
In fact, I find it a pretty sad commentary on what we have been doing with all this tech. What it really means is we sent people to the Moon with vacuum tubes and computers that took up entire buildings using reel to reel magnetic tape but it took microchips, and faster memory to launch Angry Birds.

Instead of using our incredible advancements to keep looking outward we have used it to create apps on phones that keep us looking down.

You might think I am exaggerating but some of the first benefits the public received from the technology that was developed for the Moon landing was arcade video games. That's right. We went to the Moon and what we immediately got from it was Pong, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

This past Monday, July 20th, was the 46th Anniversary of the first Moon landing. It barely registered on the news and was only mentioned as a curiosity at the end of shows. The Internet talked about it but only to direct you to websites and YouTube channels dedicated to showing you how it was just a big hoax. Its more than a little ironic that the Internet owes its early beginnings to the space program. The technology that makes all those Google searches for 'proof of Moon landing hoax' possible was originally created by guys who worked with slide rulers in their pockets to figure out the trajectory of orbits; not to make and cash in with their latest app, move to San Francisco and drive my rent up.

It didn't help that we got to the Moon, looked around, brought back rocks, left a plaque signed by President Nixon and then got bored because really it is just one giant barren rock in our sky. But it was supposed to be the start of humanities reach for the stars. Then again, every time you see perfect CGI special effects in a movie where Hollywood latest heroes are blowing up alien invaders I think to myself, of course that's what we would use our computers for now. It is much more exciting to battle spaceships with killer robots than it is to actually go looking for them. Then again, if there are intelligent life forms in the universe, why would they want anything to do with us?

While we are busy spending a billion or so dollars on keeping humans we call illegal aliens out of the country we are spending millions of dollars to look for alien beings from
space. What would more advanced creatures make of this? If, as a lot of people believe,  we are being monitored like the way we might set up night vision cameras to learn about animals in remote jungles, what would they make of our radio, TV and Internet communications? I doubt they would come here and my reason why is the Nazi's. The first TV broadcast with enough strength to escape the Earth was Hitler at the Olympics in 1936. If you watched all of that 'mini-series' play out, would you really want to visit this wacky blue marble? Besides, now we have reality TV shows.

We once thought these signals spread out into space like a giant ripple upon the surface of a pond, forever rushing away from Earth as our first ambassadors of what life is like here. We now know that the signal strength dramatically drops off. There is a lot of dust and radiation that can degrade the signals. However, if we can view and measure the almost imperceptible drop in light of a distant star as an alien world passes in front of it, I'm pretty sure any advanced space faring culture can pick up I love Lucy repeats, which is good, and Nickel Back songs, which is not so good. If aliens are visiting earth it is only to leave warnings for other advanced aliens among the stars. Yup, crop circles are the equivalent of driving in the middle of nowhere and you see a sign that says, no services at this exit.

What about ancient aliens visiting Earth is the past? Maybe, sure. Its possible. My reasoning for this isn't based on the History Channels embarrassing, Ancient Aliens show, its based on something that occurred during World War Two in the Pacific. There were many tiny islands in the Pacific Ocean that were seldom visited. Some had tribes that were barely known and others lived on islands so small and so remote that outside visitors were extremely rare. The Japanese and then Americans, built landing strips and outposts on these distant bits of land. To get the people on their side, each side also dropped food and supplies. When the war ended, so did the cargo drops. How did the tribes, villagers and people on these islands react? They built statues of the air planes they once saw flying overhead with palms, sticks and rocks as offerings to the beings who came from the sky with technology and food in an effort to draw them back. People have referred to them as Cargo Cults. Google it. Look at some of the photos of the 'planes' they built and read about how a 'religion' developed around waiting for the gifts and the people from the sky to return.
Think about churches with statues of Jesus and how they preach of his eventual promised return or the countless ancient cultures that built massive stone temples dedicate to their gods who came from the sky, taught them knowledge and promised they would come back someday. It makes you think, right? It makes me think that if all our cellphones suddenly crashed a 'cargo cult' would spring up with people holding sea shells up to their ears.

Sure, we are sending unmanned probes out to the distant worlds in our own solar system and we have made better telescopes to see farther out into the cosmic void but one of the most incredible photos ever taken has to be the astronaut's on the surface of the Moon and you cant get there with an app on your phone.