The discovery of polar ice in about 40 small craters on the moon is a life-changing one for those of us who currently live on earth. There maybe additional pride for India that this information has come via the NASA payload which Chandrayaan I carried with it on its moon mission last year. This means that if humans find living space beyond terra firma, India has had a role to play in it. There is also a vindication of sorts here for India because there had been some ego play between some scientists at the American National Aeronautics and Space Laboratory and the Indian Science Research Organisation over the feasibility or even the need for India’s moon mission and whether it served any purpose at all. Several sceptics raised eyebrows when the mission was terminated early after some malfunctions.
However, scientific one-upmanship apart, the Chandrayaan mission has emphatically confirmed what earlier explorations and calculations had found — that the moon can now be considered for habitation. Lost as we usually are in the immediate compulsions of geo-politics, scientific discoveries often get ignored or underestimated. And space exploration can just sound like so much mumbo-jumbo science fiction that only geeks and boffins take it seriously.
Now it seems that moving out of earth is not just an exciting possibility; it comes with some serious responsibility. Money also needs to be spent on vitals like creating an artificial atmosphere to support life and on migration. Right now of course these are long shots. More important is whether we look at colonisation as a viable option. It can be argued, in both a romantic and practical vein, that having destroyed so much of the earth’s natural resources we are now looking to spread our havoc around the universe.
Conversely, as a species humans have moved very far ahead compared to our animal cousins and while there was been a price to pay, progress has brought amazing results and benefits. If the next step is the moon, we cannot use some pastoral concerns to rein us in.
Instead, we need to harness all our intelligence and make sure we learn from our mistakes. A popular poster from the 1960s used to read ‘The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will have gone to Mars’. In some small way, Chandrayaan I has, it appears, helped that prophecy come close to the truth.
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