How is it possible that there's even a debate about whether we ought to fund our space program?
Forget about imagination for a minute: its costs are relatively low and amortized over time, and its contribution to the long-term health and survival of our civilization is probably essential. (Stephen Hawking thinks we won't survive another millennium cramped together on Earth alone; I remain slightly more optimistic.) The exploration of the cosmos is the paradigmatic example of a good global expenditure, and to forsake it for some kind of supposed economic reason is to miss the point of our existence in the most misguided kind of way.
And if we are to consider our imagination, then there could not possibly be an investment that pays better dividends. Mars might seem positively ordinary by now, given its extensive coverage, but if you've been paying attention, you've been rewarded for it; the Martian expanse is inconceivably marvelous and paradoxical. Those vivid, Technicolor pictures from midday are themselves already enough of an achievement, but even more evocative are those panoramic shots of the long Martian dusk, which could be mistaken for portraits of evening in the American Southwest. Well, they almost could; the dull blue sunset and the miniature sun on the horizon betray the fact that this eerily familiar landscape is actually very, very far from home. (The few photos we have from Venus, on the other hand, are instead only mere glimpses into a murky heart of darkness; at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and ninety atmospheres of pressure, the Venusian surface only allows our cameras to survive long enough to tell us how much sharper we'll have to become before our footsteps may follow.) And the iconic photos taken during our visits so many years ago to our nearest celestial neighbor—which, in lacking any atmosphere, has both a surface bathed in blinding Saharan sunlight and a sky blacker than the darkest Terran night—have long provided us with a kind of surreal beauty. But most extraordinary of all, I think, is the single grainy image captured by the Huygens probe not five years ago: it might as well just be a photo of some rusty, rock-littered undeveloped property in the middle of Riley County, except that it happens to have been taken on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, nearly a billion miles away.
These humble images—easily accessible through a Google Image Search or even on some of their respective Wikipedia pages—provide us with a haunting sense of cosmic insignificance and a profound sense of human achievement; they provide the seam between the past and the future of our species, and they leave us spellbound in the process.
This month, NASA will have to decide between some very important competing projects. They'll have to decide whether they should fund a comprehensive voyage to the Saturnian system or a comprehensive voyage to the Jovian system, and if some other project ultimately looks more inviting, they won't fund either. To select Saturn is to return triumphantly to Titan to analyze its ocean of hydrocarbons and to visit Enceladus, with its volcanic activity and suggestion of microbial life; to select Jupiter is to visit Europa, with its rolling hills of water ice and its subterranean oceans, and to meet Ganymede and Callisto, two moons certain to be future outposts. In any case, a very large and significant portion of the outer Solar System will go uncharted, for the foreseeable future. Perhaps all of it. And for what? So we can build a couple more ephemeral monuments at home?
We must fund our space program. We simply must.
