The Moon, Again

No. 42

Did you know that India landed a spacecraft on the moon last week? Yeah, India. They did it with their Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft. Believe it or not they are now the fourth nation to complete a lunar landing. Soviet Union did it in 1959, the United States 1969, and China in 2013. The United States though were the first and only nation to send crewed missions to the moon. That was a long time ago now—over 50 years—all part of the Apollo Program from 1969 to 1972. Twelve astronauts walked on the moon in that time over six missions. The milestone for India to land on the moon seemed to go almost unnoticed by the media.

I decided to take a look at some of the world numbers for traveling into space. There’s a lot of data. I settled on 2022, a record year. Aviation Week indicated that 186 rockets were launched from the earth’s surface—178 were successful. Led by the U.S. with 78; 61 of their launches were by SpaceX alone. China launched 64 rockets, second to the United States. Russia launched 21. Europe 6. A somewhat new entry, Rocket Lab from New Zealand, launched 9 times. Interestingly, India’s launch numbers were not included in Aviation Week’s information. Curious!?

And from what I saw on-line, India’s launch data was quite confusing, but they landed on the moon this year. Mind you, it’s not really the rocket launches that are important to this article but rather this renewed drive to go into space. And for what?

Elon Musk’s SpaceX—the media’s darling—that I’ve written about in a previous article “Space Versus Earth,” appears to be leading the world back into space exploration—a venture that was curtailed for several years after the fateful 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger flight that disintegrated seconds into its flight, killing the seven astronauts on board. I’m anxiously awaiting Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Musk, due out September 12^th, but for more than just the return to space story. It’s stunning, remarkable, unbelievable, or whatever extreme adjective you can think of to describe a person who is wealthier than any other person who has ever lived on the planet. At last count, Musk’s net worth according to Forbes Real-time Billionaires is almost $50 billion more than the next wealthiest family on the list. As Ronan Farrow recently commented on his podcast, Musk seems to have become an “essential yet unofficial part of American governance, holding keys to the green transition, the space race and even the war in Ukraine.” One has to wonder how one individual attained such a position. A modern-day Solomon without family lineage or a father who was God’s chosen son David. Whether you like his Tesla cars or not, they’re stylish and fast and account for more of the electric car market than all the rest put together. His SpaceX rocket company alone launches as many rockets per year as the country that leads the world in rocket launches—China. He owns one of the leading social media platforms “X” (previously known as Twitter) and is the only social media mogul who not only owns the company but has the most follows on the platform. He owns a neurotechnology company—Neuralink, tunnel boring company—The Boring Company and still has time to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Musk is astonishing to say the least. Impressive—yes, but still just a human being. Yet many today see things as the late Malcolm Muggeridge described, “there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves.” This is a cautionary note.

This lies in the face of Hugh Ross’ book Why The Universe Is The Way It Is, which I’ve quoted from before. The book explains science discoveries about how the universe took shape over many billions of years and created an environment timed perfectly for life to begin on Earth—human life in particular—that we humans had nothing to do with creating.

Examples of this I wrote about in “Created For Us?” For instance, Ross describes how the decayed remains of animals in the Cambrian Explosion 530 million years ago “made the largest contribution to Earth’s petroleum reserves.” When humans came along, it was the optimal time for petroleum production in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history along with the optimal time for the formation of reservoir structure within the earth to store the petroleum. Humanity and civilization appeared and exists on Earth at the optimal moment to utilize the petroleum now available. And it’s not only petroleum. Turns out to be the optimal time for coal formation and storage as well.

Ross goes on to describe other events that were timed perfectly in Earth’s history to coincide with the rise of humanity. The stability of the sun, for instance, burns today at the greatest consistency possible and has for thousands of years, with the lowest frequency of flares since its inception, providing the perfect radiation profile to suit human civilization. The sun’s brightness also has increased from its start allowing just the right species at just the right population levels at just the right times to thrive and survive on Earth. These layers of life removed dangerous atmospheric greenhouse gases at just the right time to compensate for the additional heat produced by the sun’s increasing brightness. Then for 3 billion years this process filled Earth’s crust with biodeposits that have now supported humanity’s survival for over one hundred thousand years. Humans arrived at the perfect time biologically when biodeposits were plentiful. This also coincided with ideal surface temperatures and the abundance and diversity of plants to support homo sapien sapien life. Humanity arrived on Earth at the optimal solar moment as well as the biodeposit and photosynthetic moments to ensure its survival. Also, the precise mixture of oxygen required by humans to breathe was reached. Ross writes that it took, “3.8 billion years to raise the atmospheric oxygen level from less than 1 percent to its present 21 percent.”

All of these examples had nothing to do with anything we did. They were initiated long before our species existed, and were all part of forming this exceptional planet we find ourselves living on that somehow—nearly impossibly mathematically—supports our existence. To our knowledge, Earth is the only planet where life exists in the entire cosmos.

This is why it’s hard for me to understand why another nation is pursuing space when we know so little about our own planet outside of theory. I refer back to that ancient text that deserves our reverence—the Bible. There is nothing in the Bible that indicates our salvation comes from outside the planet and its atmosphere, except God. When Musk speaks of an “multi-planetary species,” he’s speaking in marketing terms to sell his idea of traveling to Mars for, in his opinion, humanity’s survival. Psalm 146 warns us of this, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.” I can’t help but think there is a big monetary component to the “multi-planetary” idea as well. Musk has demonstrated repeatedly his knack for exponential financial gain. But can humanity even get to Mars? India just landed a spacecraft on the moon, coming seemingly from out of nowhere to do it. SpaceX hasn’t landed anything on the moon after hundreds of rocket launches into space since 2010. Mars on average is over two hundred times farther away from Earth than the moon. Enough said.

Everything we humans are made of comes from the earth—everything, that is, but the spirit that gives us life and existential awareness. Of the over 100 billion humans that have existed on the planet, all that we’re materially made of has come from Earth yet we know so little about it. The Bible speaks of Sheol inside the earth where all go in death and yet rise out of. In Numbers 16:33, “So they and all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol, and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly.” In 1 Samuel 2:6, “The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.” There is nothing in the Bible about going up into space or fleeing to another planet to escape Earth to save ourselves. We do have the Tower of Babel story in Genesis that tells us of the destruction that takes place when thinking we can build something (a tower) to take us to heaven.

This is why I keep returning to the drilling projects of Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia or Project Mohole started and cancelled in the U.S. at the time of the space race in the 60s (“What’s In A Hole?”). Our attention gets swiftly diverted by fast moving objects, big explosions and ground shaking power. The telecommunication advances that satellites rocketed into space bring us are wonderful. It’s hard to imagine a world without the internet and high-speed Wi-Fi. It’ll likely be the same with AI as it makes its way into our lives, saying in the future “how did we live without it”—I’ll leave that for another article. But of the now four nations that have taken spacecraft to the moon only China is drilling into the earth’s crust with their Project Deep Earth in Xinjiang.

Part of the message in this article is for Mr. Musk to adjust his sights away from space and towards boring deep into Earth’s crust. Let’s find out what’s there. Does a giant ocean exist under the mantle that new theory says is there? The idea is not new as Jules Verne wrote about it 150 years ago in his Journey to the Center of the Earth. How far down has life existed? Are there answers or clues to how we got here and for what purpose, which space can’t provide?

And maybe the earth can be profitable. If anyone can find a way to make it so, Mr. Musk can, while at the same time discovering more about who we are and how we got here. Get the world to pay more attention to what’s inside our planet, but please not the moon, again.