Over the next few years, several planned missions aim to return mankind to the moon. NASA is launching a probe to its south pole, the Artemis program plans to put humans back on the lunar surface, even private companies are getting involved. As exciting as space exploration can be, however, we must ask ourselves if this is truly the best way to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Moreover, what is the point of going back to the moon, now that we’ve already crashed a ship into its giant eye in George Méliès A Trip to the Moon?
Aren’t there enough problems to be solved here on Earth? Are our resources really best used on returning to the moon, a place explored over 120 years ago by a team of elderly astronomers with huge beards and wizard hats, wildly gesticulating toward one another in choppy, hand-cranked black and white?
It’s true that space exploration spurns technological innovation. Without our earlier trips to the moon, we would never have invented a spacecraft shaped like a giant bullet. But science has learned all it’s going to learn from that mission. We now know the safest space suits are wool coats and top hats, and that the most efficient mode of space travel is to fire our bullet ships out of an enormous gun operated by a chorus line of young women in matching bathing suits.
John F. Kennedy once said we go to the moon “not because it is easy, but because it was hard.” Naturally, he was referring to the hardships of those original men who nearly died when their ship crashed into the right eyeball of that giant face that spans the surface of the moon. They survived, but let’s not forget that the moon is now permanently blind in one eye. I’m still haunted by the images of that 2,000-mile-wide face grimacing in pain. If the price of exploration is maiming a sentient celestial body, perhaps our species is not as advanced as we think.
Private companies like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have already proposed drilling beneath the surface of the moon for mining purposes. This naked commercialism threatens to turn the moon into yet another landscape. We must protect the interior of the moon, including its vast hollow caverns and gargantuan, sprouting mushroom forests.
And let us not forget the very real risks to human life these missions pose. Elon Musk dreams of colonizing the moon, completely ignoring the threat of the moon gremlins. Is Musk’s vanity project really worth the risk of another attack from the Lunar Army and its spear-wielding soldiers? Another scampering chase across the lunar surface? Another imprisonment in their underground Moon Castle?
It’s a miracle of modern science and physics those explorers made it back to their ship, pushed it off a lunar cliff, and fell back to Earth like a rock dropped off a ledge.
I'm not saying subsequent explorations of the moon haven’t been successful. When we returned there in the 1996 music video for the Smashing Pumpkins’s “Tonight Tonight,” the world saw those frightful moon men in color for the first time. But in an era filled with so many terrestrial problems, we have more pressing matters than flying to the moon in a zeppelin while Billy Corrigan sings.
So let’s stop looking outward for answers, and look to solve our Earthbound problems, like helping the poor and curing diseases—at least the diseases we haven’t already solved thanks to that five-second Thomas Edison film of a guy sneezing.