The Urge to Explore

Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration Deniers
claim that humanity has no urge to explore. However, they are insular
nobodies attempting to project their own inner death upon humankind.
Psychologists agree that the drive to explore is a quintessential human
need. The drive to explore exists in healthy humans, and it is a
*significant* drive -- *not* a minor and weak one. The assertions of
Deniers notwithstanding, most exploration occurs in whole or part to
satisfy curiosity and the thirst for adventure. Every healthy child
spends most of his/her available time exploring for this reason! Most
adult explorers throughout time -- including many famous ones like
Meriwether Lewis and Marco Polo -- were motivated substantially by
these urges. Like Holocaust Denial, to deny these truths is not
"revisionism" -- it is outright Denial.

The following is a great article from great minds -- real explorers. It
affirms the truths that the bigoted Dietzes and Cloughs of the world so
hatefully deny.

"Living systems cannot remain static; they evolve or decline. They
explore or expire. The inner experience of this drive is curiosity and
awe-the sense of wonder. Exploration, evolution, and
self-transcendence are only different perspectives on the same
process."

Beautiful.

***

The Urge to Explore

It brought the first creatures from the sea onto the land; it sent us
to the moon. Where shall we go next?

by Buzz Aldrin and Wyn Wachhorst

Poised on the launch pad and towering 36 stories against the stars, the
Apollo-Saturn rocket seemed unearthly in the wash of floodlight,
glowing icy silver-white, like the moon above it. A half-million
pilgrims had made their way to the mosquitoed marshlands of Florida's
Merritt Island, spending the night on the beach in cars, tents, and
trailers, awaiting the early-morning launch of Apollo 11, the mission
that would put men on the moon. Along the grassy dunes and desolate
moors, onlookers stood in the soft whine of the night wind, the
children of this planet. Life, which crawled out of the sea eons ago,
would now climb out of the white cloud-capped ocean of air, cling to a
barren lunar rock, and then fall back to Earth. For one brief moment,
we would be creatures of the cosmic ocean.

Sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, an aircraft carrier set
on end, the 3,800-ton Apollo-Saturn rocket was loaded with fuel to fill
96 railroad tank cars. With its 15 million individual parts, 92
engines, and 15 miles of wiring, it was more finely tooled than an
exquisite Swiss watch. Gulping 15 tons of fuel a second, cooled by
water cascading at 50,000 gallons a minute, the Saturn V rocket rose
with the force of a 100,000 locomotives burning five million pounds of
fuel in the first 2fi minutes, getting an average of a full five inches
to the gallon.

Apollo 17, the last of the moon flights, rode a pillar of fire that
turned the night sky orange-pink, a false dawn visible for 500 miles.

Twelve astronauts spent 160 man-hours on the moon, traversing 60 miles
afoot and by rover. Sixty scientific experiments were performed on the
surface and 30 more in orbit, while 30,000 photographs captured the
moon in intimate detail.

The moon landing will be seen, a thousand years hence, as the signature
of our century. It stands with the cathedrals and pyramids among those
epic social feats that embody the spirit of an age. They are the dreams
of the child in man.

With all great leaps, there is something gained and something lost. The
price of the telephone was a loss of privacy; the airplane diminished
the sense of travel. The moon of Apollo is a barren, hostile desert, a
scarred wasteland, glinting gunmetal gray in the sun. Gone is the
mysterious, inaccessible moon that made the water silver, the moon that
rhymed with June, croon, and spoon. Yet the lunar landscape has a stark
beauty all its own, a changeless wilderness where rolling, sunny slopes
gleam like virgin snow and thousand-foot gorges border majestic,
three-mile-high mountains-lifeless, windless, looming still and
serene, only the harsh shadows moving ever so slowly with the sun.

The moon, now branded with boot prints, dissected in laboratories, and
littered with NASA's debris, was brought down to Earth, while the Earth
was placed in the heavens. "That bright loveliness in the eternal
cold," floating like a space flower above the horizon of the dead moon,
was the only meaningful object in the lunar sky. From the Sea of
Tranquility, where I could cover with a thumb the site of all human
history, the Earth seemed fragile as a Christmas ornament, drifting
like a lost balloon on the black velvet of space.

Apollo 17 created a false dawn that was visible for 500 miles.

It is at its frontiers that a species experiences the most perturbing
stress. The urge to explore has been the primary force in evolution
since the first water creatures began to reconnoiter the land. The
quest for the larger reality, the need to see the whole-from the
mountaintop or the moon-is the basic imperative of consciousness, the
hallmark of our species. If we insist that the human quest await the
healing of every sore on the body politic, we condemn ourselves to
stagnation. Living systems cannot remain static; they evolve or
decline. They explore or expire. The inner experience of this drive is
curiosity and awe-the sense of wonder. Exploration, evolution, and
self-transcendence are only different perspectives on the same process.

In the end, space exploration is not about limited political,
commercial, and scientific goals, but is rather an epochal turning
point in human evolution, one that will ultimately merge our inner and
outer realities, elevating both to a new plane in the process. Whole
species evolve by probing their environment in the same spirit of play
with which the developing child explores his immediate surroundings.

Perhaps it is more than coincidence that Sigmund Freud and Edwin Hubble
shared the same moment in history, Freud exposing the rational mind as
a tiny clearing in the dark forest of the soul, Hubble revealing that
our galaxy is only one among billions, that the heavens are immense
beyond imagination. To gaze into the night sky and feel the vastness
and passion of creation is to glimpse an equally vast interior. We are
aware of the stars only because we have evolved a corresponding inner
space.

Apollo 11 saw Buzz Aldrin climbing onto the lunar surface, while Neil
Armstrong held the camera.

While most of us have a cerebral grasp of the Copernican model and the
immensity of the cosmos, few of us seem yet to feel it. We retain a
geocentric spirit, mired down in self-absorbed consumerism. The
exploration of outer space will encourage a commensurate expansion of
inner space. We are alive at the dawn of a new Renaissance, a moment
much like the morning of the modern age when most of the globe lay deep
in mystery, when tall masts pierced the skies of burgeoning ports,
luring those of imagination to seek their own destiny, to challenge the
very foundations of man and nature, heaven and earth.

Like the sailing ships that incarnated the aura of the Renaissance, or
the great steam locomotives that embodied the building of America, the
Apollo rocket is an emblem of the human spirit. Apollo was inevitable
from the first gleam in the eye of the hunter-gatherer, from the first
fire, wheel, and furrow; it was latent in the stirrup and the longship,
in the creak of every caravel, the ring of every railroad spike, the
lonesome howl of every lumber camp harmonica. From the moment the first
flint was flaked, space was fated to be the final canvas for expressing
in bold strokes the inexhaustible soul of humanity.

Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a
spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization
of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great
opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age. Thus it
is humans, not machines, who must finally go into space, to wander far
worlds and meet once more the dread unknowns, the dry-mouthed fears of
the old explorers. This was the promise of Apollo, that people from
Earth would one day flow into the ancient river valleys of Mars, down
the gorges three miles deep, out over desolate, wind-torn plains, out
to the ice seas of Europa, and the yellow skies of Titan, out into the
ocean of light, to those worlds within worlds where the star-children
wait.

http://www.memagazine.org/backissues.../urgetoex.html

L. Merk wrote:

Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration Deniers
claim that humanity has no urge to explore. However, they are insular
nobodies attempting to project their own inner death upon humankind.

Go away, troll.

--
Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
I'm trying to forget / But I can't act as if we never met
-- Chante Moore

L. Merk wrote:

Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration Deniers
claim that humanity has no urge to explore. However, they are insular
nobodies attempting to project their own inner death upon humankind.

Hey, at least we can rub two propositions together and
construct an actual logical argument.

Psychologists agree that the drive to explore is a quintessential human
need. The drive to explore exists in healthy humans, and it is a
*significant* drive -- *not* a minor and weak one.
[...]
The Urge to Explore

It brought the first creatures from the sea onto the land; it sent us
to the moon. Where shall we go next?

by Buzz Aldrin and Wyn Wachhorst

Right, that great psychologist, Buzz Aldrin. A true renaissance man,
he must be!

Look, dumb****, you've got this basically irrational space urge.
Despite your sophistic dancing definitions, this urge of yours
is not shared by most people. To widen the net to embrace most
people (including myself) you need to enlarge the definition
of 'exploration' and then pretend the two definitions are the
same. But as I and many others here have pointed out, they aren't
the same, not be a long shot.

I'm sure you really *feel* you're correct here. Well, touchy-feely
illogic has led you down the garden path, stupid. Your attempts
at rationalizing these feelings aren't getting you anything
but derision.

Paul

L. Merk wrote:
Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration Deniers
claim that humanity has no urge to explore. However, they are insular
nobodies attempting to project their own inner death upon humankind.
Psychologists agree that the drive to explore is a quintessential human
need. The drive to explore exists in healthy humans, and it is a
*significant* drive -- *not* a minor and weak one. The assertions of
Deniers notwithstanding, most exploration occurs in whole or part to
satisfy curiosity and the thirst for adventure. Every healthy child
spends most of his/her available time exploring for this reason! Most
adult explorers throughout time -- including many famous ones like
Meriwether Lewis and Marco Polo -- were motivated substantially by
these urges. Like Holocaust Denial, to deny these truths is not
"revisionism" -- it is outright Denial.

The following is a great article from great minds -- real explorers. It
affirms the truths that the bigoted Dietzes and Cloughs of the world so
hatefully deny.

"Living systems cannot remain static; they evolve or decline. They
explore or expire. The inner experience of this drive is curiosity and
awe-the sense of wonder. Exploration, evolution, and
self-transcendence are only different perspectives on the same
process."

Beautiful.

***

I concede that humans have an inate drive to explore, but is a manned
mission to mars the best outlet for this urge. If the desire is to
understand the mysteries of martian history and geology, machines have
a significant advantage, and the building of them will advance robotic
technology in much the same way that the space program and aerospace
advanced the integrated circuit.
Do you hold that such projects as the mars rovers, the hubble and
gallileo do not qualify as exploration?
Projects should be chosen to maximize the scientific return for the
limited amount of funds availiable, and if possible to generate public
interest so that funding will increase.
It is worth remembering that even in ancient times the vast majority of
ships were built for commerce or war and not for exploration. In fact
it was the advances made to the art of shipbuilding from these persuits
that made seafaring exploration possible. With that in mind it might
make more sense to push the envelope in the more mundane areas of
reduceing launch costs, recycling systems, solar power and mass drivers
for propulsion.
If the commertial aspects of space are developed, manned missions
throughout the solar system will be that much more practical and safe.


The Urge to Explore

It brought the first creatures from the sea onto the land; it sent us
to the moon. Where shall we go next?

by Buzz Aldrin and Wyn Wachhorst

Poised on the launch pad and towering 36 stories against the stars, the
Apollo-Saturn rocket seemed unearthly in the wash of floodlight,
glowing icy silver-white, like the moon above it. A half-million
pilgrims had made their way to the mosquitoed marshlands of Florida's
Merritt Island, spending the night on the beach in cars, tents, and
trailers, awaiting the early-morning launch of Apollo 11, the mission
that would put men on the moon. Along the grassy dunes and desolate
moors, onlookers stood in the soft whine of the night wind, the
children of this planet. Life, which crawled out of the sea eons ago,
would now climb out of the white cloud-capped ocean of air, cling to a
barren lunar rock, and then fall back to Earth. For one brief moment,
we would be creatures of the cosmic ocean.

Sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, an aircraft carrier set
on end, the 3,800-ton Apollo-Saturn rocket was loaded with fuel to fill
96 railroad tank cars. With its 15 million individual parts, 92
engines, and 15 miles of wiring, it was more finely tooled than an
exquisite Swiss watch. Gulping 15 tons of fuel a second, cooled by
water cascading at 50,000 gallons a minute, the Saturn V rocket rose
with the force of a 100,000 locomotives burning five million pounds of
fuel in the first 2fi minutes, getting an average of a full five inches
to the gallon.

Apollo 17, the last of the moon flights, rode a pillar of fire that
turned the night sky orange-pink, a false dawn visible for 500 miles.

Twelve astronauts spent 160 man-hours on the moon, traversing 60 miles
afoot and by rover. Sixty scientific experiments were performed on the
surface and 30 more in orbit, while 30,000 photographs captured the
moon in intimate detail.

The moon landing will be seen, a thousand years hence, as the signature
of our century. It stands with the cathedrals and pyramids among those
epic social feats that embody the spirit of an age. They are the dreams
of the child in man.

With all great leaps, there is something gained and something lost. The
price of the telephone was a loss of privacy; the airplane diminished
the sense of travel. The moon of Apollo is a barren, hostile desert, a
scarred wasteland, glinting gunmetal gray in the sun. Gone is the
mysterious, inaccessible moon that made the water silver, the moon that
rhymed with June, croon, and spoon. Yet the lunar landscape has a stark
beauty all its own, a changeless wilderness where rolling, sunny slopes
gleam like virgin snow and thousand-foot gorges border majestic,
three-mile-high mountains-lifeless, windless, looming still and
serene, only the harsh shadows moving ever so slowly with the sun.

The moon, now branded with boot prints, dissected in laboratories, and
littered with NASA's debris, was brought down to Earth, while the Earth
was placed in the heavens. "That bright loveliness in the eternal
cold," floating like a space flower above the horizon of the dead moon,
was the only meaningful object in the lunar sky. From the Sea of
Tranquility, where I could cover with a thumb the site of all human
history, the Earth seemed fragile as a Christmas ornament, drifting
like a lost balloon on the black velvet of space.

Apollo 17 created a false dawn that was visible for 500 miles.

It is at its frontiers that a species experiences the most perturbing
stress. The urge to explore has been the primary force in evolution
since the first water creatures began to reconnoiter the land. The
quest for the larger reality, the need to see the whole-from the
mountaintop or the moon-is the basic imperative of consciousness, the
hallmark of our species. If we insist that the human quest await the
healing of every sore on the body politic, we condemn ourselves to
stagnation. Living systems cannot remain static; they evolve or
decline. They explore or expire. The inner experience of this drive is
curiosity and awe-the sense of wonder. Exploration, evolution, and
self-transcendence are only different perspectives on the same process.

In the end, space exploration is not about limited political,
commercial, and scientific goals, but is rather an epochal turning
point in human evolution, one that will ultimately merge our inner and
outer realities, elevating both to a new plane in the process. Whole
species evolve by probing their environment in the same spirit of play
with which the developing child explores his immediate surroundings.

Perhaps it is more than coincidence that Sigmund Freud and Edwin Hubble
shared the same moment in history, Freud exposing the rational mind as
a tiny clearing in the dark forest of the soul, Hubble revealing that
our galaxy is only one among billions, that the heavens are immense
beyond imagination. To gaze into the night sky and feel the vastness
and passion of creation is to glimpse an equally vast interior. We are
aware of the stars only because we have evolved a corresponding inner
space.

Apollo 11 saw Buzz Aldrin climbing onto the lunar surface, while Neil
Armstrong held the camera.

While most of us have a cerebral grasp of the Copernican model and the
immensity of the cosmos, few of us seem yet to feel it. We retain a
geocentric spirit, mired down in self-absorbed consumerism. The
exploration of outer space will encourage a commensurate expansion of
inner space. We are alive at the dawn of a new Renaissance, a moment
much like the morning of the modern age when most of the globe lay deep
in mystery, when tall masts pierced the skies of burgeoning ports,
luring those of imagination to seek their own destiny, to challenge the
very foundations of man and nature, heaven and earth.

Like the sailing ships that incarnated the aura of the Renaissance, or
the great steam locomotives that embodied the building of America, the
Apollo rocket is an emblem of the human spirit. Apollo was inevitable
from the first gleam in the eye of the hunter-gatherer, from the first
fire, wheel, and furrow; it was latent in the stirrup and the longship,
in the creak of every caravel, the ring of every railroad spike, the
lonesome howl of every lumber camp harmonica. From the moment the first
flint was flaked, space was fated to be the final canvas for expressing
in bold strokes the inexhaustible soul of humanity.

Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a
spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization
of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great
opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age. Thus it
is humans, not machines, who must finally go into space, to wander far
worlds and meet once more the dread unknowns, the dry-mouthed fears of
the old explorers. This was the promise of Apollo, that people from
Earth would one day flow into the ancient river valleys of Mars, down
the gorges three miles deep, out over desolate, wind-torn plains, out
to the ice seas of Europa, and the yellow skies of Titan, out into the
ocean of light, to those worlds within worlds where the star-children
wait.

http://www.memagazine.org/backissues.../urgetoex.html

why is this not working?

UncleHoward wrote:
why is this not working?

I see by the indentation that your post was in reply to mine.
Could you be more specific?

On 8 Jun 2005 19:57:43 -0700, "L. Merk" wrote:

Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration Deniers
claim that humanity has no urge to explore. However, they are insular
nobodies attempting to project their own inner death upon humankind.
Psychologists agree that the drive to explore is a quintessential human
need.

How much exploration did you do last month?

In article .com,
"L. Merk" said:

Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration
Deniers claim that humanity has no urge to explore.

Oh look, now he's got an Uppercase Name for the people who disagree
with him...

However, they are insular nobodies attempting to project their own
inner death upon humankind.

Yes darling, of *course* they are.

-- wds

"Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a
spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization
of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great
opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age.'

Try that argument on a venture capitalist and see how far you get.

Look, people understandably but innaccurately peg me as somehow
anti-space, when what I'm really saying is "If you want to go to space,
come up with an irresistable business model and the privale money to do
will start rolling in. If you can't do that, it won't, and since space
is gosh-darn expensive, you won't be able to get there."

The definition of an irresistable business plan is one that the venture
capitalists can't resist. You can kvetch about NASA making it harder
to come up with one, but that's just part of the challenge. So what
I'm saying is that the fastest way to get to space is to focus your
energy on an irresistabe, short-term business plan.

"Give me 200 billion becuase of your built-in drive to explore" doesn't
seem to be working.

wrote:
"Beyond all the political and economic rationales, spaceflight is a
spiritual quest in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization
of humanity and a rebirth of hope no less profound than the great
opening out of mind and spirit at the dawn of the modern age.'

Try that argument on a venture capitalist and see how far you get.

Look, people understandably but innaccurately peg me as somehow
anti-space, when what I'm really saying is "If you want to go to space,
come up with an irresistable business model and the privale money to do
will start rolling in. If you can't do that, it won't, and since space
is gosh-darn expensive, you won't be able to get there."

The definition of an irresistable business plan is one that the venture
capitalists can't resist. You can kvetch about NASA making it harder
to come up with one, but that's just part of the challenge. So what
I'm saying is that the fastest way to get to space is to focus your
energy on an irresistabe, short-term business plan.

"Give me 200 billion becuase of your built-in drive to explore" doesn't
seem to be working.

Yeah, I think in exploration we're actually looking at a desire to make
money, a lot of the time. Spices, the slave trade...

Incidentally, what-iffers may not be the only people interested in BBC
7 -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/drama/7thdimension.shtml - re-running the
radio serial dramatisation of Stephen Baxter's _Voyage_ (again), next
Mon-Fri. This is the one where a nuclear Mars rocket programme is
launched after President Kennedy opens his damfool mouth during TV
coverage of Apollo 11 and says they should do that.