The Man Who Knew

As he does so frequently, Charles Pierce nails it on the death of Neil Armstrong:

For at least a time, there literally was only one other person in the history of man who knew what Armstrong knew — how that sandy soil feels when you walk on it, the exact places where the shadows fall, the precise geometry of the mountains of the moon. Today, there are only eight of them left, all of them in their 70's. What will happen when the last of them dies? It's very likely that there will not be a living human being who knows what Neil Armstrong knew. It will all be for videotape and digital libraries, for historians and, if we're very lucky, for poets, as well. But there will be nobody alive who actually knows. Not a single one of our fellow humans, anywhere on the Earth. That knowledge will be as dead in the world as Columbus is. One fewer person on the Earth was able to look up at the moon on Sunday night. What he thought when he looked at, night after night, is a perspective lost to all but eight old men. Sooner or later, there will be none of them left. On that day, like today, we should mourn for what we once thought we were. From that day forward, I fear, it is all going to sound like myth and magic, and the tales that the old men told around the ancient fires.

I remember clearly the debates in the '70s about the expense and uselessness of the mannned flights to the moon. "Think of what we could use that money for right here on earth!" Yep, abandoning manned space flight beyond our own orbit bought us a shitload of fossil-fuel subsidies and a Wall Street casino that makes Vegas look like a back-alley numbers racket.

It's no coincidence that the anti-science moronification of America began at the same time we abandoned the moon. Knowledge is what we lost. What we're losing now is the ability to gain any more.