A personal survey carried out on people in the street as to “what has been mankind’s greatest achievement in the 20th century” has given me a vast consensus on: “ The Moon landing”. And not because of any application, however useful, arisen from the Apollo or indeed from any other space programme. Rather, because space makes people dream, in general, and all the more so when it yields the possibility of seeing men and women like us on extraterrestrial bodies, such as the Moon yesterday and Mars tomorrow.
Towards society as a whole, the impact of such a fundamental exploratory quest is only matched by the search for extraterrestrial life and by the exploration and understanding of our Universe. These two activities are being now vigorously pursued in space, and they both have a chance of profoundly influencing our society. The discovery of present or past life forms on Mars, for example, or of convincing pre-biotic material in a comet, would have an impact comparable to Columbus finding a form of intelligent life in the “West Indies”, which clearly Adam and Eve could not have reached.
On the other hand, we have now been looking at our Universe from space for the last forty years. The depth and breadth of the information reaped in by our telescopes at all wavelengths has given society a richer and more profound knowledge than 400 years of ground-based observations, from Galileo till today. Those four centuries have, in turn, given mankind an infinitely better view of the cosmos than the previous 4,000 years of naked-eye astronomy, from the Caldeans to Copernicus. Thus, space science stands as a testimony to society of the unstoppable acceleration of scientific, rational thought.
Prof.
Giovanni
Fabrizio
Bignami
Director
CESR Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements
http://www.cesr.fr
Professional Category:
Physical Sciences
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