Pie in the sky

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, it was a Copernican moment in a way. The keepers of the universe-on-paper, the universe of cosmological theory, had long ago banished the earth from its privileged position at the center of it all. The universe-as-lived, however, remained unavoidably Ptolemaic. For our ordinary comings and goings, and consequently for the liberal arts and social sciences, the earth has been the end-all and be-all.

But the moon landing, which fulfilled the project defined by Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon a little more than a century after he first penned it, expanded our realm of influence by a sphere. The center of gravity of human life shifted outward, and we began to think of ourselves as spacefaring.

Lately, we have begun to think of the moon—which might as well have been made of green cheese, for all we knew or cared—as a real economic resource.

As my brother reminds me, that mining the moon will ever prove worthwhile is still a long shot. But the mere fact that it has been proposed signals a sea change in our thinking.