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Remember Man's trip to the Moon?

If you do not remember it directly, what do you recall reading, seeing, or being told about "Going to the Moon?"

Have your grandparents or your parents ever told you about what it was like to "watch" Neil Armstrong take that One Small Step, Live?

Or what it "felt" like? From 240,000 miles away?.

For most of those old enough to recall it, or mature enough to have been thoughtfully introspective about it – it was the first "Moment" of Species Unity, of Species Transformation.

Tom Hanks brilliantly realizes how important this step of going to the Moon was for mankind. He also recognizes that the generation that fought WWII was also the one that helped build the way to the nearest neighbor in space.

If Nixon had not been elected, if Kennedy had not been assassinated, if Kennedy had pulled the troops out of Vietnam , if the Republicans and many Democrats had not been bed with the military industrial complex, and the powerful financial draw of the cold war which your parents and you when younger financed to line rich pockets even richer. . . a lot of "Ifs"
We might have a Clarke - Kubrick orbiting rotating wheel in space above us rotating for artificial gravity and serving as a stepping stone itself to the Moon, to Mars, to the Belt.

Alas. But "Going To The Moon . . ."

No other event in human history engaged such a wide spread number of watchers and listeners across the planet.

It was that kind of moment. It was a moment of "Promise," for all mankind.

The Promise? It was the sense of "opening" a world much larger than the New World. It was the opening of Travel to Other Worlds, into "Space".

Then what happened? Many think we broke our promise. But it was only a promise to ourselves.

What Important Discovery did we make when we went to the Moon?

• We learned that the Moon ‘rung’ like a bell; that it had no molten core.
• We learned the Moon and Earth's crust have the same constituents
• We learned the Moon was a lifeless, harsh, empty place.
• We learned the Moon was of Earth, splashed into space in a vast collision.

It took many years to understand enough to figure out the "splash thing," but if theory had been ready, the evidence on the Moon would have borne it out immediately.

Often, the most important discoveries aren't even recognized when they happen. . .they are subtle things . . . things that get “by” most people.

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT DISCOVERY MANKIND MADE ON THE MOON!

Astronaut Pete Conrad (photographed by crew mate Alan Bean) inspects Surveyor 3's camera assembly. Surveyor 3 landed on the moon on April 20, 1967, at 2.94 deg S, 23.34 deg W in Oceanus Procellarum. On Nov. 12, 1969, Conrad and Bean piloted the Apollo 12 Lunar Module (in the distance, in the background) to a landing 156 m (512 ft) away.

WHAT IS 'SIGNIFICANT'? Pete Conrad

The late American Astronaut, Pete Conrad (1930--1999), in a "look-back" in 1991 said, "I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the whole...Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said [anything] about it."

Charles P. Conrad, Jr. was referring to the Surveyor 3, "Stowaway," the Streptococcus mitis, a space traveler who went from the Earth to Moon, stayed on the moon for a couple of years, and then came back alive. All without a space suit!

Pete Conrad and Alan Bean brought the living bacteria back to Earth. And NASA laboratories verified these few unprotected space travelers were fine, alive and well! This living entity was then the only known survivor of unprotected space travel, "living" on the Moon, with nothing to eat or drink for roughly 940 days. Conrad’s statement, make no mistake, places Mr. Conrad in that category of brilliant perceptive humans with the "right stuff" to be an American Astronaut, and much more. Mr. Conrad was right.

ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/1999/99-080.txt
ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/1999/99-079.txt

The Surveyor probes were the first U.S. spacecraft to land safely on the Moon. In November, 1969, the Surveyor 3 spacecraft's microorganisms were recovered from inside its camera that was brought back to Earth under sterile conditions by the Apollo 12 crew.
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http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/EXLibrary/docs/ApolloCat/Part1/Surv3.htm

This was the outline of the mission plan and was inpart a bit of the conclusion after the debriefing.

The bacterial traveler's story was “glossed over.” None associated with the space program wanted to dwell on this ‘contamination’ problem. And the hitchhiking bacteria legend would not become a bulwark of embedded knowledge in the "public consciousness."

It was not ignored so much, as quietly "downplayed" by the scientific community. At the time, many thought it was a "contamination" problem; something we humans needed to address in our search for life on the other planets of the Solar System. Indeed! Contamination with the ‘filth’ of Earth was a problem to be addressed.

There was, though, something subtly more important about that bacterial hitchhike to the Moon and it’s return to Earth.

For some scientists, it was like, "We shouldn't make a big thing out of this because it conflicts, potentially, with a number of uh, . . . "social" . . . issues."

It also conflicts with many scientific “pre-dispositions,” that is, with the un-stated assumptions within the personal belief systems of practicing scientists.

To be fair, it must be said "not all" scientists or adult thinkers have this unstated biasing in their approach to their scientific work. Some of these outstanding scientific minds have made gigantic intuitive leaps when others would be afraid to extrapolate and voice the obvious. These serious adult minds, these scientists, then set about doing the "science" to change the whole world of entrenched paradigms around them. One primate tells another primate tells another primate and pretty soon word gets around....

Eventually, we get to asking obvious things like, is this tough little weed/bug a rare bacteria? Nope. It is pretty much an ordinary bacteria, a common bacteria, one you probably have in your mouth, nose, and throat right now. Not especially, tough?

22 February 2002 In an article published in Science, a team of scientists have shown that common microorganisms including E.coli survive and replicate at extremely high pressures, equivalent to depths of 50 km in the Earth's crust or under an hypothetical ocean 170km deep. "Microbial Activity at Gigapascal Pressures" p 1514-1516 v 295, Science, 22 Feb 2002.

We already knew how tough some of them were, making the ride in vacuum, living for 940 days on nothing, and different bacteria are tough in different ways.

There is one tough-guy bacteria that really has characteristics worth noting. This is the one that “contaminates” the water coolant inside nuclear reactors: Deinococcus radiodurans This fellow’s DNA has the ability to recognize damage caused to it by radiation, and to fix it .In an evolutionary sense, durable abilities usually do not evolve or persist if there is not a useful purpose for them. Deinococcus radiodurans has the remarkable capacity to withstand massive space-scale doses of over 1.5 million rads of radiation--3,000 times the dose that would kill a human in space – and yet happily reproduces inside a reactor.

The idea of mutation seems a little far fetched with respect to D. radiodurans.

What possible reason would the bacteria have for being able to repair radiation damage either from a nuclear reactor, or from other harsh environments?

Deinococcus radiodurans

This is what the really tough ones look like.

In the next few xomba Science xombytes, I will further delve into why the bacteria hitchhiker, Streptococcus mitis, (Not this tough-guy to the right)going to the moon and back was Pete Conrad's idea of a significant discovery, and why others agree.

You have it all figured out, don't you?

ALL IMAGES COURTESY NASA