Brian Monteith: Mankind still making giant leaps 40 years on

Published on Friday 24 July 2009 09:43

WHERE did the last 40 years go? As I sat watching various programmes this week telling us of man's journey to put those first footsteps on the moon, I could not but help think how so much had happened since then and yet it only seems like yesterday.

As a young Edinburgh kid that read my Look & Learn under the covers with a torch and played with my toy rocket that would catapult 50 feet into the Queen's Park's stratosphere, I was transfixed with all things regarding space travel. The Sixties was the age of space exploration that culturally fed music (Telstar, anyone?), television (Fireball XL5, Dr Who), the movies (2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes), and introduced us to TV personalities James Burke and Patrick Moore. Airfix kits of the Saturn rocket and the Lunar Module were all the rage.

It was also the time of the space race between two super powers that underscored the ever-present fear of a nuclear holocaust and the fight for dominance between Western Capitalism and Eastern Communism.

With Apollo 11 and the moonwalk, I got to stay up all night until Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon at 3:56am, British time.

A debate was sparked off about the worth of man's journey to the moon – or more accurately, there was a debate in the West about the value of the USA investing billions of dollars in the NASA mission (there was no such debate in the Soviet Union). It had all seemed such a good idea when John F Kennedy famously said "We choose to go to the Moon – not because it is easy but because it is hard" in Houston in 1962.

The result of this debate was the birth of the environmental movement on the back of population pessimism – the belief that the world was hurtling towards its own certain end by a growth in mouths that could never be fed while those that lived in the developed world were parasitically living on their backs.

One seminal work that contributed to such gloom was The Population Bomb, written by Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1968 forecasting that millions of Americans would face starvation by the Eighties. There were many more like it. The end was nigh and going to the moon was futile. The answer, these doomsayers told us, was for greater state control, from recycling everything – to limiting the children we could have.

Now, 40 years on, we can see just how wrong these people have been. Relative and absolute wealth is actually spreading across the world, populations continue to grow – and more people are being fed and living healthier, better lives than ever before. This happened because the globalisation of trade that followed the moral and practical defeat of Eastern Communism brought a dramatic increase in per capita food production, higher economic growth and a consequent fall in malnutrition.

In 1900, the global average age expectancy was only 30 – by 2009 it had reached 67. Of course, there are still many people out there, many doomsayers that tell us the end is nigh. They are from the same mould as the Ehrlichs, telling us we need more controls, more Big Government, if not World Government, telling us what to do. And yet it is the incentive of bettering ourselves, our families and our communities – the invisible hand that Adam Smith wrote about – that helps us serve those we do not know or are aware exist.

It is in helping the poorest countries establish property rights and have rules that allow them to trade fairly without developed countries dumping subsidised produce on the market that will save our shared environment and its people from some cataclysm of our own making.

Man is now planning to go to Mars – and to many it will still seem all so futile. To me it is all part of our human drive to discover the unknown. Although we forget so much that we know already, without that search we will not make the technical advances that have in the past allowed us to defeat the predictions of the doomsayers.

Ewan's sacrifice

The public support in driving rain for the funeral of firefighter Ewan Williamson shows a healthy level of respect for the sacrifice he made. In an age when we are constantly berated for being greedy, selfish, conceited and caring for no-one but ourselves, it was refreshing to see so many people who did not know him, but felt a debt of honour to his memory, turn out and pay tribute to this brave man.

There are many more Ewan Williamsons in public service that seek to protect us and we would all be worse off if such community spirit was to be lost. Public leaders should find ways to encourage such public spirit without requiring such sacrifices to remind us of it.