A few entries ago I mentioned the Ron Howard documentary about the Apollo missions, “In the Shadow of the Moon”. I saw it again today, and was again impressed. This time, I went with a date, a woman who has some technical background – she used to be a system administrator on a DEC-20. (Twenty-five years ago, that was a “mainframe computer” – enough racked electronics to fill a small living room with about as much power as one of the keys on my Macintosh: How times do change.) She has spent most of the last fifteen years or so being a wife and mother, and even though she approves of the space program and is moderately interested in it, she never kept up on the details.

    She was enthralled with the movie, but at the end asked me with a slightly puzzled expression, “Why did we go? What did we do it for?” Ben Franklin had been asked much the same question when he witnessed the ascent of an early man-carrying Mongolfier balloon during his diplomatic travels in France, in the very early days of aerospace, and I modified his response: I said “Why did you have a baby?” She had an answer: “To procreate … to go on … so that the human race would continue to exist …”, but she still looked puzzled. I nodded, and said “Think of the possibilities”, to which she replied “But what did we accomplish? All we did was just that …” My answer was, “Ask again in another billion years.”

    I think she got it. I wish more people did.