Ok, so here we are. I'm writing, and hopefully you are reading. A subject that has been on my mind often of late is frontier. Western culture has been founded on the establishment of a frontier, a centered effort to explore and cultivate said frontier, and the ensuing enterprise of civilizing it. Core to this endeavor has been the knowledge that the world was created to explore. The leaders in this collective endeavor have done so by holding in their consciousness, perhaps unaware, the original mandate of mankind found in the Creation Story of Genesis. God says to Adam; the first man, the first being capable of the profound recognition of the passage of time; to have dominion over the earth. This mandate is seated deep within the Mythos of Being, and lies at the root of Western tradition. Natural law is constructed around the protection of an individual's right to fulfill this mandate in their own life. Rights are essentially the tools one must possess that they may have dominion over their world. They don't ensure that the individual will front the burden of their fulfillment, they merely provide him as Thomas Jefferson said, with "The pursuit" thereof.
Now if you are new to biblical literature, I highly recommend you read the first 11 or so chapters in Genesis. You can easily read it in a week, but it contains the roots of every tradition from the 7 day week to the institution of non-essential clothing. If nothing else, its interesing to note that these first few chapters were written by an estimated minimum of 4 different authors over a time period of a thousand years or so. Certainly the preservation of so elegant a narrative in an age when written language was incredibly rare is nothing short of awe inspiring, regardless of modern day interpetations of Genesis. For certain, the fact that ideas no less than 10,000 years old are still debated in the "modern" day is something to consider. Whatever the mandate in Genesis is, it's deeper and more ancient than any known civilization, and far more meaningful than any of our "modern" ideas about the purpose of life.
Whew! If you're still with me, how does this all relate to frontier? Well, you may find it interesting that while Apollo 11 was the most viewed event by relative population in all history, Apollo 12 was removed from the air due to low viewership. The reason for this is very simple. The Moon was the greatest and most formidible physical frontier of all. Since time immemorial, mankind has looked up at the moon as a timeless symbol of his place in the universe. Namely that he was a being forever staring at the moon from earth. yet when the first views from the moon looking back at the earth were broadcast, that leap in mankind's evolution would forever be in the past. Mankind was now, forever, a being of the heavens and the earth, not just the earth. The heavens above were no longer heavens at all, rather they were merely empty space to be crossed. Humans, who forever had looked up, and seen gods in the stars, now looked up, and saw not gods, but their own children, other humans.
Words fail at describing the scale of the "giant leap" romanticized by Armstrong: One Small Step? If in metaphor the moon now only lay one small step away, to what may the hearts of man turn to as the New Frontier? Perhaps it is too soon to say. Perhaps we may never know. Perhaps the anals of our own history will remember the moon landing as the greatest achievement of our species, but this leaves the question, was this truly a Human achievement? Did all partake in the success of this venture? Or rather was this the ultimate triumph of one relatively small faction of humans, who succeeded where so many others had, and did, and would continue, to fail? Did the moonshot begin in 1962? Or rather did it find its true beginning centuries, even millenia before?
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