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by dazzawazza
5516 days ago
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I for one would lobby my government to stop this from happening. When I look in to the infinite wonder of space I don't want to see a fucking coke logo slowly going by. To quote from Sagan's The Dragons of Eden where he speculates on the Evolution of Human Intelligence: "A typical example of the occasional resistance mustered by intuitive thinking against the clear conclusions of analytical thinking is D.H. Lawrence's opinion of the nature of the moon: "It's no use telling me it's a dead rock in the sky! I know it's not." Indeed the moon is more than a dead rock in the sky. It is beautiful, it has romantic associations..." |
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But in a strange way mankind needs to move "forward" "whatever" that means. We need to colonize the Solar system, then the galaxy and then spread to the other galaxies.
Governments prefer to fight religious wars by spending orders of magnitude more than the NASA budget, because it is easier to garner votes with war. It appears as if free enterprise is the only force that will take man beyond the gravity well of this planet.
It is natural to dislike crass advertising. But we should remember that even Google is just an advertising company. Without Google we would have been worse off. Yes worse off even without SEO, SEM and so on.
The situation is not black and white. Formula 1 racers are covered in Ads. But we still watch the games and enjoy them too. The moon is our common heritage. We cannot let it turn into an eyesore. But it will some day be mined, some day, there will a number of ads, whether you or I or another person objects to it will hardly matter. What we can do is strike a balance between growth and beauty.
It will no longer be as beautiful as it was. But as a civilization we will be better off. If you consider we are better off today than in the stone age. That itself is subjective. But this world belongs to 6.5 billion people. It is for them to decide quality of life v/s beauty by abstaining from exploitation.
We have taken steps like having sanctuaries, of leaving Antarctica alone and so on... Maybe we will do something similar to the moon as well. Maybe no development will be permitted on the visible side of the moon at all. It does not matter. Maybe no structure larger than the limit of visual acuity will be permitted.
Free enterprise abiding by the laws we give to ourselves has to take us beyond the shackles of this planet. Let us be pragmatic. Every penny that the Space industry will make will take us off this planet... not in hundreds... not in millions... but in billions...