Space Education and Strategic Applications Journal
thought by means of language ( some 30,000 years ago as evidenced by complex rock art ); becoming cognizant of not being controlled by nature but of our own ability to control it ( through domestication of animals and plants , some 9,000 – 12,000 years ago ); and being cognisant of our ability to destroy our planet ( first deployment of an atomic bomb , 1945 ). 53
“ Having humans leaving this planet and stepping onto Moon ,” Spanneman continues , “ ranks among these key developments .” 54
Even more , throughout our evolution , we have compounded our learning across cultures and centuries , developing and perfecting tools as they are distributed through diverse societies . 55 We know this because of the cultural artifacts we have found around the globe . Take , for example , the Ishango bone , a 20,000-year-old baboon fibula recovered in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo . 56 Originally believed to be just a tally stick , its three columns of deliberate marks running its length are now thought to indicate an understanding of various mathematical relationships and perhaps “ the first tool upon which some logic reasoning seems to have been done .” 57 Humans would not have made it to be Moon without math .
Similarly , while little is known about the first attempts to make glass , it is generally believed that glassmaking was discovered 4,000 years ago , or more , in Mesopotamia . 58 Glass is not only used in arts but also lenses and optics . It is crucial for observational astronomy , not to mention windows and spacesuit helmets . In short , spaceflight , whether originating in the United States , Russia , China , Japan or any other one of the handful of nations that are truly spacefaring , would not have occurred without the earliest innovations of our common ancestors , and the curious intellect of stargazers with names like Galileo , Copernicus , Ibn al-Haytham . Friedrich George Wilhelm Struve and countless others whose names have been forgotten by time .
Surely , every landing site on the Moon — soft or otherwise — is a memorial to centuries of human perseverance and ingenuity . They are unique expressions of the cumulative nature of science
53 Id . 54 Id .
55 The author would like to thank Dr . Marlene Losier for sharing her as yet unpublished research on heritage segmentation and human activity on the Moon . Both of the examples mentioned in the text originated with her analysis . The results of her work will be available through the website forallmoonkind . org in 2021 .
56 Ross Pomeroy , Is the 20,000-Year-Old Ishango Bone the Earliest Evidence of Logical Reasoning ?, RealClearScience ( Nov . 23 , 2015 ), https :// www . realclearscience . com / blog / 2015 / 11 / the _ earli est _ evidence _ of _ logical _ reasoning . html
57 Id ., quoting Vladimir Pletser of the European Space Research and Technology Centre . 58 History of Glass , http :// www . historyofglass . com /
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