(Web Desk) - A staunch critic of the moon missions in the Apollo era, Martin Luther King’s words and the Civil Rights movement’s criticism of where the US government put its resources still carry weight.
It wasn’t that Martin Luther King was anti-science — quite the opposite. While a man of God, King preached about the wonder that came with scientific progress.
And during the height of the Civil Rights movement, there were plenty of advances to wonder at: massive leaps forward in computing, the advent of lasers and the development of organ transplants all took place in the 1960s, to name just a few.
But all of those paled before the greatest scientific achievements of that decade: the invention of space travel.
In 1961, the first man left Earth. Less than 10 years later, another stood atop the moon.
King was not immune to the awe that came with studying and exploring the cosmos.
"[Notice] the Sun which scientists tell us is the center of the solar system," he said in one sermon.
"Our Earth revolves around this cosmic ball of fire once each year, traveling 584,000,000 miles in that year at the rate of 66,700 miles per hour or 1,600,000 miles per day.
This means that this time tomorrow we will be 1,600,000 miles from where we are at this hundredth of a second.
Look at that Sun again. It may look rather near. But it is 93,000,000 miles from the Earth.
In six months from now we will be on the other side of the Sun — 93,000,000 miles beyond it — and in a year from now we will have swung completely around it and back to where we are right now."
But King was also skeptical that mankind was able to take larger lessons away from scientific discoveries, particularly by spending the equivalent of a quarter of a trillion dollars in today’s money while millions went hungry.
"There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance," he said during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964.
"We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”
Now, as humans are once more spending billions of dollars to go to the moon — and, eventually, Mars — it’s worth reflecting on the sentiments King expressed while testifying before Congress.
"Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, and from which none presently can benefit, while the densely populated slums are allocated minuscule appropriations.
With the continuation of these strange values in a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon and with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slum on earth with their intensified congestion, decay, and turbulence."