This article appears in the July 26, 2019 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Apollo+50
Mankind’s Future Must Determine Our Present
A Dialogue of Cultures on How to Develop the Population and Productive Workforce for Earth’s Next 50 Years
Being Happy About Each Other’s Creativity Is Necessary If Human Civilization Is to Survive
[Print version of this article]
I think that the significance of today, of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, of the future perspective of having international cooperation in space, is a synonym of what the New Paradigm of international relations among nations must be, if human civilization is to survive. I’m absolutely convinced that we are very, very close to a new epoch of mankind, where the relations among nations, will be like the relations between the members of a family, a good family, a loving relationship, where everybody is happy about the creativity of the other because it serves the common good.
July 22—In advancing this evaluation the day after her participation in the Schiller Institute’s New York City-based international conference, “Apollo + 50: Mankind’s Future Must Determine Our Present,” Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche expressed the way forward, beyond the swamp of geopolitics, to a new future. For the moment, the danger of war, of world financial destabilization, instigated by British Intelligence-led provocations in many areas, and of trans-Atlantic cultural decline, took a back seat. [The full conference video is available here.]
An infectious optimism, a renewed focus on the vastness of the universe and excitement about investigating it, through what NASA has termed Project Artemis, to take human beings to the Moon and Mars, is now being expressed worldwide by new generations not even born when Apollo 11 carried out its successful Moon mission.
This space-driven mission could very well wipe away the toxic effects of the Green ideology presently sweeping Germany, Europe, and other parts of the trans-Atlantic world. Zepp-LaRouche added:
And for me it is the most beautiful refutation of this insane, Green ideology which is all based on the idea that we are in an earthbound system where the resources are limited. And the fact that man can go to the Moon, mine helium-3 for second-generation thermonuclear fusion reactors, just as one example, proves that the incredibly huge universe—the Hubble Space Telescope has now identified that we have, at least, 2 trillion galaxies—is practically unlimited.
Chinese Space Program Lauded
Even the usual attempts to pit the United States against China were momentarily derailed. In a July 19 Fox News interview with former NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second human being to walk on the Moon, Aldrin refused to take the bait when he was told that a recent Harris Poll survey of 3,000 children ages 8-12 in China, the United Kingdom and the United States found that in China today, 56%, when asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” said that they wanted to be astronauts, compared to about the same percentage of American youth saying that they wanted to be YouTube personalities.
Aldrin replied:
I think it’s a tribute to the imagination of the people in China, wanting to do that. And if we’ve lost that, that’s why this “five decades of Apollo” is trying to inspire, [with] what this nation did 50 years ago, and we’ll get caught up again in being able to do things of that inspirational nature.
The previous night at a Washington event, Aldrin had said that America, Russia, China, India, Japan and the European Space Agency should form a “united space alliance” to return to the Moon; use “power—say, nuclear power?” to exploit the resources there; and send human beings to Mars.
Dennis Speed, the Schiller Institute’s conference moderator, highlighted that space exploration has now erected a new standard for determining what must be meant by the term, “human civilization.” He referred specifically to the idea of a new economic platform, as Lyndon LaRouche had proposed decades earlier, that could be established for humanity through space exploration, emphasizing discovery itself as the true purpose as well as basis of mankind’s durable survival:
You’ve just seen the opening moments of a 1988 nationally broadcast television show, The Woman on Mars, conceived and written by the physical economist Lyndon LaRouche.
Thirty-two years after it was originally broadcast, The Woman on Mars is still the most visionary as well as the most feasible approach ever designed to incorporate all of humanity into the single mission for which it was created—to discover the purpose and meaning of life, by reproducing intelligent life throughout the Solar System, the galaxy, and the universal system of galaxies. This is a mission that requires the entirety of humanity.
The more than perhaps two trillion galaxies, along with, in some cases, the trillions of stars within individual galaxies, require people; they require intelligent life. It is this conception of physical economy which is the only true human conception. For most of the time that humanity has been on Earth, it has not been civilized; because a civilized humanity would incorporate all of the members of that humanity into that mission for which it was divined.
The 130 persons in the New York audience included diplomats, science researchers, historians, teachers, and space enthusiasts of all ages, including a few veterans of NASA’s Apollo program itself. The event was live-streamed, with real-time international audiences assembled in several locations in the United States and abroad. Importantly, the New York gathering acknowledged the simultaneous involvement of millions throughout the world in celebrating humanity’s 1969 triumph.
Celebrations Around the World
Spain has a close connection to the commemoration. Fifty years earlier, the now-famous words from astronaut Neil Armstrong that day in 1969—“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—were actually first transmitted to the NASA space center in Fresnedillo, near Madrid, Spain and then relayed to the Mission Control Center in Houston! Spain’s current Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Pedro Duque, is an astronaut himself.
In a July 19 Council of Ministers meeting led by Duque, the astronaut championed the role of the international space program in inspiring young people to become scientists and engineers. “My generation grew up with the space race, and all children wanted to be astronauts. That was my dream when I was barely six years old,” the year of the Moon-walk. Duque was Mission Specialist on the Discovery Shuttle in 1998. Five years later, he returned to space for a ten-day Cervantes Mission on the International Space Station. He trained in Russia at Star City before the mission, and has since promoted joint university studies and double science majors between Russian and Spanish universities.
As part of the July 20, 2019 worldwide commemoration of the first Moon landing, three men—Soyuz Russian Commander Alexander Skvortsov, Italian flight engineer Luca Parmitano, and NASA astronaut-physician Andrew Morgan—blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and docked at the International Space Station. They joined three others already there—Expedition 60 Commander Alexey Ovchinin, and NASA flight engineers Nick Hague and Christina Koch. The six now have a busy summer and fall ahead of them of space walks, handling arrivals and departures of multiple visiting vehicles, and scientific research.
The Schiller Institute conference included presentations from several speakers including:
Andrea Jones, NASA planetary geologist and education specialist, addressed the New York City audience via a live teleconference connection from the National Mall in Washington D.C., where over 150,000 people had visited various NASA exhibits over the previous days, and answered their questions, as summarized below.
Dr. Xing Jijun, Counsellor and Head of the Science and Technology Section for the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in New York, was particularly warmly greeted by the audience. He seconded Jones’ enthusiasm.
Ben Deniston of the LaRouche science team presented an outline for the creation of over 2 billion advanced technology jobs throughout the world in the next fifty years, a design that generated considerable discussion among the participants, both in the questions and answers session immediately following the event’s array of presentations, and in the hotel corridors afterward. Deniston’s presentation also stressed the necessity of incorporating young researchers and scientists into the Artemis effort.
A surprise announcement was also made by Daniel Burke of New Jersey, who informed the assembly that in order to directly campaign, particularly to reach college age and younger generations, speaking out against the idea of “limits to growth” and the “Green New Deal,” he would run as an independent candidate for the office of U.S. Senator in the 2020 elections.
The Extraterrestrial Imperative
Space pioneer Krafft Ehricke (1917-1984), a Schiller Institute Board Member, the creator of the Centaur rocket, and the author of the concept of “the extraterrestrial imperative,” was recalled in his role of both scientist and father by his daughter, Krista Deer. More than nearly anyone else, Ehricke had thought through each step of successive missions to the Moon, and beyond. The work of many, including Lyndon LaRouche’s 1988 The Woman on Mars, was extensively influenced by Ehricke.
Krafft Ehricke stated it thus:
The Extraterrestrial Imperative is a driving force in the natural growth of terrestrial life beyond its planetary limits. As such, it is an integral part of the obviously expansionistic and growth-oriented pattern of life’s evolution. This drive caused life to grow from infinitesimal beginnings into a force that encompasses and transforms an entire planet through its biosphere. More basically, the Extraterrestrial Imperative expresses a “first message,” a primordial imperative, bred into the very essence of the universe, driving the evolution of matter from simplest forms (elementary particles) to highly complex structures (e.g., the intelligent brain). . . .
The Extraterrestrial Imperative is of concrete significance to us. . . .
The evolutionary road on this planet is paved with many crises. In fact, every major advance was preceded by, triggered by, and made possible by crisis. However, not every crisis led to an advance. The penalty of failing the test of crisis is death.
The New York City conference also heard an excerpt from Ehricke’s last speech, given in 1984 only weeks before he died. Ehricke, like LaRouche, enjoyed the practice of “axiom busting.” He challenged the assertion, weeks before his death, of the unquestioned authority of Darwinian evolution as a model for study by offering the photosynthetic revolution as the alternative precedent for the human race.
In drawing the meeting to a conclusion, moderator Dennis Speed remarked:
Let me point out that seven years from now this country will be 250 years old. The American Revolution took place over seven years, in the period 1776-1783. The past 50 years have not shown America in its best light. It’s clear to those of us who were around at the time that man walked on the Moon, that we have lost tremendous ground, and lost tremendous self-respect.
Were a revolution to be made, now, using the revolutionary idea of a Moon-Mars mission and the ideas that you’ve heard today, and were that revolution to be carried the same way that it was in 1776 by a brigade of youth such as the Marquis de Lafayette, who was about 18 years old; Alexander Hamilton who was about 19 years old; John Lawrence who was about 27 years old; and most of the other people that actually fought the Revolution—James Monroe, who was 25, or John Jay, and so on—if that’s what we do now, then, humanity will join the people of the United States, in working together with the United States to cause the United States to remember itself, and act accordingly as it was founded and as it truly is.
Respecting the Creativity of the Other
In her concluding remarks, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said:
Parts of the world are in a New Paradigm: 126 countries have joined the Belt and Road Initiative. Even 22 of the 28 European Union countries are cooperating with the Belt and Road Initiative. I am absolutely convinced that we have to go away from geopolitics. . . .
I think that the significance of today, of the Apollo landing celebration, of the future perspective of having international cooperation in space, is a synonym of what the New Paradigm of international relations among nations must be, if human civilization is to survive. . . .
Benjamin Franklin modeled his moral theory on Confucianism. I think there was a long history of collaboration between Americans and China during the time of Sun Yat-sen and the time of President Abraham Lincoln. We should not be afraid of the other culture, but study the beauty of Chinese culture, of Indian culture, of Russian traditions. We must make a cultural Renaissance where each of us has the idea that the question of aesthetical education is not some abstract thing for students, but it starts with us.
The issue of Space and the extraterrestrial imperative, of having the idea that each of us as a human being has to have a daily improvement, so that we better a human being every day. There is nothing which stops us from creating a beautiful, new epoch of civilization, where we put the danger of war, poverty, and disease, all behind us, because we will be on a path of problem-solving and respecting the creativity of each nation and each other individual on this planet. That will be the kind of future Lyndon LaRouche and Krafft Ehricke were absolutely committed to. [applause]
