One space mission captured the world’s attention like no other, the mission of Apollo 13. Apollo 13 is a story of near-catastrophic technological failure threatening all life on board, and of miraculous escape with one amp of power to spare. It is the cautionary tale of our age.
Just think about it. The Saturn V rockets represented human ingenuity at its technological, gas-guzzling, brute-force best. Trusting their lives to that technology, the Apollo astronauts represent us, as we roar into the future towards our goal. Their goal, of course, was the moon, but even that goal was symbolic of greater things: human beings were taking the first steps towards the colonization of space. Nothing it seemed could stop us: and so we seem to believe today, as we march on blithely up the exponential curve of economic growth, discarding stage after stage of our Saturn V rocket (i.e. our world’s resources) in the faith that we’ll splash down safely at some point in the future.
Today, however, even the most blinkered optimist has reason to harbor subconscious doubts about the wisdom of our untenable and unsustainable ecological path. The remarkable true story and lessons of Apollo 13 writes those doubts large. Something goes wrong. Significantly, it’s the oxygen supply—a metaphor for the Earth’s atmosphere—which has been sabotaged by human error. The astronauts are suddenly faced with a desperate race against time and diminishing resources to get safely home. The higher goal—the moon (or the techno-nirvana goal of a world of 200-odd fully-developed countries)—is abandoned, and the use of resources (the ship’s power supply) is shut down to a bare minimum, just as we fear we might have to do back here on Earth in the in the coming decades and beyond. The results are depressing: without power, the astronauts’ world gets extremely cold, and there’s still no guarantee of a safe return in exchange.
The Apollo 13 astronaut’s unforgiving reality is combined with hope upon hope that a technological solution will be their ticket out of the crippled ship. As they wait for “a fix from Houston” they tell of a cassette-player that hangs in zero-gravity as the sound of the music playing slowly runs down as its batteries die. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide content within the ship’s atmosphere continues to rise to dangerous levels. Their biggest fear is that the heat-shields will fail them upon reentry, causing the ship to become untenably hot, making it unable for them to survive—global warming, anyone?
The underlying take away of Apollo 13, given this environmental reading, might be a dangerously optimistic one–being that human ingenuity will rescue us from our predicament of continuous ecological “human errors”. The experience of Apollo 13 shows that the know-how of the NASA staff at Houston safely pulls the mission through. We are all like the astronauts in the lunar module hoping that human ingenuity will similarly save us from disaster back here on earth.
The happy ending story of Apollo 13 is that there is a definite time-limit to a crisis (in this case, a few days), and at the end of it, if all goes miraculously well, you can sit back and relax in safety and comfort—and even carry on as before. And this, surely, is what a lot of people hope will happen with the global environment and economy. With a bit of temporary sacrifice, we’ll fix everything up, and then we can get back to business as usual.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily work like that. Today’s environmental problems along with our rapacious depletion of the planet’s resources will be humanity’s challenge for centuries to come (if we should be so lucky to last that long), and there’s no safe splash-down at the end. Life in the future might be a lot more like huddling together in the cold lunar-module, realizing we squandered our only way home.
Smart Green 2020 