If I had a TARDIS, I'd...

Somebody really needs to get their act together and invent time travel.

No, really. In between doing the job search thing and getting a few other things done today, I got to thinking about how cool it would be to be able to hop around in time and witness past events. And then I got to thinking about it some more and soon realized that most of the things I want to go back and see aren't discrete historical events - moments in history, or even the things you traditionally find in the history books. Instead, they are processes, many of them, events that happened over a period of time and that have had an impact, but not necessarily on war, politics, and economics - all those drivers of academic history.

I shouldn't really be surprised by that. I chose to major in anthropology rather than history, and I'm really fascinated with how people get along and how they do things, individually and in groups. As I think I've mentioned here recently, process is a big thing for me. There are a few more traditionally historical things that I'd like to go back and see about, but there were also some very pop-culture things that turned up on the quick list of ten that I drew up. I imagine that if I took more time, there would be a list that's a lot longer than this, but these are the 10 that came immediately to mind, starting with the less traditionally historical entries:

1) Opening day at Disneyland.

Not the famously disastrous "Press Preview" day on July 17, 1955, but the next day, the real opening, when people started lining up at something like 2 a.m. to get in to see Disney's newest production. I've always loved Disneyland (for all that I was chided once for that love and told that liking Disneyland is not "sophisticated"), and it would be so cool to see what it was like at the beginning, before it expanded and turned into the icon that it is today.

2) A Beatles concert.

Preferably the one that appears in the movie "Let It Be", the final time all four Beatles performed live in public together. That was on January 30, 1969, on the roof of the headquarters of Apple Records. But any Beatles concert would do, because it just isn't right that I never got to see The Beatles perform live.

3) The recording sessions for "Pet Sounds".

I've been watching some documentary footage recently of the sessions for this Beach Boys album, considered by many to be one of, if not the, greatest pop album ever made. Fascinating. I don't think all those people who call Brian Wilson a genius are just engaging in hyperbole. Clearly, Wilson hears things that the rest of the world doesn't, and that he managed to get those successfully on record is miraculous (especially since he is deaf in one ear), and I'd love to be able to witness that genius at work. Because they were done the same year, I'd like to also include in this the "Good Vibrations" sessions, which were a continuation of Wilson's experimentation on "Pet Sounds".

And now, on to the more historical events that appear on the list:

4) Mission control during the flight of Apollo 11.

Yeah, I'm a space geek. I proved that a couple of weeks ago when I visited the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian, and burst into tears several times at the things I saw there there. I've seen some film of operations in mission control at Johnson Space Center in Houston during that mission, and I would love to have the experience of seeing that first moon landing from where the flight was being directed.

5) A meeting of England's Queen Elizabeth I with her Privy Council.

Elizabeth I must have been one hell of a woman, running a country at a time and place in history where women were just not expected to do that sort of thing. I'd love to see how she handled the responsibility - and the men who had to acquiesce to her as queen.

6) One of Savonarola's sermons around the time he came to power as the de facto dictator of Florence in the mid-1490s.

I'm really curious about how that ugly little monk (sorry, I've seen paintings, and if they are at all accurate, the poor man was one of the least attractive individuals who ever lived) was able to impose his will on the home of the Renaissance for a bit over two years after delivering a series of fire-and-brimstone, prophecy-laden sermons to the population of the city. Hell, even Botticelli burned some of his artworks in Savonarola's "bonfires of the vanities" after hearing his sermons. Michelangelo, thank goodness, wasn't as swayed by the monk's admonitions. Savonarola finally overstepped in his ambitions when he started preaching reform. Pope Alexander VI excommunicated Savonarola and put Florence under an interdict as long as they harbored him. That was bad news for Savonarola, since instead of just kicking him out of town, Florence had him and two of his fellow monks burned at the stake. The thing I'm interested in, in all this, is how Savonarola managed to work his way into power in the first place.

7) Michelangelo painting the Sistine ceiling.

Just about the time that Savonarola was coming to power in Florence, Michelangelo left his home city for Rome. He returned to Florence to carve his David after having sculpted the his Pieta that stands today in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Once again in Rome, summoned by Pope Julius II to carve the Pope's tomb, Michelangelo found himself instead assigned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He resisted, insisting that he was a sculptor and not a painter. But those were the days when you really didn't say no to the Pope, and over four years, from 1508 to 1512, Michelangelo created one of his most cherished masterpieces. Of course, he made things more difficult on himself by designing a much more ambitious series of frescoes than the pope had asked for, but that was Michelangelo for you. I would love to be able to witness the process that resulted in such beauty.

8) The building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Well, yeah. It's the Great Pyramid. Every once in a while, someone says that they've figured out how the Egyptians lifted all those heavy, heavy blocks to build that pyramid, but I would like to see for myself exactly how it was done. Because, you know, I don't buy the story that it was aliens.

9) Life in what is now the US southwest during the time when the Pueblo peoples were building and living in those giant apartment buildings they created.

There's more to it than just the cliff dwellings such as those at Mesa Verde in what is now Colorado and freestanding apartment buildings like Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico. There were the roads that supported a wide trade and indications that they traded even outside the region and into Mexico, over a thousand miles away. This was a complicated culture, and I would love to see how those communities were built and sustained in such a difficult environment.

10) The United States Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

I get tired sometimes of hearing politicians talking about the original intent of the framers of the US Constitution. I would like to see for myself exactly what was said in those meetings, and in the after-meetings where the framers probably said what they were really thinking. But, again, I need a time machine to do that.

The truth is, if I made this list again tomorrow, or had made it yesterday, it would be different than this list. Probably not completely different, because at least a few of the entries are non-negotiable, at least today. No, I'm not telling which ones. And as I said at the beginning of this, if I had taken more time to think about it, this list would probably be a lot longer.

The thing I'd like to know now is, if you made a list like this, what events would you put on it? Why would you choose those events? Please, if you feel so inclined, drop a comment about what your list would include. Or, if you use this question as a prompt for a blog post of your own, please drop a comment and link so that I can read it.

Another anniversary: the return of Apollo 11

Saturday, I wrote about it being the 44th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing. That day 44 years ago is something that most people who were alive and conscious of world events at the time remember.

But today is the anniversary of a day in the US space program that is at least as important but which rarely gets recognized. It is the 44th anniversary, today, of the return of the crew of Apollo 11 from the Moon, and it is the fulfillment of the second part of the goal set by John Kennedy of sending men to the Moon and returning them safely. Kennedy also said on the day in 1962 that he set this goal that we, as a society, chose to do that not because it was easy, but because it was difficult.



And it was difficult, and was done with, it is said, significantly less computing power than is contained in the low-end laptop I'm writing this on right now. The landing was, of course, important. But so many things could have gone wrong to strand the astronauts on the moon, or strand them orbiting the moon, or send them careening out into the solar system with no way to get back...and those are only a few of the things that could have gone wrong.

So, I think it is important to also mark the day that Apollo 11 and its astronauts made it back home safely.

Not that there wasn't at least one hiccup in the landing procedure. When the command module splashed down into the Pacific Ocean, it landed upside down and stayed that way until the astronauts activated flotation devices that righted it. I suspect that at least a few folks at NASA flashed back to the splashdown in July of 1961 of Liberty Bell 7 after a suborbital flight, part of the Mercury program, when Gus Grissom nearly drowned after the capsule's hatch blew unexpectedly, sending the capsule to the bottom of the ocean and nearly drowning Grissom. But, all was well and the three astronauts were picked up and deposited on the ship that had come to meet them.

Even that was not the end of the mission, however. Once on the ship, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were decontaminated and put in quarantine for three weeks just in case they had brought any bad bugs back from the moon. Still, this is a day to remember. We not only sent men to the moon, we managed to bring them back alive and in one piece each.

It's Moon Day...

While I've been away from blogging, there have been a bunch (that's a technical term) of things I've wanted to blog about. Most of them are not happy topics, but sometimes it is necessary to think and write about them. But before I wade back into all of that, I really feel the need to point out that today is the 44th anniversary of possibly the best thing humans have ever done.

Forty-four years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on and then later in the day walked on the Moon to become the first humans to set foot on a celestial body other than the Earth. Maybe you had to be there to witness the landing to really understand how big a deal it was. And billions of us did witness it, via a television broadcast of the event, which in itself was a very big deal at a time when we weren't used to instant broadcasts from remote locations as a daily occurrence. The pictures from the Moon that day were a bit murky - resolution was kind of low and contrast was high - but, still, we got to see the "giant leap for mankind" in the time it took to relay the pictures from the Moon to a satellite dish in Australia and then around the world.

It was pretty damn cool.

I've written here before about watching the landing and the Moon walk with my father, who was thrilled beyond words about the whole thing, so I won't go over that ground here again right now.

What I want to address is the amount of imagination that it took to put together the program that sent Armstrong, Aldrin and ten other men (and only men) to walk on the Moon - and, lest we forget, a number of others who orbited but did not set foot on the Moon. Yes, it took a lot of money to go to the moon. But it took even more imagination. The first moon landing took place a little short of twelve years before the Russians put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in orbit around the earth on October 4, 1957 and a little over 8 years after Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space (and to orbit the earth) on April 12, 1961. A few weeks later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space in a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. An American didn't orbit the earth until John Glenn did so on February 20, 1962.

From those first manned flights to the first moon landing was an incredibly quick progression. That landing humans on the Moon was accomplished at all, let alone in such a short period of time from the inception of the efforts to put humans in space, took great imagination and great determination. Granted, at least some of that impetus came as a result of the Cold War and American determination that the Soviets wouldn't "get" the Moon. I don't believe, however, that was the whole of the program to go to the Moon. It also had to do with the essential human urge to explore.

I wonder, sometimes, what has happened to that urge, because there doesn't seem to be much of a desire on the part of most people to move on and push the frontier of exploration farther, or even to hold the frontier at the Moon. Whenever it is proposed that we return to the Moon, all sorts of objections are raised. It's too expensive. It's too dangerous. We don't need to go. Plans to go to Mars are met with similar objections. When George H. W. Bush was president, he proposed sending a manned mission to Mars. It was shelved because it was seen as being too expensive. Barack Obama has also called for a mission to Mars by the 2030s, but there is as yet no budget for the effort.

When I was a child and the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs were progressing, there was a huge excitement about the space program. Now, it seems, very few people care. Very few people seem willing to even look up and see the planets and stars in the universe, much less take any more tentative steps to visit even the closest of those celestial bodies. They seem to want to cling to the planet we were all born and are so far confined to. True, there is a more or less permanent human presence in space, on the International Space Station. But that is a tenuous presence and limited to a few people at a time, with a maximum permanent occupancy of six. It has been continuously occupied for almost thirteen years, but the ISS will not last forever. The United States, since the end of the Space Shuttle program, has no means to send crew members to the ISS and depends on Russian launches to get its astronauts and supplies to the station.

So, I want to take advantage of the anniversary of the first human walk on another planetary body to say that we need to rediscover that ambition, that imagination, that determination to reach beyond this rock we live on and reach out, first to our immediate neighborhood and then, perhaps, to the rest of the universe. Just imagine what we might learn...what me might find.