Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight (51 page)

That evolution of our universe continues today.

Hubble’s deep-field distant galaxies. (Hubble and NASA)

The first suggestion that the unimaginable explosion occurred was by a decorated World War I artillery officer, ordained a Jesuit Belgian priest in 1923. His name was Georges Lemaître. He met with the pope of his time, Pius XII, and convinced him not to talk about creation any more. Lemaître felt strongly that one should not mix science and religion. He told the pope, “As far as I can see such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being. For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God. It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”

The pope agreed.

Lemaître referred to the “singularity” as a “cosmic egg” exploding at the moment of creation. He published in 1927 what scientists now call the Hubble Constant, which tells us how fast the universe is expanding. Later, Sir Fred Hoyle, an English astronomer known for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, coined the Big Bang, originally a pejorative term. Hoyle believed in a static universe. Lemaître received a Ph.D. from MIT, and met with Einstein a number of times. Einstein originally agreed with the mathematics but not Lemaître’s physics. Later the formulator of the theories of relativity called his rejection of the idea of an expanding universe, “the greatest mistake I ever made.” At a meeting in Princeton in 1935, Einstein generated standing applause for Lemaître, referring to his work as “the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

The universe’s age of 13.82 billion years was determined in recent years by satellite measurements of the cosmic microwave background. These measurements also detected thermal residue of the Big Bang, making Lemaître’s theory even more credible.

Neil Armstrong, as did most, questioned what prompted the singularity; where did the smallest of energy particles come from? Not that Professor Armstrong necessarily disagreed with accepted theory. He had questions. He just wanted to know if the singularity was simply an accident, or an act of some great force of nature, or if a supreme being orchestrated that big bang.

As of this writing no one will or can answer Professor Armstrong’s basic question.

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In his never-ending research Neil found that nine billion years after the “singularity,” when galaxies were being born and billions of stars were burning themselves into dead matter, an ancient star had exploded. It littered our Milky Way Galaxy about 26,000 light years from its center with whirling clouds of the materials it had made while it lived.

This photo of Nebula NGC 6302, the Butterfly, is an example of how our own solar system was born. (Hubble and NASA)

These whirling clouds of dust are called nebulae. They are very beautiful. But this one was different. It was the nebulae that gave birth to our solar system. It was nitrogen and oxygen and iron, and then the tireless forces of gravity pulled it all back together—the heavy engineering that produces planets had begun.

Vast spirals of dust gathered. At the center of one of these spirals a rocky planet that would be called Earth was taking shape. It was built from stardust and assembled by gravity. Within 100 million years it had grown into a giant ball sweeping up billions of tons of celestial materials. And at the heart of our nebula the pressure and temperature of this ball of hydrogen gas had become so great that the atoms were beginning to fuse. A new star, our sun, was coming to life.

As our sun ignited it gave off a huge blast of solar wind—a gust of energy that blew all the remaining dust and gas left over from the nebula out to the edge of our solar system.

In the outer reaches the huge gas planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune took up their orbits. Farther in—denser, rocky planets were fighting to survive.

There were about twenty and when there was nothing more to sustain them, things got nasty. They orbited the sun, their gravity affected each other, and they began to collide. With each collision they devoured one another, and over time the twenty became four: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Neil’s research suggested Earth consumed about ten of its neighbors. The results were an incredibly hot planet—about 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Had there been any living thing on Earth then it would have disappeared in an instant—just a brief puff of steam and ash.

So it appeared all life had to do was wait for Earth to cool. Then 50 to 150 million years after its birth it seemed our young world had things under control. But it didn’t. From deep within the solar system a large planetoid was headed Earth’s way. It was on a collision course and it was unbelievably massive—possibly the size of Mars itself.

Had there been humans on Earth then they would have spotted this intruder millions of miles out. They would have watched it grow in size night after night. Soon it would have filled the sky. There would have been no escape, no reprieve. Instantly they would have been staring doom in its face as—at an oblique angle—the planetoid squashed the young Earth.

Our virgin planet reeled violently from that catastrophic blow. The planetoid exploded into the hottest of hot debris as it gouged a terrible, great wound in Earth—its mighty fires speeding on, leaving behind a flaming, quake-wracked planet. The mixed remnants of that titanic blast whirled back into space, there to be grabbed by Earth’s gravity.

Most of the heaviest elements from the planetoid, especially its iron, remained with the now-molten Earth, beginning a long settling motion to the core of our world-to-be. As Earth cooled, it became a planet much different from the one it had been before the collision. Like Mercury and Venus without their moons, Earth had rotated sluggishly. But that terrible impact sped up our planet to one full rotation every 24 hours.

Again a harvest had been reaped. The flaming, vaporized planetoid hurled away from Earth, now settled into orbit. In the billions of years to follow it coalesced under its own gravitational attraction into the moon we see today.

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Modern humans appeared on Earth about 200,000 years ago. Soon our ancestors were out of their deep African Eden, moving about, exploring, wondering where the moon came from. Then in the middle of the seventeenth century, Galileo and other astronomers fashioned crude telescopes and clearly saw on the lunar surface bright highlands and darker plains with endless overlapping craters.

Earth’s great universities joined the telescopic studies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then, like neighbors everywhere, a lunar visit in the twentieth century seemed the neighborly thing to do.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were first to land and walk on the moon. Within a period of four years, 24 Americans had visited our nearest neighbor. Some of them flew twice. Half of those 24 rode their landers down to the lunar landscape where they walked and drove on that small world.

Had Russia sustained its early lead the number of humans going to the moon might have increased greatly.

The Apollo trips alone leapedfrogged humans 50 years ahead in science and knowledge. But what most astounded Neil was not that we went to the moon, but that we didn’t stay.

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At this writing it appears at least one half-century will have passed before humans leave Earth orbit again. In Neil Armstrong’s words, “I find that mystifying. It’s as if sixteenth-century monarchs proclaimed that ‘we need not to go to the New World again, we have already been there.’”

Neil spent his last years convincing our species of the importance of exploring.

He was guided by one absolute.

From the moment he read the words written in the nineteenth century by the Russian visionary Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Neil had a clear understanding of where humankind should be going.

Tsiolkovsky is credited as being the first to envision the concept of using rockets for space travel. In a simple elegant use of language, the Russian scientist/schoolteacher saw the future, saw what humans must do and where they must go if they were to survive.

“Earth is the cradle of the mind,” wrote this self-taught man reaching for tomorrow, “but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”

Tsiolkovsky’s words became part of Neil and he never felt their meaning more strongly than when he first left the cradle and enjoyed the freedom of sustained weightlessness aboard
Gemini 8
. Neil had marveled at those moments moving over oceans and seas with their surface glassy and undisturbed. He happily recalled seeing a shining streak, a single wirelike gleam of sunlight reflecting off a long, straight railroad track running through green fields and vast tracts of farmland for miles. Awed, he saw cities that were dark patches, huge rivers that were, from Neil’s vantage, sparkling ribbons winding through the countryside.

But it was the night that held him most in wonder. Ironically, the darkness brought with it what was invisible during the day.

Cities sparkling and gleaming with multicolored lights, a swarming of neon illuminations, brilliantly lit streets, buildings ablaze from neat rows of glowing windows, man-made oases of color and brightness connected by long tendrils of highways marked with inching headlights.

City streets and lit buildings as seen from Earth orbit. (NASA)

Aurora borealis as seen from Earth orbit. (NASA)

Then, silently, magically, glowing colors would rush down from arctic regions, the aurora borealis—electrical charges ignited by the sun in the upper atmosphere of Earth.

From
Apollo 11
, from near the end of his journey across the Earth-Moon system when they entered full darkness, Neil had stared, unblinking, at the illuminated objects and the companion Magellanic Clouds in his own Milky Way—a Milky Way full of dust and gas with its halo of dark matter. More than 90 percent of its mass contained an uncountable array of suns and nebulae and supernovae and whirls of stars within whirls of lights and colors, all members of our great pinwheeled galaxy of which we of Earth are merely one tiny member.