Why I Want to Run a Marathon on the Moon
The first profession I remember I wanted to pursue as a kid was that of what I called an inventor. Building new and useful things for others seemed like fun. I was eagerly spending my time searching for expendable things within our household and recombining them to look like new machines and invented a purpose for them.
Then, I learned about space travel. I don’t remember what age I was at or where exactly I heard about it first, but it must have been around the time before school started. My parents had nothing to do with both these professions although my dad had a solid understanding of world events and general knowledge about it. No passion for it at all, though.
For me, finding out about the moon landing instantly ignited the wish to become an astronaut. The make-believe machines I built started to look more like rockets and robots. It was all about the exploration of the unknown. How vast and beyond reach this abstract thing called “space” was became a big fascination for me. I learned the numbers and was in constant awe about the sheer scale of it. Some friends agreed, but many just shrugged it off and didn’t enjoy thinking about it as much as I did.
Unfortunately, my aspirations were crushed fairly soon, because when I replied “astronaut” to the ever-present question of “little boy, what would you like to do for a living when you’re a grown-up?” – simple adoring laughter was one of the nicer reactions. Most people, including my parents, thought they were doing me a favor by stating the obvious: Chances are so slim to do anything like that in the future, I should just forget about it and aim for something more practical to make a living off of.
In retrospect that’s a sad thing. Pursuing that dream and finding ways to work in a related area would have been very possible! It goes to show that the imagination of people wasn’t well-developed, especially considering they were talking to a boy that would quite probably live to see the next eighty to a hundred years of human development play out. An amount of time that in the past had dramatically changed the course of history multiple times already – just compare the difference of what the years 1850 and 1950 looked like in nearly all countries and you’ll have to agree.
Because of my newly found openness for ways to make a living I detailed in “Project System Elephant”, these childhood dreams came back to me. Starting the contemplation from the beginning means to look at these dreams more closely. My interest in exploring the unknown had surely survived.
Meanwhile, I had taken up a new hobby, which had slowly but surely made its way into becoming a way of life for me. Running. From it, I’ve learned many different things. The power of persistence, of incremental and compounding growth. How to construct self-esteem. More simple things such as nutrition and regeneration. But first and foremost, how great it is to set a big audacious goal for yourself and keep chipping away to reach it.
Regarding space travel, humankind didn’t make the leaps forward which many suspected during the years I was aware enough to watch it. With the cold war over and our focus shifting to bailing out failing banks instead of paying scientists to build awesome new things, it’s been a dry period.
But now, we’re in a different era where space travel is again on the table. The reasons for it and the key players are questionable, to put it mildly, but still, there’s progress and it’s talked about again. A few governments have made big progress, notably India, which last year put a probe on the moon for a mere seventy-five million dollars with its Chandrayaan-3 program.
Why not put a person on the moon to run a marathon on it?
What an amazing adventure that would be! I realize how stupid and crazy this sounds, but dreams are allowed to be stupid and crazy. Sure, the chances of this happening are slim, and the chances of me being the person to get selected are even slimmer, but I’m convinced they’re not zero.
Control what you can control
Stating the obvious, I certainly won’t be able to finance or build a moon lander during the rest of my lifetime, and I probably also won’t go back to university to become a physicist and get employed by ESA or a similar space agency. Even for the standard astronaut programs I would need to match requirements which I don’t.
So what can I do? Two things:
- Staying fit and healthy to be able to run a good marathon on a moment’s notice under any conditions.
- Getting this dream out in the open.
Staying fit and keeping on running for as long as possible is a plan I’ve been pursuing anyways. And getting the moon marathon plan into the public eye is what I’m doing right here and what I’ve done by building the little website www.moon-marathon.com. And maybe I’ll look for a job as a janitor or something at a jet propulsion company, just to have a foot in the door! If you’re reading this and have any contacts, let me know.
I’m forty right now and I hope to be able to run marathons for at least forty more years until I’m eighty. If all goes well, maybe I can even add a decade or two to that. Imagine what the world in general and space travel in particular will look like in the years 2064 to 2084! Maybe it will be accessible to tourist humans, who knows. Author Rutger Bregman said:
“But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.”
How do you feel after reading this?
This helps me assess the quality of my writing and improve it.
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