Wednesday, July 20, 2005
One Giant Step
Today is the 36th anniversary of the peak of American and perhaps Western Civilization: Sending men a quarter million miles into space to the moon and getting them back safely. A lofty goal indeed was set by JFK to do this in less than a decade.
And it was done! No easy task. In fact it would seem impossible at the time. So many things needed to be done. Nobody had gone very far in space, nor for very much time. There had been no docking in space, landing on anything or even leaving the spaceship.
Success here required advances in materials sciences, rocketry, aeronautics, communication, computers, electronics and even medicine. The benefits are with us today. The offspring include our whole computer and communications boom. Medical imaging. Materials in your car and perhaps your body.
So what have we done since? The computer is clearly an advance in so many ways to process data. The related Internet is pretty amazing too. Of course human nature has made much of it more marketing bullshit, fraud and pornography. The third is portable phones. Again this technological advance with plenty of practical benefits has turned into a mostly irritating and frequently unsafe babbling.
Sorry but a picture phone is very lame compared to the moon shot. And our culture lame as well. The sixties America was a robust industrial economy that made things. The people were educated and skilled. We had vision and dreams as a country. And money to do them.
Now our sick economy bleeds billions of wealth daily overseas. Our prosperity is based on financial shell-games rather than real value. Real Estate as a great example. Stocks are worse. The Feds the worst. Our education system is a joke. College education is for the majority a remedial eighth grade education of past generations. Our public education for children is in shambles in many areas. Can-do has been replaced with I'm a victim and litigation.
What would be the next grand project anyways? The deepest alchemy of matter itself? The deepest nature of soul? Psyche? Life itself? Nanotechnolgy? If it's biotechnology, we are already toast given the stem cell position in this once-great nation. That's OK, I'm sure China, Japan and Korea will do it for us. Besides our kids don't do science or engineering anymore. And those damn foreigners are not coming here in droves to our universities either.
The truth is we have no will for a great project. The money needed is not easily available. Corporations want more immediate results. So do the voters.
As a boy I loved the space program. We visited some of the NASA Centers and I had glossy photos and plastic models. We even shot off Estes model rockets. Then they cut the program. The future rocket scientist was introduced to toxic amounts of endogenous testosterone and then it was sports and sex until he turned... Oh, who am I kidding.
I went into medicine since that was the hot place to be. Right. Twenty years of assault on medicine have degraded the profession. I used to say I should have been a lawyer, but in reality finance like banking would have been the place to be. Nothing really constructive in the value sense, but you are the money.
The folly of humans is endless.
I still look at the sky when I'm away from the city and see the wonder of the universe in all its beauty and mystery.
And it was done! No easy task. In fact it would seem impossible at the time. So many things needed to be done. Nobody had gone very far in space, nor for very much time. There had been no docking in space, landing on anything or even leaving the spaceship.
Success here required advances in materials sciences, rocketry, aeronautics, communication, computers, electronics and even medicine. The benefits are with us today. The offspring include our whole computer and communications boom. Medical imaging. Materials in your car and perhaps your body.
So what have we done since? The computer is clearly an advance in so many ways to process data. The related Internet is pretty amazing too. Of course human nature has made much of it more marketing bullshit, fraud and pornography. The third is portable phones. Again this technological advance with plenty of practical benefits has turned into a mostly irritating and frequently unsafe babbling.
Sorry but a picture phone is very lame compared to the moon shot. And our culture lame as well. The sixties America was a robust industrial economy that made things. The people were educated and skilled. We had vision and dreams as a country. And money to do them.
Now our sick economy bleeds billions of wealth daily overseas. Our prosperity is based on financial shell-games rather than real value. Real Estate as a great example. Stocks are worse. The Feds the worst. Our education system is a joke. College education is for the majority a remedial eighth grade education of past generations. Our public education for children is in shambles in many areas. Can-do has been replaced with I'm a victim and litigation.
What would be the next grand project anyways? The deepest alchemy of matter itself? The deepest nature of soul? Psyche? Life itself? Nanotechnolgy? If it's biotechnology, we are already toast given the stem cell position in this once-great nation. That's OK, I'm sure China, Japan and Korea will do it for us. Besides our kids don't do science or engineering anymore. And those damn foreigners are not coming here in droves to our universities either.
The truth is we have no will for a great project. The money needed is not easily available. Corporations want more immediate results. So do the voters.
As a boy I loved the space program. We visited some of the NASA Centers and I had glossy photos and plastic models. We even shot off Estes model rockets. Then they cut the program. The future rocket scientist was introduced to toxic amounts of endogenous testosterone and then it was sports and sex until he turned... Oh, who am I kidding.
I went into medicine since that was the hot place to be. Right. Twenty years of assault on medicine have degraded the profession. I used to say I should have been a lawyer, but in reality finance like banking would have been the place to be. Nothing really constructive in the value sense, but you are the money.
The folly of humans is endless.
I still look at the sky when I'm away from the city and see the wonder of the universe in all its beauty and mystery.
