Good article, but I disagree with his future shock theory. I happen to have grown up in Eastern Europe. When communism fell you had a flood of new technology pouring in. The society, from a technological point of view, was leapfrogging tens of years in a matter of months or short years. He had computers, color TVs, calculators, more TV time than ever before, all the electronic appliances you can think of, and so on. People weren't future-shocked, quite the opposite. There was this general vibe about what new things the future may bring, a general feel of optimism, of embracing anything new, especially science and technology.
What was different? Education. The level of science education all the way to high school, and arguably beyond, was and still is much higher than in the US. In a way, the brains of most people were more ready to absorb all this new information. It's like having an athlete train in a closed room for years and all of a sudden letting him run freely. What we have in the states is not only muscle atrophy, but also brain atrophy. There are of course pockets of resistance, but the overall trend is negative. Sadly going back after years, I've noticed a similar mental laziness taking place even there. When the hunger for more is fulfilled, complacency settles in...
I agree. I don't think his "future shock" explanation really holds water. If anything, the last few decades have demonstrated that most people are far more tolerant of change than they themselves might have even predicted they'd be.
Case in point: cellular phones. I remember when they first came out, first the wired-in car phones, and then the "bag phones" with the lead-acid batteries. And almost immediately you had a class of people saying "I hate those things, I'll never own one." Anyone older than 20 or so can remember a lot of backlash as phones started to get smaller, cheaper, and more popular. Very few of those people are still without cell phones. A few holdouts here and there -- I know a couple, we all do -- but fewer and fewer every day. The vast majority of people who initially rejected the technology as being too disruptive were brought around, sometimes grudgingly, into accepting it. The same story repeats itself over and over with many new devices or technologies.
We tend to vastly underestimate our own ability to deal with change, even very disruptive change. The whole concept of "future shock" was a manifestation of this underestimation; it didn't happen this way.
The explanation for the failure of the US space program, I think, is much more simple and is put forward in one of the comments to the linked piece: during the Cold War, Americans were content to spend large amounts of money on Apollo, in order to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Without that competitive aspect, public interest disappeared.
People are simply not as willing to spend money on pure exploration as they are on a meaningless competition between nations.
If you could frame the current space program in some sort of nationalistic, competitive terms -- perhaps versus the Chinese? -- people would probably be interested again. But since the public perception is that the US "won" the space race, and that nobody is currently that close (although the gap is narrowing), large investments like we saw in the past are simply not on the table.
The political tides of a given era do not necessarily equate with the level of general intelligence in a society, and the author (I think) stretches it when he says that we have done nothing since Apollo because we are a nation of idiots who refuse to give priority to scientific goals.
The moon project was given high political priority because of the cold-war impetus to outdo the Soviets. Substantial funds were devoted to the project and the goal itself was specific, symbolic, and achievable (as it turns out, though the underlying effort was obviously an amazing achievement).
Once that was achieved, nothing of comparable impetus has arisen in the space program to excite the public imagination in a similar way, and it is the public imagination that sways political decisions, not abstract judgments made in the name of advancing "science."
Average people may be largely ignorant of science but they like what it brings into a society even if they don't understand how it comes about. The American infatuation with "progress" for the past couple of centuries has largely been tied to a national pride over scientific achievements and nothing has changed in this area. A century ago, they were proudly boasting of Thomas Edison; today, they boast of Silicon Valley.
I would guess that it is not so much an antipathy to science that has caused politicians to pull back on the space program as it is a general loss of focus in that program that has caused the public to look at it with apathy. No public support. No political support. No political support. No "billions in funding."
The appallingly low level of scientific knowledge in the general population is real but is likely not (in my judgment at least) the cause of this particular phenomenon. The author does make his point with great vigor, though, and the piece is fun to read.
"We’re having a debate in this country over whether or not evolution is true. They have half a point- evolution isn’t science, not anymore. Today it’s technology."
Nice rant. If I think about it long enough, it's depressing. So I won't. I'll code something instead.
(Sometimes I think the reason I program so much is because the big issues seem so futile. This is one thing that I can do something about right now, so I do.)
We have a government spending trillions of dollars with plans to spend more and he suggests spending billions more on space travel? The real solution is to eliminate the regulatory barriers to private space travel and sell off NASA to interested private parties. The Moon might not be their first priority, but we would have a much more vibrant space program and the costs for larger missions would drop dramatically.
The problem is that they worry foreign companies will muscle into the picture.
Imagine if China landed the first Moon Base in 2020 and was wellestablished there before the US even landed another astronaut. Highly unlikely BUT the fear is there - and with that fear comes the other one; strategic habitation of the Moon establishes something of a superiority over other countries.
Summary: the US govt. will guard NASA as long as it can. It can use it to make sure that it holds onto much of the tech (or at least controls who makes it).
In a nutshell human beings have depleted helium reserves on planet earth to the point that within 20 years we run out. Now you say, big deal, no more party balloons. But little do you realize that the manufacturing processes for just about everything super technical requires helium. It's a big enough deal that both Russia and China are developing standalone robotic systems to harvest helium-3 from moon rocks where its found in great abundance due to the suns constant bombardment of the surface rocks which creates the substance. Helium-3 is also a core ingredient in fusion reactor processes and as such is required in great quantities to sustain the fusion reactor operations.
Yes--they ensure that guys living in caves are our biggest threat. If we did not have stealth fighters and stealth bombers, actual countries might think a war with the US would be a fair fight, and they might start shit.
Unlike Switzerland, the US is actually worth attacking. Not that Switzerland isn't, but it's in an easily defensible position. It's easy to make attacking Switzerland a bad cost-benefit. Not so much the US.
Plus we have obligations to protect foreign allies.
yes. A moon base established by any one country would be a massive massive coup. Your on the very frontier of space and if you get a foot hold chances you will be at that fore-front for decades.
From the economic perspective there is a massively lucrative tourist market to sell.
And above all of that you have proof of the countries dominance over the earth. Some of their residents are literally untouchable :)
EDIT: if China makes it to the Moon that would establish them and the next biggest super power. Chances are it will be them anyway but still...
All very vague. What is the actual strategic value in this? What would you be able to do that other spacefaring powers couldn't, and why would it matter in a strategic context?
"Some of their residents are literally untouchable"
It's trivially easy to stop shipments to the Moon. How long can a lunar biosphere last?
The trick is the ability to build everything and due to the cost of transporting stuff to the moon means CPU's are probably the last thing to be manufactured on the moon. So, once we start building chip fab's on the moon a lunar biosphere could last for millions of years.
It would "prove" that Communism is superior to Capitalism and lead non-aligned nations into China's sphere of influence. That's what the original space race was about - impressing countries that hadn't made their minds up yet.
There's supposedly fuel on the moon. He3, if I'm right.
You'd be much more easily able to control space (orbital space), because you'd have fabrication plants on a place with about 1/6 of the gravity, making escaping that gravity much, much easier.
It would bring you a lot closer to the goal of space colonization.
1) The Moon contains metals that can be used to make useful things. In the long run, it would be cheaper to make the parts for orbital colonies there, instead of making them on Earth and boosting them into orbit.
2) There is evidence that there is water and oxygen on the Moon. Again, it is cheaper to collect these on the Moon and send them out to the orbital factories and space-based solar collectors than it would be to do so from Earth.
But isn't that self defeating? If China decides that they want to go to the moon for strategic purposes and that private enterprise is the way to do it, then they will loosen up restrictions and tell the American engineers to come over and help. I'd imagine a lot of them would go to China because they see NASA getting less and less prominent. I don't see how this helps strategically.
I don't disagree, and considering the amount of military hardware that NASA puts up, they will be keeping NASA for quite some time. What should be done and what is actually done are usually two completely different things when it comes to the U.S. gov't.
I said fear. should have said irrational fear. Such things can do much for furthering tech (example: the space race) but also hamper it (example: the current NASA situation).
This idea isn't a bad one. In case anyone is interested, the most successful private space company so far is SpaceX, started by a co-founder of PayPal. It recently (December 2008) won a contract from NASA to resupply the ISS. I believe the X is because the goal of the founder is to improve the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 10.
From their mission statement: "Our mission is very simple. We are working towards launching a human being into space.
This is a non-profit suborbital space endeavor, based entirely on sponsors and volunteers."
They've done a number of successful booster tests and are well on their way to the goal.
It was nice to get an alternative to the idiocracy theory that we're getting stupider because stupid people are having more kids. That sort of thinking is doomed to turn a grave social problem into a two sided us-vs-them culture war.
It's more meta than that. If knowledge was decaying yet interest remained high, then that could be addressed straightforwardly.
What's happening is analogous to children believing that meat comes from supermarkets, not farm animals... Accomplishments of science and engineering are taken for granted. But mobile phones and MP3 players don't grow on trees...
I wonder if this is a general truth, just hiding a bit.
Take, for example, some bad PHP-webprogrammer (or RoR, or whatever). They will wonder what the hell some 'webserver' is and why you need one and what's all that fuss about networks, ports, routing, security and such. (Please don't kill me, I just needed an example for ignorant people in software industries and this one was the first to come to my mind :). In other words, the abstraction of such a Web framework creates a certain ignorance and even missing knowledge about the underlying mechanisms.
And now consider this: A child gets food from the supermarket and does not know about the cow behind this. Looking at this from a bit further away, these two patterns look awefully similar, because here we have an abstraction AGAIN (the supermarket, similar to the web framework), which hides the actual infrastructure (cow, butcher, truck, ...). And again, there are people showing heavy ignorance and even missing knowledge about the underlying infrastructure.
Certainly, I do not know how to butcher a cow or drive a truck either, and I am unable to configure a webserver in a dark room with a blindfold and one hand tied behind my back, but I certainly know that these things happen behind the abstraction.
So, is this a certain indicator of ignorance, if one just uses abstractions and never ever looks behind the abstraction?
Has anything changed? A 100years ago how many people knew (or cared) how a steam engine or telegraph worked?
You don't have to be computer literate because there is a computer on your wrist. In the 30s the big thing was electric motors, everything was going to be run by electric motors and people would have to become electric motor literate.
Oh sure, NASA talks about designing a space plane- but they’ve been talking about designing a space plane since before Neil took his ride- and I ain’t seen one yet.
NASA has worked on this, many pilots of the X-15 qualified as astronauts, though I would not consider this a space plane either. Several Single Stage to Orbit ships have been built(none of them coming close to orbit)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit).
NASA isn’t going back to the moon, not any time soon.
Ares and Constellation are dead, except in name. The NASA budget has been reduced to a level that is incompatible with completion of the program. I've read NASA insiders acknowledging this on semi-public message boards.
> But work at the staff level continues out of view of the nation’s elected
leadership, and in the recent passback to NASA from the Office of
Management and Budget, the news is not so good. After a small increase this year, Exploration Systems at NASA goes down by $3.5 billion over the next four years. When combined with earlier reductions of almost $12 billion during the Bush Administration, well over $15 billion has been extracted from the Exploration Systems budget in the five short years since the new space policy was announced. Funding for lunar return in the Constellation program was
already less than $4 billion in the years prior to 2015. This was to be allocated to early work on the Ares 5 heavy‐lifter, and the Altair lunar lander. With only a half‐billion dollars now available, this work cannot be done.
We should be actively colonizing space to increase our survival chances. However, behind every technical reality, there is a far more important economic reality. First, the need for a back-up planet isn't that high yet. Second, NASA isn't self-supporting. It can't amplify its achievements like business can. Putting men on the moon was the peak of what it could do without requiring an unrealistic change in the nature of people. The market needs to step in and develop a genuine space flight and colonization industry. This is a slow process, but has already started.
In general, if you think a large group of people are idiots, you should count yourself among them. People are competitive creatures and won't all step in the same direction because you want them to. They'll act in their own interest. They'll do business. That is how mankind achieves things.
1. Give the terrorists a space Program. We didn't go to the moon because we thought it'd be neat up there, we went to beat the Soviet's asses. That's why Americans were interested then, that's why they'd be interested now.
2. Make gains clearly applicable to world power. Gee oh I wonder why the US was so willing to invest millions and millions into rockets. Might it have something to do with the fact that they used the same technology to give themselves the ability to put a Nuke in striking distance of anything on the planet? The government only gave a crap about the Moon because it pleased the people and because it made their death-weapons possible.
People are no dumber now than they were then. In fact, people are loads smarter. Look at the devices they use on a daily basis!
Why is there some need to lament the state of humanity at every turn? Guys, it's not really that bad. Everything's going to be OK
What was different? Education. The level of science education all the way to high school, and arguably beyond, was and still is much higher than in the US. In a way, the brains of most people were more ready to absorb all this new information. It's like having an athlete train in a closed room for years and all of a sudden letting him run freely. What we have in the states is not only muscle atrophy, but also brain atrophy. There are of course pockets of resistance, but the overall trend is negative. Sadly going back after years, I've noticed a similar mental laziness taking place even there. When the hunger for more is fulfilled, complacency settles in...