It is indeed strange when you have to go back 40 years to get back to the future. When men bouncing on the moon looks quaint. Fact is, that first moon trip is more ancient to kids today than the Model T Ford was to baby boomers when we were young.
Some pundits are calling the lack of followup of the Apollo program a failure of nerve and spirit, a retreat from the human frontier.
Columbus refusing to discover America, something like that.
It was exciting TV, that 1969 moon landing. Exhilarating to transcend gravity for the first time ever. Cut the apron strings, as it were. But beyond the drama of that technological triumph, what’s in space exploration for the human race?
There’s always been sort of an assumption that our future lies out there. One of the motives of space exploration is to find life, by which we mean life of our kind. “Intelligent life” we call it. The sort with which one might conceivably shoot the breeze or have a decent game of chess. It’s lonely, it is said, being the only ones of our kind in the whole expanding universe. We yearn for playmates.
But even as astronomers begin to identify other solar systems that might conceivably support life of the right sort, the chances that we will find enjoyable company out there seems remote. Our more credible sci fi movies make a cuddly Chewbacca or romanticized senior citizen types like ET or Yoda seem less likely than aliens that, however beloved by their mothers, are monsters to us.
The universe is filled with some weird stuff: black holes, anti-matter, little strings everywhere, in theory anyway. Most of this stuff you don’t want to mess with. Even if we turned our resources to scouring the universe, heavenly body by heavenly body, our efforts might not turn up a single friendly bar, micro brew or thin crust pizza.
What motivated Columbus and other explorers of this outer space where we live now? Maybe a certain amount of sheer curiosity. But also: rumors of cities of gold, fountains of youth, paradise on earth. Human comforts or the wherewithal to produce them. Actually, it was the pleasure coast of present-day Florida they had in mind; their timing was just a bit off.
A future Magellan of outer space might come up with a few good candidates for Siberian -style gulags, but few-to-no spots with realistic resort potential.
It’s been assumed that the future and space exploration are almost synonymous, as if that surely is the form the future would take. The earth is Europe, outer space is the New World. But what if we’ve been wrong about what the future would look like?
There’s talk of putting more footprints on the moon, then onto Mars some decades down the line. Why shouldn’t we too, like the 1960s and 70s, have a nice simplified, telegenic show like the Super Bowl, bread and circuses to take our minds off real life?
Meanwhile the Obama administration’s healthcare initiative is sitting on the launching pad and it’s having trouble achieving liftoff. Even if the goal is just keeping up with other civilized countries, it is apparently much harder for us than launching space ships. With the latter there are only tech problems to be overcome.
For us a humane, logical healthcare system must overcome the sheer gravity of prejudice and ancient habit. The irrational panic at the word “socialism”, which after all is only a word for government of the people, by the people, for the people. The stranglehold of insurance companies salivating at the idea of an individual mandate system which does little to shift the burden of payment, an AMA that can’t imagine a better life for its doctors.
We are mired in the sludge of our inability to imagine that we could have what most other countries have taken for granted for generations: a universally accessible, humane system– healthcare as a basic human right.
When it comes to healthcare, we are the Old World. We have a much easier time imagining getting to other planets than a better healthcare future.
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