HorizonsEdge
Active Member
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2019
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This is probably a minority position. Humans need a frontier. We are better when there is an unknown drawing some percentage of the population. Where hope and wonder are stimulated. When there is something to conquer besides other humans. At its best it stimulates innovation that trickles down to everyone else while providing a pressure release valve for humanity.
We blew it. We had momentum and faltered. We got the horrible engineering disaster that was the space shuttle and it killed the space program. An alternate reality might have taken us down a more effective path where we would have an off planet foothold. Where gateway technologies like fusion got serious investment. Imagine a world where fusion power was readily available. Where space based resource acquisition and manufacturing were viable. How different our lives might be.
Now we are caught up in inexplicable disagreements about vaccines. Where alternate facts are commonplace. Not the world I grew up in. It saddens me.
Debating the investment is worthy. Is that money better spent on curing cancer? Solving fusion? Those arguments have merit as do many others. In my lifetime, I would have said we could do both under the right circumstances. We have not been those people in a long time. We allowed grievances to fester and become so prominent that they define our day-to-day lives. It is depressing. It feels like we have turned back the evolutionary clock to the dark ages where primary human activity was centered around forcing "the other" to submit to their belief system.
We blew it. We had momentum and faltered. We got the horrible engineering disaster that was the space shuttle and it killed the space program. An alternate reality might have taken us down a more effective path where we would have an off planet foothold. Where gateway technologies like fusion got serious investment. Imagine a world where fusion power was readily available. Where space based resource acquisition and manufacturing were viable. How different our lives might be.
Now we are caught up in inexplicable disagreements about vaccines. Where alternate facts are commonplace. Not the world I grew up in. It saddens me.
Debating the investment is worthy. Is that money better spent on curing cancer? Solving fusion? Those arguments have merit as do many others. In my lifetime, I would have said we could do both under the right circumstances. We have not been those people in a long time. We allowed grievances to fester and become so prominent that they define our day-to-day lives. It is depressing. It feels like we have turned back the evolutionary clock to the dark ages where primary human activity was centered around forcing "the other" to submit to their belief system.
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