Soon we will celebrate the invention of Gunpowder. Already it has started, because I live very close to Lego Land where there are fireworks every night around this and the Christmas holidays. I watch them from my patio and don't hear the booms for a couple seconds from across the lagoon.
Of course our nations Big Roman Candle, the NASA Space Shuttle, seemed like a dud, but that's just the weather. I'm all for scientific adventures, but the problem with NASA is that science itself has begun to take a back seat to the "pragmatism of politics." This means that things will be done for the nebulous American Spirit of the thing and even the grandeur of working in the greatest of Gods creations, the Entire Universe, if we can only visit the part immediately surrounding the Earth. [I'm glad it finally made it... dt].
When I was a child the phrase "by the year 2000" was a catch phrase for some utopian future when Space Cities would be floating between the planets like giant cruise ships. Now it is just the grim reality of 2006. Things aren't as horrible as they could ever be, but there certainly is no utopia.
We can barely keep the technical means of achieving such goals within our capabilites. During the time since the man on the moon in 1969 there have been computer enhancements that became cheaper and more powerful. Rockets to the moon are less powerful and more expensive, now that we have "political pragmatism," and that means there are no rockets to the moon.
Sure, we claim that in 2065 such and such will be solved and Windows XP will be a forgotten nightmare in the morph of Gasoline Engines. Somehow I doubt that the bad stuff will go away. We still use Gasoline Engines after a hundred years of noisy, polluting clunkers and I imagine that something akin to Windows XP will be around then, with side doors where different annoying interfaces will force themselves upon you.
But 2065 would be a time when I would be 111 years old. I don't think I'll make it that far. But my granddaughter might be alive then. Will the bare necessities of life drain us of our technical curiosity? Will we become like the Egytians with a somewhat stagnant technology for a thousand years?
It might take all the available energy on the planet to allow a minimum survival rate on the Earth. All the energy is not on the Earth. It is out there, like the Sun, which shines billions of times more light into empty space than what hits our little stony planet. We have energy from nuclear fission in the Earth's core. It might not last much longer than a few million more years. It might get really cold here, or it could get unlivably hot from the ever increasing breakdown of life into greenhouse gases that lead to a Venus-like hell.
But that's some other species' problem, not ours. Let the giant sentient wasps a few million years in the future give it a try.
That's all for now.
Of course our nations Big Roman Candle, the NASA Space Shuttle, seemed like a dud, but that's just the weather. I'm all for scientific adventures, but the problem with NASA is that science itself has begun to take a back seat to the "pragmatism of politics." This means that things will be done for the nebulous American Spirit of the thing and even the grandeur of working in the greatest of Gods creations, the Entire Universe, if we can only visit the part immediately surrounding the Earth. [I'm glad it finally made it... dt].
When I was a child the phrase "by the year 2000" was a catch phrase for some utopian future when Space Cities would be floating between the planets like giant cruise ships. Now it is just the grim reality of 2006. Things aren't as horrible as they could ever be, but there certainly is no utopia.
We can barely keep the technical means of achieving such goals within our capabilites. During the time since the man on the moon in 1969 there have been computer enhancements that became cheaper and more powerful. Rockets to the moon are less powerful and more expensive, now that we have "political pragmatism," and that means there are no rockets to the moon.
Sure, we claim that in 2065 such and such will be solved and Windows XP will be a forgotten nightmare in the morph of Gasoline Engines. Somehow I doubt that the bad stuff will go away. We still use Gasoline Engines after a hundred years of noisy, polluting clunkers and I imagine that something akin to Windows XP will be around then, with side doors where different annoying interfaces will force themselves upon you.
But 2065 would be a time when I would be 111 years old. I don't think I'll make it that far. But my granddaughter might be alive then. Will the bare necessities of life drain us of our technical curiosity? Will we become like the Egytians with a somewhat stagnant technology for a thousand years?
It might take all the available energy on the planet to allow a minimum survival rate on the Earth. All the energy is not on the Earth. It is out there, like the Sun, which shines billions of times more light into empty space than what hits our little stony planet. We have energy from nuclear fission in the Earth's core. It might not last much longer than a few million more years. It might get really cold here, or it could get unlivably hot from the ever increasing breakdown of life into greenhouse gases that lead to a Venus-like hell.
But that's some other species' problem, not ours. Let the giant sentient wasps a few million years in the future give it a try.
That's all for now.
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