Thursday, July 8, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Exploration
This country has so completely lost its heart for exploration. We went to the moon 40 years ago and we haven't been back since. It's sad.
Those men did a great thing. Going so far. But in the following decades we have been content with barely getting out of Earth's atmosphere. To me that's like crossing the pacific only to come home to play in the pool in the backyard.
A couple things have conspired to have me thinking about these things. First was getting the first couple discs of the show "Defying Gravity" from Netflix.
Great show, humans decide to tour our solar system. It was cancelled before they finished airing the first season. Thankfully they released all the episodes to DVD.
That tells you one thing. Our culture just isn't interested in space any more. Not like it used to be anyway. The second thing was that the show was set in the 2050s. Why should it take so long for us to get back to the stars?
Second I've been watching "When We Left Earth" on the Netflix watch instantly. All about the early space program. I see what those men did and with the extremely primitive -- by our standards -- equipment, and I just have to shake my head. We should be in space now. We should have a real permanent station in orbit. We should have a colony on the moon. And we ought to be halfway to Mars.
The third thing that got me thinking about this was learning that the International Space Station is now visible from Earth. If it's not raining I'll be able to see it traversing my sky tonight about 11:13pm. It shines brighter than the moon. But we're in for more clouds I think.
I grew up dreaming of space travel. Reading Robert Heinlein. Heinlein expected colonies on the moon by the mid-1980s. Ships capable of interplanetary transit in days instead of months. And we could do it, but we don't. We've lost our drive. We need to get it back.
Those men did a great thing. Going so far. But in the following decades we have been content with barely getting out of Earth's atmosphere. To me that's like crossing the pacific only to come home to play in the pool in the backyard.
A couple things have conspired to have me thinking about these things. First was getting the first couple discs of the show "Defying Gravity" from Netflix.
Great show, humans decide to tour our solar system. It was cancelled before they finished airing the first season. Thankfully they released all the episodes to DVD.
That tells you one thing. Our culture just isn't interested in space any more. Not like it used to be anyway. The second thing was that the show was set in the 2050s. Why should it take so long for us to get back to the stars?
Second I've been watching "When We Left Earth" on the Netflix watch instantly. All about the early space program. I see what those men did and with the extremely primitive -- by our standards -- equipment, and I just have to shake my head. We should be in space now. We should have a real permanent station in orbit. We should have a colony on the moon. And we ought to be halfway to Mars.
The third thing that got me thinking about this was learning that the International Space Station is now visible from Earth. If it's not raining I'll be able to see it traversing my sky tonight about 11:13pm. It shines brighter than the moon. But we're in for more clouds I think.
I grew up dreaming of space travel. Reading Robert Heinlein. Heinlein expected colonies on the moon by the mid-1980s. Ships capable of interplanetary transit in days instead of months. And we could do it, but we don't. We've lost our drive. We need to get it back.
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