Neil DeGrasse Tyson likes to joke that if he could get the leader of China to leak a memo saying that China was going to Mars, we could get there in 9 months. A month for the Pentagon to plan and build the initial rocket, and then 8 months to get there.
What he means is that we have the ability to do it, and have had that ability for some time. Something is holding us back.
We went to the Moon because of Sputnik. This will be hard for the young to understand. Sputnik was a small object, and there was only a radio in it. It had no real function, it was more publicity stunt that anything else. It just went beep, it didn't receive signals, just went beep.
Now that we have thousands of the things in orbit, it's easy to take for granted. But that was the first, it was a Soviet device literally over our heads, and that shocked us to the core. Seriously.
And that is why we went to the Moon. They one upped us, so we were going to one up them.
So there we went.
And after that we didn't do much. NASA budgets have been going down ever since. They've done a lot with that limited budget, but there was, and is, incredible potential in Space.
So why have things slowed down so much that some analysts have predicted extinction for NASA?
Human minds are weak and fragile. Most of our intelligence lies in the multiplier effect that some institutions like science offer.
Politics doesn't offer that multiplier effect, a reality you can witness in the news every day. It's the Negative Space, the lack of organisation that holds us back in so many areas.
Space isn't the final frontier, Negative Space is.
And it's not just Space, it's climate change, natural resources, and more.
What he means is that we have the ability to do it, and have had that ability for some time. Something is holding us back.
We went to the Moon because of Sputnik. This will be hard for the young to understand. Sputnik was a small object, and there was only a radio in it. It had no real function, it was more publicity stunt that anything else. It just went beep, it didn't receive signals, just went beep.
Now that we have thousands of the things in orbit, it's easy to take for granted. But that was the first, it was a Soviet device literally over our heads, and that shocked us to the core. Seriously.
And that is why we went to the Moon. They one upped us, so we were going to one up them.
So there we went.
And after that we didn't do much. NASA budgets have been going down ever since. They've done a lot with that limited budget, but there was, and is, incredible potential in Space.
So why have things slowed down so much that some analysts have predicted extinction for NASA?
Human minds are weak and fragile. Most of our intelligence lies in the multiplier effect that some institutions like science offer.
Politics doesn't offer that multiplier effect, a reality you can witness in the news every day. It's the Negative Space, the lack of organisation that holds us back in so many areas.
Space isn't the final frontier, Negative Space is.
And it's not just Space, it's climate change, natural resources, and more.
