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Requiem for the Once-Imagined Future
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The underwhelming Discovery mission has the Wall Street Journal Online's Real Time columnists lamenting the space program's failure to realize the sort of intergalactic exploration they once imagined as kids through the works of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. Considering the Viking landers were digging around Martain soil back in 1976, 'we figured the place would be necklaced with orbiters and cris-crossed by rovers by now. Maybe there'd even be astronauts (or cosmonauts or taikonauts) tracing the courses of unimaginably ancient rivers.' Instead, we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.' At this rate, the columnists fear the innovations of the future won't be much more exciting: 'Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.'"
Sadly the "kick in the pants" has always been things like a world war or having a well funded arch enemy, like the old US vs. USSR enimity. Adversity breeds inovation. Prosperity breeds complacency. So, be careful what you wish for.
I will take exception with what you had to say:
The United States suffered *none* of the disaster that was World War II with regard to our infrastructure and general populace. In fact, our economy got such a kick out of the production the war spurred that it put the US into what many people consider its Golden Age: the 1950s.
Eastern Europe was *devastated* by World War II, and was under the control of the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War. The result being that the area never truly recovered from the war and only now under the European Union is seeing any progress. Western Europe was also badly damaged, but had many important advantages: it had the United States to bolster its regrowth, and the population loss wasn't as great as in the East. Europe is still second fiddle to the United States economically, and will probably never regain its former position in the world with the rising economies of the Far East.
The United States basically lucked out of WWII (though I don't say that with any intention of diminishing the accomplishment or the sacrifice), and relative to the rest of the world, we got off very easy. The political unrest in the aftermath of the Cold War, by the way, is what *we* are dealing with today in the form terrorism -- you can't fight secret wars on the backs of poor people without engendering serious animosity. The threat of nuclear annihilation was actually *more* unlikely during the Cold War than it is today -- terrorist groups might not hesitate to spark a nuclear war or use a nuclear weapon, as they have very little to lose relative to the former Soviet empire.
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.