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.'"

Comments

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

first post! WOOP WOOP! WoooooAAAWoooooooOH!

Herd on the Street

[Doc Ruby]

Maybe if the Wall Street Journal weren't incessantly fighting for stupid people like Bush to run the government, so the corporations the WSJ worships can rape the people of Earth as much as possible, then the future might not suck so much. But of course the Baby Boomers running the WSJ, and most of them reading it, want it all, with no cost, not even any concessions to reality. That's why the corporations they pimped so hard in the 1990s turned out to be shells of lies, corruption and theft, like Enron, Global Crossing, HealthSouth, WorldCom...

The echo-chamber they haunt lets them believe that they can get everything just by asking. No sacrifices, no dues-paying, no research: they've got lots of money, so they can buy the factories, and make even more money, right? Science is risky, astronauts are blue-collar, so the WSJ just shows up to complain. Maybe if they had more sense of the future over there, they might get behind the kinds of investments that made America great (not just rich): universal education, strategic domestic engineering projects, scientific risks culled for truth, smart people in charge of things. Of course they won't: the WSJ lives at a pinnacle of the ivory towers of power that create nothing but illusions, money and ignorance. Running a capitalist propaganda daily isn't rocket science - just demand others do all the work, and act like you're a reasonable critic because you're rich.

Re:Herd on the Street

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation -1
    100% Offtopic

TrollMods: the topic is the WSJ bitching about the future, which they have mortgaged. Drop your bowtie and grab your ass, because BOHICA runs this town.

Re:The WSJ Op-Ed page is antiscience

[FreeUser]

BTW why, since you work for them, are you still scraping up stories about John Kerry? The last time I checked he didn't actually win. Your guy did.

Perhaps because there is significant evidence that Kerry DID in fact win, and local republicans stuffed the ballot box (electronically and otherwise) in both Ohio and Florida, where traditionally very accurate exit polls differentiated from official talleys by a greater percentage than those in the Ukraine that sparked international protest and a new election.

This is bound to come out, sooner or later, regardless of how long Ohio continues to violate the law and refuse to release voter records and ballots for a recount (where they exist--electronic ballots cannot be recounted), and demonizing the other party will, of course, mitigate the social and political fallout somewhat, and may even set the stage for the American populace to tolerate another series of stolen elections in 2008 and 2012.

The hope on the extreme right is that everyone will "let bygones be bygones" and finally drop this matter. Then they can brazen out the public fallout of their actions without consiquences and continue to do what they like, irrespective of laws and the will of the American People(tm).

I suspect, however, that the willingness of the population to accept these sorts of abuses is about used up, Wallstreet Journal editorials and Junk Theology misrepresenting itself as Science notwithstanding.