Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Lost in Space:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_07_19-2009_07_25.shtml#1248194851
Megan McArdle [1]perfectly expresses my feelings - my sadness and
disappointment, in fact - on this anniversary of the lunar landing:
If you're like me (and I know many of you are), you grew up reading
the science fiction of the 1940's and 1950's, promising a quick and
rapid expansion into the solar system, and not too long thereafter,
the galaxy. Your young mind tried, and failed, to fathom the
vastness of the empty gulfs between the stars. But there was one
thing you knew: you wanted to go. During the incomprehensibly
lengthy interval between you and adulthood, man would surely
prepare itself to go to Mars and beyond, and you were going to be
among the pioneers.
Four years before I was born, man walked on the moon for the first
time, the most magnificent single feat our little tribe of East
African Plains Apes has ever managed. Now we don't even do that.
What happened to the dream? Government mismanagement, yes, but
something more than that, too, some failure of imagination and
will.
I hope that by the fiftieth anniversary some people, somewhere,
will have regained the momentum that pushed mankind into our first
tenative baby step towards the stars.
(I was one of the few people alive at the time in the developed world,
I guess, who didn't see the walk on the moon. By some unaccountable
fiasco, I was at Boy Scout camp, and we had gone on a fifty mile hike
into the Sierra backcountry. How a boy scout camp would make such a
mistake, I have no idea, but anyway, the one small step happened while
I was getting sunburned in the Sierra Nevada.)
References
1.
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/one_small_step_for_man.php
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