In my last post I noted a minor observation in the night sky:
“there it was… a gleaming silent line of human intelligence wrought among the stars. Maybe 50 dots in a perfect formation. A constellation. Just a hint of the 2,400 already up there and the vast grid that will be there in due time. It wasn’t sad, like a McDonalds billboard on the interstate, it was glorious, like a reminder that humans can fly if they wish.”
One of the most crushing things I’ve witnessed over my lifetime is the slow gradual embrace of what I call “socialist incapacity”. What I mean is that all people are born with endless potential but they’ve been worked over by powerful forces. They’ve been dumbed down, gaslit, and slowly badgered until they’re hollow and weak. They end up thinking of themselves as less than they once were. From hero to peasant. From peasant to supplicant. From supplicant to a means to an end. A cruel fate; to be a game piece on someone else’s chessboard.
I don’t like the degradation of humanity! Humans aren’t meant to be meat slabs in a vote farm. We’re individuals. We’re amazing! We’re not rabbits or buffalo, unaware animals grazing on what is there but not questioning how it got there. Such limited beings are incapable of deeper concepts like time or honor. Nor are we programmable robots; widget consuming production units… or increasingly often not even production units but votes to be purchased.
We are far more. We’re born with the spirit to soar and the intellect to accomplish that which we imagine. To a human, at least one that hasn’t been beaten into submission, the impossible is only that which hasn’t yet been done. This is why large systems dislike humans. Those who would oppress us sand “humans” and “citizens” down until they’re mere “civilians”, “constituents”, or even “clients”.
Our modern universities and declining social capacity are the smoldering ashes of the Library of Alexandria. It isn’t necessary that I know all these things, but it’s crucial that someone know all those things. Without them we are not mankind, but cavemen with iPhones. Yet former repositories of knowledge are subsumed in waves of foolishness.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Just as many as it takes to decide which restroom to use.
I see NASA as the saddest loss of all. NASA’s bureaucratic bumbling consumed most of my lifetime on earth. I was born to a time when “space hotel” was a legitimate concept. A child of the time had a reasonable shot at orbit. That was the trajectory that perished. What replaced it was a four decade committee meeting of the doomed. From this disastrous mess, humanity is just emerging.
Humans went from the Wright Flyer to Apollo 11 in 66 years. (1903 – 1969.) I was born just around when NASA lost heart. It spent a half century stepping on its own dick as I got old and stayed on the ground. NASA isn’t the cause of this. It’s only a reflection of humanity’s failures. We have a super computer in every person’s pocket but use it to spy on law abiding citizens. Who thought that was the best use of all that power and knowledge?
The news today is about airlift of baby formula from Germany. As if we were a people who can’t make baby formula. Of course we can make baby formula. We need only quit shooting ourselves in the foot and do the task.
We lack the progress of a serious people because we are unserious and unaccomplished. Oh sure, NASA did some neat things. They succeeded here and there. It seems sometimes almost by accident they’d cashed so many checks in so many congressional districts that it couldn’t help but make something useful. But overall they spent most of my life as a funds dispersal mechanism with a space hobby. If 66 years went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base I had a reasonable expectation of more in the nearly equal time that has elapsed. They can’t yet repeat what was last accomplished in 1972.
Why? Because NASA is a bureaucracy. Humans have the spirit that wants to go and the mind that makes it possible. Bureaucracies have the opposite, and they’ve the whip hand lately. Masked Karens and cell phone dopamine addicts can’t make the trip. But they can bitch about everything until nobody else has the heart to try.
However, all is not lost. Despair is a sin. It is betted to keep trying than whine like those who never tried.
Watch this:
It’s just a few minutes. What better thing are you doing?
You don’t have to geek out about nerdy tech terms. “Max Q at eleven seconds? Who gives a fuck?” Just bask in what is possible and how hard it was to accomplish. This is the real deal. Every single minute of that video is fraught with risk.
Unlike a society that’s cowering in the basement over COVID or inflation or Monkey Pox or someone who didn’t use the right pronoun, the people that made that rocket fly took on risk. They beat risk. They over came risk. They literally rise above the mundane.
In the video powerful machines are unleashing immense energy. All that massive effort is going through math and software and infinitely delicate machinery; converting thrust and vector to pinpoint accuracy. Smart people worked very hard on this. They lift humanity from the earth’s gravity well, position their machines precisely where they want them, and then direct them to fall back at screaming speeds to earth. At the last minute they pull their machines out of that swan dive to ground and land on a target. A tiny target floating in the ocean.
They do this over and over again. Falcon 9 has has 156 successful flights. What has any politician done to equal that?
SpaceX improves. It learns. SpaceX managed the first vertical landing of stage 1 rocket in 2015. This year they launched and recovered a stage 1 rocket that had been to space 12 times. Their satellite constellation is slowly providing internet service to the entirety of planet earth. I saw it in the skies the night of the lunar eclipse. Nothing said at a podium in DC matters as much as the small but perfect lights I saw in the sky.
Compare that to the bullshit you see in the “news”. Diesel is $6.50 and nobody knows how long truckers will keep delivering stuff. Speaking of stuff, much of it is floating in container ships in the pacific. Maybe farmers can keep producing food like we’re accustomed, or maybe they can’t. The president who got more votes than any other candidate in history took time off funding war in Ukraine to bitch out China about Taiwan. Nothing says “elder statesman” like less than a year between a botched evacuation of Afghanistan and a proxy war of choice against Russia followed maybe by a skirmish or two with China in China’s backyard. You’re free to disagree with me on all my implied opinions, that’s fine. The solution for these is as complex as the causes. But we can probably agree these aren’t good things. Sound, well reasoned people in systems of wise governance aren’t known for fuel shortages, declining food supplies, and war.
Yet through it all. Smart people who actually payed attention in college calculus class are doing what humans are meant to do. They’re launching spacecraft.
You can look up to the sky, or you can look at the shit on your shoes. Right now the shit is talking loudly, using words like disinformation, and spending money so much that the concept of money begins to diminish. It is the skies that show the dream. Idiots cannot reach the sky. Shit cannot build a rocket. Don’t let shit drag you down. In the end, it’s just shit.
Good luck y’all!
A.C.
P.S. Hat tip to Sondrakistan for reminding me how cool it is to be alive right now.