Progressives, or socialists, or whatever they call themselves this week like to say they’re on the “right side of history”. Nobody is on the right side of history.
To say “history bends my way” is to assume you are a God. “The universe must bend to me, because I am correct.” It doesn’t. The universe does no man’s bidding. Nor does it care how deeply you believe in your inherent perfection.
Nor does history inherently progress upward. For every wide eyed youth who expects Utopia after just a few committee meetings… and eventually a few executions… there’s a equal and opposite generation of hunter gatherers that moved through time without ever thinking about time in a linear way. How many million generations grew old and died without seeing the other side of a hill at the edge of a traditional hunting territory? How many new ideas for bow design, or agricultural innovation, or cultural enrichment simply never happened. The mind boggles.
In the early 21st century, humanity looks like it is locked in a relentless upward climb to glory. It’s appearance without reality. The masses are not climbing. They’re driven rabid by instant communication. Our churning upheaval is another reflection of the twitchy sudden shifts that came about from the Gutenberg press.
Twitter is not real. Until the evolved ape holding with opposed thumbs a device of infinite power learns this, we are maladapted to the world we’ve built.
We’re prone to madness. We panic. We’re easily led. And we’re obsolete.
Already, the newest generations are a different human variant. For better or worse, they have brains rewired since birth by small glass display screens with dopamine dispensing media. They cannot think like the humans of before, just as the humans of before cannot think like them.
Thus, the frenetic spasms of modern life are just that; frenetic spasms.
Yet we sense inflection points in time. All my life this has been a thing I pondered. If you look, you will see. If you see you’re no longer the same as those who do not see.
The most advanced maritime explorers in humanity, the Polynesians, must have pondered the same eternal questions. At least some of them might have.
Some portion of that group, presumably the bravest of the brave, cast off from atolls and specks of land and explored all the way to extremely remote Easter Island. They arrived at the closest thing to the middle of nowhere our planet offers. Depending on who’s archaeology text you believe, this happened sometime in the 4th or 8th century.
Whenever it happened, the explorers found a place no human had ever occupied. They also found Paschalococos disperta (the Rapa Nui palm), an absolutely stellar material for boat building. Imagine the joy these sailing badasses experienced at the discovery of a large island with good resources.
By 1650 the palm was extinct. Modern man cannot understand that level of being stranded. I simply cannot think that way. Nor can you. Yet it happened.
The Rapa Nui imprisoned themselves on a remote speck of the planet they formerly explored. Collapse and poverty was fated from that point on. Captain Cook, an explorer from a culture that took a thousand years to catch up with the first arrivals at Easter Island, showed up in 1744. He found an impoverished people. They were literally the survivors of utter collapse.
We have words for such concepts but they’re inadequate. We speak by analogy, trying to muster the ultimate vision of a world or people that’s completely destroyed; Armageddon, Apocalypse, Mad-Max, SHTF. Call it what you want, on Easter Island it happened.
The thing I ponder is that some of them must have known their fate. Polynesian sailors weren’t fools. They knew how boats were made. They knew how palm trees grew. Some of them must have watched the dwindling stock of building materials with increasing alarm.
I’m sure they tried to avert this avoidable mess, just as we try to avert our current self inflicted messes. They failed. As we fail.
What did they think as the last ocean-worthy hull rotted away? What was their world for “Armageddon”? It must have been a long time coming. Some of them must have seen it happening. A few had to have known what that meant.
Most people don’t think that deeply. Surely most islanders were the same as all people in all times. Focusing on the mundane. Arguing with their neighbor. Pissed off about or enthralled by the chieftain’s expensive public works policy. Hoping to woo a good mate. Trying to keep the garden growing. Wondering if the new generation of kids were idiots. Etc…
But there were some who must have known the full horror of losing the last boat. The few, the wiser, the aware, they always know. They know because they pause, notice, reflect, and think. They use their big monkey brains to ascertain cause and effect. The building material for boats is gone. What have we done?
Did they stand furious on the shore of an island they would never leave and scream their soul’s torment into the universe? If not, then what? Can you imagine being in that person’s head? Can you imagine observing the fools in the village bickering about their little lives when the whole ocean had become impassible? Can you imagine knowing it’s all going to shit, it already started going to shit, it’ll keep going to shit for the rest of your life, it’ll be shit for your children’s life and their children too… for as far as your monkey brain can comprehend; nothing but a long slow dismal decline.
Imagine the weight of the universe in a single human mind. To stand there, feeling the sand, soft and sinking beneath their feet, and know there’s no solution. The resignation is heartbreaking. Humans are still new at thinking. There on that shore an evolved monkey looked at the sky and pondered to the limits of a finite mind amid infinite loss: Is this it?
When I was a boy they taught me the first European to reach the new world was Columbus, who, as Bugs Bunny sang, “sailed the ocean blue to arrive in 1492”. Like everything else I was taught in school, this was wrong. I don’t know if it was deliberate falsehood by bored teachers or oversimplification by ignorant ones.
L’Anse aux Meadows is a small spot in northern Newfoundland. It is firmly established (as it was when my teachers instructed me otherwise) that the Norse had a settlement there. Tree ring analysis puts it at the year 1021.
Imagine the vast gulf in time and space between Medieval Europe (itself a remnant of the long dead Western Roman Empire) and the Mississippian culture that was thriving not too far south of the point of contact. Medieval Norse explorers bridged the gap, or almost did, or perhaps they simply tried. Regardless of intent, they failed spectacularly in terms of joining the two.
Archaeology suggests that the Norse weren’t defeated so much as they retreated… never to return. They may have failed but they did manage to go home. That’s no small thing.
Imagine standing on that shore, watching your culture and the Norse parting ways. Those two paths in time wouldn’t meet again for 471 years. When Europeans returned again they’d make first contact in what is now Cuba, not what is now Canada. They’d inadvertently carry smallpox. They’d bring with them firearms. The Spanish would bring horses. Whatever incremental change that could have happened with the Norse became a landslide with the Spanish.
If you stood on that shore watching the last Norse boat leave you would have no idea that the rift would be half a millennia. It would be impossible to know that the strengths and weaknesses of both sides would change completely. Whatever happened at this contact, the next was very different.
Maybe they were happy the smelly dipshits were leaving. Maybe they wished they’d pried the secret of smelting iron out of their heads. Maybe they expected them to come back the next year. Maybe they were better off without them. Certainly a harsher, larger, irreversible contact five centuries and thousands of miles away could not have been foretold by anyone present at the time.
Thus it passed. Explorers came. Explorers left. The Norse left not much more than footprints. Their absence wasn’t the start of anything. It was a footnote leading to a gap of half a millennia.
I was born to the only culture that ventured past earth. My people walked on the moon.
Then… they didn’t.
I was too young to experience that moment. Just a kid. I never saw a live moon landing on TV. It was done before I was old enough to remember.
The generation before me tried but failed to pave the way for mine. As a kid I had high hopes. America had high hopes. I remember being ecstatic when the Space Shuttle first flew.
Then… hope faded. NASA crawled up its risk averse ass and died. America recently seeks the same outcome.
Oh sure, there’s been progress. We have lasers and microwaves and cell phones and all sorts of cool new technology. But over the decades the spirit of adventure and the willingness to take risk has been systematically beaten out as many humans as possible.
Gen X that I am, I have always been standing on the shore watching options ebb. Twelve men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. In due time, I gave up hope that my generation would go where others had gone. I began to give up hope that any generation would return.
How different am I than my hypothetical Polynesian? He was trapped on an island without the resources to make an ocean going boat. How different am I than my hypothetical native? Are grainy black and white videos of men on the moon any different? It’s the same. The bittersweet and scarcely recognized loss of watching the secret of iron sail away toward Greenland.
I too remain at the shore; trapped in a little spherical human cage.
By 2010 the Chief of NASA said his agencies goal was to “reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” (Google it.) That’s when I really gave up.
So why am I telling you all this? Because resignation, despair, failure of the soul is never the right choice. The human soul is meant to soar.
Today the whimsical human parody Elon Musk, pulled another rabbit our of a hat. He used government money and his balls to do what armies of bureaucratic risk averse desk jockeys could not. Today was the first experimental orbital launch attempt of Superheavy / Starship.
The thing about Superheavy is that it’s on the verge of completely changing the cost of flight. Elon’s audacious goal is to make the per pound cost of putting objects beyond the earth’s gravity well an order of magnitude cheaper than it is now. He’s making good strides in that direction. He created an organization that’s doing what no other bureaucracy could.
His biggest challenge now is less a matter of gravity than the government (which funds him yet defaults to tying innovation in knots). This morning went well. A rocket with twice the thrust of Saturn V evaded both the bounds of earth and the red tape of man. It made it to the edge of space.
Then it exploded.
Adventure is hard. Everyone knew the risks. Watch the video. People cheered at how far they’d gone instead of lamenting that the flight wasn’t perfect on the first experiment. That is how you get to space! Cheers, not lamentation.
I have more hope today than I did yesterday. I may eventually be more than the guy standing on the edge. At this point I’m too old to go even if I could but that was never the point. I may once again be of the people who can land on the moon. That’s what I really want!
The link below is cued up for the launch.
A shorter video is here.
P.S. I’m sure I’ve told the Easter Island / Norse / Space story before. It’s a thing that’s often on my mind.
Very well put, as usual.
Along those lines, I’ve thought for a while that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is something similar.
For any given planet, once you have population sufficient to produce enough smart and capable beings to achieve spaceflight, you only have so much time to turn that into space based resource extraction. If you don’t, as your population collapses, so does the chance to get off the planet, because you have already used up the easy to get resources. You mined the metal. You burned the fuel. And you burned your best and brightest too.
If the cycle repeats, it’s infinitely harder the next time, and if you fail more than once, you are done.
We’re pretty close to being done if that’s true. We turned the momentum of the moon landings into the morass of the civil rights movement, and progressives have been busy dragging society down to a lowest common denominator ever since.
Of course, there is a small but non-zero chance we got to the moon, but the zookeepers revealed themselves and let us know “this far, and no further”.
I hope it’s just humans being human, as we seem to have just enough left for one more chance to leap…
nick
Great post. I’m old enough that I did watch that first moon landing (by a strange coincidence, I’m pretty sure that it was the same week that the first Sesame Street show aired – milestones for very different cultures.). I believe that if we never risk real failure (up to and including dying), then we never gain real reward. I just wish that Musk had started his private space work a couple of decades ago, so that I might actually be able to leave this world, if only for a few hours. Probably not to be now, but our grand-kids might have the opportunity I don’t.
On the other hand, your Easter Island example is a real warning of where we could end up, today. It’s hard work to keep things going, and we don’t get to ‘read ahead’ to find out how the story about the 2020s ends. All that we can do is guess what’s likely to be coming — and it is probably going to be something wildly different than we forecast. It might be time to try living by the philosophy that “A pessimist can only be pleasantly surprised”.
But only when we are stuck in the rat race. Taking mental-safety breaks away to the woods and water is a great idea, and while it means that you might be a while between posts, I am more than willing to wait for you to come back to the keyboard.
Despair is a sin, thank you for your continued vocal optimism.
I’ve found that people who think ahead are rare. Having a small farm I need to know what I want to achieve 2-3 years out minimum. Most people can’t seem to plan past lunch. If you have a very short time horizon all the knowledge of history in the world won’t change anything. Also the hubris of this time we’ll do it right doesn’t help.
I’ve often wondered why we stopped at the moon. The biggest piece of evidence to me that the moon landing was faked is we stopped there and haven’t gone past orbit since. 1/10 people heading to California died – true exploration is dangerous for the explorers. Did we let safety first place us into a cocoon of non-achievement (Mike Rowe’s Safety Third)?
Explorers and pioneers are not nice or gentle people. One book I read years ago by a man who as a boy knew some of those people remarked none of them were people you would want to introduce to your family. Being nice and being safe sound like good ideas but allow interference by non-achievers with achievers.
I’m sure the Islander that could see the apocalypse coming about was told he was being mean. No one wants to listen to a meanie.
I highly recommend Christoher Wanjek’s book, “Spacefarers”; a critical look at the scientific and technical challenges surrounding spaceflight. There’s a lot more involved than people realize.
Our moon landing was little more than a day trip. We went there, grabbed a few samples, planted a flag and went home. The challenge of living on the moon is a whole order of magnitude greater. The International Space Station (ISS) has been a wonderful laboratory to test the ability of human beings to live and work in space as well as develop the technology to go further. It’s time to use what we’ve developed.
Anyway, read the book. It doesn’t say that spaceflight is impossible but it does provide a reality based outline what will be needed to do so.
You echo my thoughts, thanks.
I suspect the last Polynesian boats didn’t rot away, but were sailed off by some of the more foresighted islanders; maybe they made it elsewhere, maybe not, but I bet some took that risk.
Risk aversion is a huge issue, but folks like Musk probably have the same concerns as you AND have the wherewithal to try break the fetters of the mundane and banal. Comparing the coverage of yesterday’s partial success is instructive; the legacy media for the most part reported “Musk’s huge rocket blew up [haha it failed]”, but the folks I read for entertainment and education are all about the learning curve, the data and the pride of those making this happen, and most of those are working at SpaceX are a generation or two younger than you and I; I see some of that in individuals where I work too. So do not despair.
Given how many other rich men’s space toys have ceased recently I wonder just how deep Musk’s pockets are for this effort?
As I’ve mentioned in other blogs, space is dangerous and expensive. Pushing the limits always generates learnable lessons from failures.
It’s not yet lack of trees suitable for ocean going sailing craft and thus stranding/Armageddon. It’s more enough money and desire to explore.
I wonder how many interesting science experiments were shut down and forgotten during that worldwide event known in America as “The Great Depression”?
“Humans are still knew at thinking.” … or did you mean ‘new’ at thinking?
It sort-of works the first way too…. 🙂
Ugh! There’s always a typo!
Thanks for the note. It’s fixed.
Thank you for another excellent bit of written thought.
I DID watch the grainy b/w images ‘live from the moon’; also visited the ‘museum’ at KFC when it was a Quonset hut in the middle of a lime-rock parking lot that was filled with un-used and retired space & rocket ‘stuff’. You walked around in the summer Florida sun and tried to take in what you were seeing. We built plastic models of what we saw on TV and hoped in the best dreams possible for more ‘coolness’.
Skylab came along and that was okay but seemed sort of anti-climatic but it did make sense if you got down into the details of the science. Then the SSL program started. Have family that was involved in making that work. As that program progressed I could tell politics were more important than the science but it did sometimes give us some ‘WOW’ and a tease of hope.
Although I have not given up completely, I’m still not sure if we’ll every get our DNA off this planet. As the saying goes, ships weren’t built to stay in the harbor.
Thanks again | Good luck to us all.
Elon promotes the “Fail Fast” model. Instead of spending years to make something perfect make it the best you can now and use it. If it fails you can use that data to make version 2, rinse and repeat.
I believe it was Chuck Yeager who said after the shuttle disaster that NASA should roll out the next one and launch it. He understood that there’s a momentum to things. Not just physical things, but spiritual (esprit) things as well. I learned this when I watched NASA just sit for years. Musk, I believe, got tired of waiting around for people to make good on the promises about space we’ve been told about for generations. And like a good human, decided to do it himself. I like him so much I might even join Twitter.
Yeager was a wise fellow. I note that the press is as risk averse as the weakest lamest Karen to ever wear a mask alone in a car on the way to her therapist. They’re gloating that the craft exploded as if that was totally unexpected and Musk is a loser. Those among us who know how these things work were impressed it did as well as it did. I was almost moved to tears seeing that big audacious machine blast upward. If I thought it would have to work flawlessly the first time I’d never expect anything to happen. If the Wright Brothers were making the first airplane in 2023 it would have to come with autopilot, parachutes, and a written, binding, legal guarantee it would be able to cross the Atlantic on day one; and then the FAA would spring into existence and demand more hoop jumping because people who can’t fly ought to regulate those who can.
Thinking of the shuttle reminds me of my youth when the first shuttle blew up. I watched it, though “well that sucked”, and was over it in about ten minutes. My grandmother saw it too but she flaked out. She parked in front of the TV and watched the news repeat the same 30 second video for hours. I asked “it’s been all day, why are you still watching that?” She said “I want to know why it blew up.” I said “It blew up because it’s a fuckin’ space craft! It’s not a Buick going to the grocery store.” I got in so much shit for swearing at my grandmother (justly deserved since I was a wise ass about it). Regardless, I stand by my reasoning. Spaceflight isn’t easy and it’s ridiculous to expect perfection at the early stages. For that matter, cars are a hundred years old and sometimes a Buick going to the grocery store will slide into a ditch too. None of us sit all day in front of the news demanding to know why the Buick was in a ditch. Hell, boats are technology as old as humanity and sometimes they’ll sink too. Gordon Lightfoot might write songs about them but we seem to generally “get” that a boat might sink.
I also note another development in space exploration. Absolutely every single thing that launches is now built to be 100% controllable from earth. One lesson of the shuttle was “if you blow up an school teacher the nation will go apeshit and shut down the program forever”. I think the Shuttle was the last launch vehicle that couldn’t fly on remote control. It required on board control. That’s over from now on.
Musk is pretty awesome because he’s found a job that suits him. He’s functioning as a set of subcontracted balls for a bureaucracy (a society?) that gelded itself. I’m glad he’s doing it.
I used to think Musk was a rent seeker, just looking for whatever the government would fund and making that; electric cars, boring machines, wherever there’s a subsidy he was there. However, as he succeeds with SpaceX all is forgiven. All I want is success and he’s bringing home the bacon so I salute him. He’s also bringing something like “planetary wifi” with his constellation of minisats. Just another side gig for a man with brass balls.
But join Twitter? Eww! You don’t have to do that! You’ll get stupid all over your computer. Just enjoy the show as SpaceX curbstomps all competition and slowly turns rockets into “space trucks”.
“Some of them must have seen it happening”, kinda like these days.
“Who dares wins”
The Saturn Five was an incredibly complex machine, a miracle it worked.
To have been to the moon and back over 50 years ago was a miracle.
Elon Musk wants to make it mundane.
My money on the future of mankind is Musk, not despair.
I’m almost 70 cycles around the sun. I watched the first moon landing live on 📺.
I worked for the DoD for 39 years and had the exceptional pleasure of working at Edwards AFB for 20 years. I worked over a dozen shuttle landings on site and in person.
It’s never going to happen again
I’d prefer to think that our moon adventure is more like the Vikings in Newfoundland. We weren’t so much defeated as retreated. We left our footprints on the moon but we were able to return and that IS something. My hope is that it won’t take half a millennium to return.
I’ve been chewing on this one for awhile AC. It’s in the air, isn’t it? Things can’t keep going on like this. It’s getting so bad that sitting on the couch, eating potato chips and watching sportzball…is as bad as spitting on your hands, raising the black flag and slitting throats. But TV, beer and the couch are easier than guns, steel and shot, so…
I dunno what to do with any of it. Except pray…
I too watched the Lunar landing live on TV, obsessed over all things ‘space’. Built scale models and read sci-fi about Moonbases and Lunar colonies…
But I’ve never understood the “Why did we not go back?!” laments. We DID go back a few times, prospecting for water, oxides, metals, green cheese, ANYTHING that would allow us to build even a remotely self-sustaining (semi)permanent base. Found largely rock and dust, silicates.
Am I wrong? Misinformed?
Subsequent research has shown glimpses. Whisps of this, hints of that, and speculations of the other. Nothing to hang your hat on.
Perhaps SpaceX can change the cost structure to the point where Elon & Co. can bring some 21’st century prospecting technology to bear on our Moon. Maybe something worth making the trip for does exist there. Here’s hoping!
Consider, if you will, the ancient Egyptians. They had fabric, wood, cord, and fire. They even had birds-there are pictures. [Pause for sinking-in] Humanity could have had flight five thousand years ago. But no. Something else was missing.
You know that’s not such a silly thought. At least a fabric balloon could have happened but nobody gave it a shot for thousands of years. Having seen a balloon it’s hard to imagine not being able to imagine it.
The other thing that’s amazing is how much can happen when whatever was missing suddenly is present. The Wright Bros first flew on December 17, 1903 and man walked on the moon on July 20, 1969. “It” was a rampaging monster for a while!
That’s 65 years from no flight to space. Absolutely amazing when “it” is present, whatever “it” is, humans are incredible.
Also, NASA last had a man on the moon on December 14, 1972 and it is now May 4, 2023. That’s 50+ years. NASA has managed to NOT land on the moon for almost as long as it took humanity to go from Wright Brothers to Lunar landing. When “it” is gone… it’s gone!
Heck “it” is so gone in 2023 that I’m just happy the power grid is still functioning.