We Once Dared
There was a time when we dared take great risks for worthy adventures. We used to imagine great accomplishments as within our grasp. We used to seriously consider projects that, today would not even be creditably discussed, let alone attempted. We have become a risk-averse culture to the point where we have no grand aspirations save our own hedonism.
Sending a man to the moon in 1969 was only the most manifest example of the old confidence. The story is by now a well-worn cliche, but it bears reminding. The Apollo program was declared, funded, researched, and built within the space of 8 years. The risks undertaken by the astronauts were extreme. Three died on the launchpad in Apollo 1 but the program went on. It was expensive, consuming a much larger fraction of GDP than NASA currently receives. But nevertheless they did it.
Today we would never do such a thing. Indeed, it is not even a hypothetical. The US manned program has ambled aimlessly in space since the 70's. We presently even lack the ability to send astronauts into space ourselves. There is no need to hypothesize what we would do. We are already deep in a state of neglect.
Today we would never pursue an Apollo program because it would be considered too dangerous. It would, frankly, be too ambitious. In the current climate, in which human life is considered nigh-infinitely valuable, no dream is so inspiring as to justify the risks. We have become a risk averse society to an extreme.
We also wouldn’t spend the money. No matter how much of a pittance science and space exploration may be compared to our vast resources (recession or no), there is a stultifying lack of vision. It is always claimed that ‘problems on Earth must be solved first’ or we should ‘take on poverty’ before we are allowed to dream. These are the words of a stagnating society.
It’s not just in space where we have idled. Taking a page from Peter Thiel, our progress in the world of things, as opposed to the digital one in silico, seems to have slowed considerably. Our mode of transport is virtually the same as it was in the 1960's. We have even regressed in some ways; it was once possibly to fly from New York to London in 2 hours on the Concorde. No longer.
We should be embarrassed by our under-performance in the face of so much latent knowledge. Our society discovered virtually infinite energy in the 1940's in the form of nuclear power. Nuclear reactors today have reached an exceptionally high state of efficiency and safety. And yet a few incidents, such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima cause us to eschew these wonders. Nuclear technology represents untold power to do good on behalf of society and the Earth. If we care about the environment with intellectual sobriety we must embrace nuclear.
And yet we don’t. The nuclear industry has stagnated and declined since the 1970's. No new reactors have been built in the US in many decades. Much of the institutional and professional knowledge in the field has retired or died of old age. We actually cannot match our old capabilities in this field at least until a new generation is trained. We discovered near limitless power, and then we hesitated and blew it. Irrational fear outweighed sober analysis of the facts.
There is far too much self-congratulation in our society about those things we have mastered, namely computers and their offshoots. These are by no means to be taken lightly. But we should not forget either the vast space of potential we once thought possible. Missions to Mars were conceived that were fully within our technical capabilities. Fusion research was began, only to wither on a shoestring budget for decades, despite the stupendous rewards of success. Big projects were undertaken, and geo-engineering planned, on an audacious level, in forms that we would never now equal. What may have been hubris on the part of the preceding generation has turned into a deep gloom about the prospects of science and technology. The old confidence that technology would lead to a better tomorrow has turned to a sour sense of dispossession.
The photo at the beginning of this post is of a Nuclear Thermal Rocket test from 1967. It is an amazing picture. No such rocket has ever flown in space. It is an experimental idea for more efficient propulsion beyond Earth orbit using the heat of the reactor to efficiently expel propellant. It remains still unproven; it was never given a chance. But that picture strikes me because, even so early in 1967, they were willing to give it a chance. They built it, probably in a very short space of time. And they probably envisioned all sorts of audacious missions that could be plausibly be performed with it: the sort that we don’t dare to consider now. They had something then, at the moment that picture was taken, that seems lost today. I am afraid that we have lost that daring. There is too much fear and risk-aversion today to dream so high. We’re a culture that worries about liability and terrorists instead. We’re hamstrung by structural deficits that prohibit us from wisely investing in the future. Most of all, we’ve eschewed the optimism of technological progress. We cling instead to our bread and circuses.
