Who draws parallels with the curious fact about acceleration, that "as an object approaches the speed of light... you can throw more and more energy into accelerating that object" but "it becomes increasingly reluctant to pick up speed. Instead, that energy gets added to the mass of the object, making it even harder to accelerate. Eventually, despite any effort you might make, the object just becomes more massive, stubbornly staying short of exceeding, or even completely reaching, the speed of light"
and limits-to-growth, innovation-gets-harder-and-more-expensive type ideas
"As John Horgan pointed out in his book The End of Science the cost of making fundamental technological discoveries has been a steady march from basement tinkers to the Large Hadron Collider. Where we could once make fundamental leaps for the cost of some polished lenses and a few pounds of chemicals, it now takes massive international efforts to move the goal line an inch. To make the kind of breakthroughs required to reach the Singularity, or clear any of the hurdles standing in its way, an investment greater than anything we’ve seen before will be required."
as well as the mystery of why we haven't heard from alien civilisations yet, given that there's millions or even billions of solar systems that could have planets that might support life.
"Maybe civilizations just … run out of steam.
Maybe instead of a never-ending climb, we’re doomed to just follow an
arc of our own making, right back into the ground..... perhaps the answer to “where are they” can be derived simply
from the one intelligent civilization we know. Where are they? Nowhere.
They didn’t spread to the stars. They didn’t reach a technical nirvana.
Instead they just … failed.... They built systems in which technical progress was too closely allied
with the profit motive, and as the scale of investment increased and
the prospect of gain became both more long term and speculative, they
simply stalled out. Like a rocket with insufficient velocity to achieve
orbit, they surged up, up, up but eventually could not move any higher,
or even maintain the peak of their flight. They fell back. They used up,
wore down, wore out....
"One day going to the moon was a dream. Then it was a fact. Then it was history. Then it was a myth"
This "Moon landing as myth' idea reminded me of two things -- Daft Punk's "Contact", which I talked about at the Tomorrow Never Knows Symposium as an elegy for Space and the Western Faustian drive of a "perpetual spiritual reaching out into boundless space" (Spengler) and then I quoted not the bit that DP sampled from Eugene Cernan on "Contact" ("there's something out there" etc etc) but what he actually said, as the last man to stand on the Moon's surface, when he climbed up the ladder into the lunar module:
“As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow.”
The other thing "then it was a myth" re. the Moon missions reminded me of was that when I did an interview with Salon.com about Retromania, and during the course of it mentioned the space race, some idiot in the typically-Salon.com rebarbative comments section made fun of that: "how dated, he's talking about the space race" . As if the idea of Humanity pushing beyond its terrestial confines was somehow camp - not an epic civilisational project or essential spiritual imperative - but more or less on the same level as the open-necked shirt and medallion-in-a-nest-of-chest-hair. Something that went out of style in the Seventies.
Actually the analogy is more with something like Woodstock -- the Space Race, as a locus of excitement and expectation, now regarded, with the enormous condescension of posterity, as a form of generational over-estimation - something it's embarrassing when the old folks keep banging on and on about it....
This "Moon landing as myth' idea reminded me of two things -- Daft Punk's "Contact", which I talked about at the Tomorrow Never Knows Symposium as an elegy for Space and the Western Faustian drive of a "perpetual spiritual reaching out into boundless space" (Spengler) and then I quoted not the bit that DP sampled from Eugene Cernan on "Contact" ("there's something out there" etc etc) but what he actually said, as the last man to stand on the Moon's surface, when he climbed up the ladder into the lunar module:
“As I take man's last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I'd like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow.”
The other thing "then it was a myth" re. the Moon missions reminded me of was that when I did an interview with Salon.com about Retromania, and during the course of it mentioned the space race, some idiot in the typically-Salon.com rebarbative comments section made fun of that: "how dated, he's talking about the space race" . As if the idea of Humanity pushing beyond its terrestial confines was somehow camp - not an epic civilisational project or essential spiritual imperative - but more or less on the same level as the open-necked shirt and medallion-in-a-nest-of-chest-hair. Something that went out of style in the Seventies.
Actually the analogy is more with something like Woodstock -- the Space Race, as a locus of excitement and expectation, now regarded, with the enormous condescension of posterity, as a form of generational over-estimation - something it's embarrassing when the old folks keep banging on and on about it....
