DoD Buzz | PAS11: A warning from the rocket men

[polaris93]

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/06/21/pas11-a-warning-from-the-rocket-men/

Although everyone expects the U.S. and world defense budgets to hit a plateau at best and a decline at worst, the aerospace giants with exhibitions here are keeping up an

Comments

[jordan179]

I am confident that the human race is going to expand beyond the Earth. I am far less confident that America is going to contribute the dominant cultural influences to that subset of human culture which expands beyond the Earth, which is the subset of human culture from which most of the great civilizations of the far future will be descended.

Think of Earth as the "Africa" of the Solar System. Cradle of Mankind -- and most of the future human cultures will be descended from the small subset of those which diversified here and then colonized other worlds in which explosive growth and radiant cultural variation could take place. And, like Africa, thousands of years from now, Earth will probably be the hellhole of the human worlds, a place at best ignored and at worst divided between the real Great Powers.

[dexeron]

I think of some group of men back then, the most powerful of the powerful, possibly ruling over many tribes (the world's first empire). They saw no need to move beyond what they knew, and it was only the brave (foolhardy?) and disaffected who strove northwards and eastwards and ultimately settled the fertile crescent (and later Europe.)

A thousand years from now, we'll have to sit through some Martian or Jovian writing a song about those poor backwards savages on Earth. "Where nothing ever grows, no gigantic gas monsters flow, do they know it's Kerflaswathrapul at all? (Feed the solar system!)"

Lionel Richie will have been transformed into a cyborg by then, of course, and he'll wisely steer clear of any idiotic such projects this time. :P

[polaris93]

We've never had 7 billion people alive on Earth before. The more densely populated a region is, the faster disease pathogens travel from hosts to new hosts -- and that's true even when the region is the entire planet. Many of the pathogens we are already used to, including, sometimes, the common cold, can cause brain damage. So can more exotic ones that are turning up in places we didn't even know were places. Seriously. It's claimed people in this country are getting smarter, using IQ scores to prove it. Well, IQ scores are calculated on averages -- and the "average" can be tweaked any way the test-makers and those asking that tests be done want. Furthermore, IQ has little or nothing to do with common sense, initiative, native curiosity, maturity, and a host of other qualities all of which are necessary to technological innovation and intelligent applications of new inventions. Then there are religious beliefs, and what training in them can do to various cultures -- think "Islam" and "the Middle East." And now a sort of

[polaris93]

Jordan, in my time everything I've ever cared about has fallen in ruins, and everything I've wanted to occur, including space travel and everything related to it, has been derailed and made impossible by people who'd rather take bribes/abuse power/enjoy all the perks of abusing power, sometimes after actually being attempted and then cruelly halted for good (think "Apollo Moon landings" and the possibility of colonizing other worlds). I've had every aspect of what is considered a normal, successful life denied me: marriage, hope, love, a career, children, a real home, parents that loved me, college degrees, friendship, you name it. And though for a while I thought that at least in a few cases there'd be people I could talk shop with and discuss interesting things with sanely, now almost everyone I know has slipped into this "I'm a [conservative/liberal: take your pick], therefore I know everything there is to know, so I refuse to look at any data or proofs about anything you or anyone else may show me, so there, nyah-nyah!" mode