(no subject)

[prog]

Me am sad that people are being cynical about future moon & Mars missions because Bush is vocally backing them, and therefore something stinks.

Of course by "people" I mean Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, and I dunno how effective a barometer he is, but one could make the argument.

Another reason not to like Bush, though for bizarro reasons.

Speaking of Bizarro, to people who bring out the "Why are we spending money on outer space when it could better go to solving problems here on earth?" I say:

1. Your notion of national finances as a zero-sum game is inaccurate, and
2. You are acting exactly like the villain from that one episode of Super-Friends and you know I could never support you if you keep up that sort of thing.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I'm all for space exploration and settlement, just NOT NOW. It seems like a really bad time to be focusing a lot of attention on that. It'd be like Hoover proposing a moon shot (or something equivalently grandiose and long-term) in 1932. It seems solely politically motivated. Also, what little I heard about the plans included scrapping the International Space Station, which sounds kind of ridiculous to me. Let's keep going with that, and rehabilitate our shuttle program, and then maybe 20-30 years from now we'll go to Mars for fun.

Also, I'm surprised a Republican wouldn't want to encourage privatized space flight. Or maybe that's too much of a security threat?

[keimel.livejournal.com]

It'd be like Kennedy saying "We'll put a man on the moon before the end of the decade!"

Here, you've got eight and a half years, make it happen.

Granted, the political conditions are in many ways different, we don't have duck and cover drills now but we do have poeple confiscating nail clippers in the airport. I suppose discussing current political climes in comparison with other times is much like "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

I disagree with several things King George II has done (that li'l scavenger hunt for WMD's is the big one), but a commitment to the space program is good. The benefits of both the space program and our nations military programs on the rest of our technological world have been immense and I'm not just talkin bout tang and MRE's. (well, MRE's are good to throw at unruly cow-orkers)

Ok... stopping rant... go with that Kennedy thing above.

[prog.livejournal.com]

A more important diff between now and 40 years ago is the lack of competition. We were in a very literal race to the top, back then, and you could very reasonably argue that it was a matter not just of national pride, but national defense (whee, orbital bombardment). Now we have a vast lead over any nation that might want to pick a new space race with us, so you can make the argument (as some here have) that talk of a Mars-shot nothing more than a ploy to get more Americans to look up and pay less attention to all the mess at their feet, at least through November.

And while I can make counter-arguments to these (there's always something to be said for looking up), I grind my teeth that my president can't even tell me what I've been wanting to hear, without me wondering what's in it for him. (No, I don't think that this reaction is equivalent to "question authority", which I try to always do, even against authority I like. This is automatically doubting authority. I hate developing prejudices, and becoming cynical. Argggh.) And that's probably more the motivation for my post.

Either way, I will follow this story with great interest, you bet.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I think an even huger difference is that the early '60s was at the peak of national unity and prosperity and forward-thinking-ness. Yes, there were plenty of things wrong-- the cold war, racial inequities, lack of attention to the environment, etc-- but by and large things were going pretty smoothly and it was a good time to dream (and Kennedy was an eloquent dreamer). Right now things are more chaotic than they've been in (relative) peacetime since the Depression, and it's almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

I'm cribbing a lot of my ideas about history and zeitgeist from Generations (and other books) by William Strauss and Neil Howe. A lot of the details of what they say seem wrong or tenuous (and a lot of their jargon and rhetoric is super pretentious), but their basic premise, that the generational cycle repeats itself roughly every 80 years, is very compelling. It's hard not to see the events of the last five years or so through the lens of their theory (first published in 1991).