Humanity as a whole needs something to strive for, frontiers, challenges, opportunities for growth. The modern world has methodically destroyed all of the traditional sources of these. There are very few unexplored parts of the world. The edges of science have become so distant that it takes an entire lifetime of learning to reach them. While there are wars, major countries are trying to avoid fighting each other to avoid destroying the world. Even the internet has become the bastion of huge multi-national multi-billion dollar companies. The story of a plucky pair of programmers staring a million dollar startup has gone the way of the intrepid mountain man striking it rich by finding an undiscovered silver mine.

So in the absence of the traditional outlets for excessive energy that energy has turned against civilization and humanity itself. Afterall if there is some apocalypse, then we have all of the traditional outlets again.

I doubt that it is as simple as I am making it, but fifty years ago we as a race had a chance to reach for the stars by continuing the push to space, opening up an entirely new set of new outlets for this energy. We chose not to do this, both of the then space powers chose to build weapons here on earth rather than pushing on into space. Both the USSR and the USA were well within five to seven years of being able to put full-scale colonies on the moon and missions to Mars before the first US moon launch. However, the US went for propaganda victories rather than the development of a sustainable infrastructure. They had potential aerospace planes in prototype and early test stages that would have done what the space shuttle did, almost twenty years before it flew. But…JFK was worried that the USSR would beat the US to the moon. So he pushed for the tried and true rocket solution, we knew it would work, but it was absolutely useless for any real exploration or space development. The Saturn V was a great heavy-lift rocket, but it was a horrible long-term investment. The cost per pound was high enough that there was no way anyone would agree to use it to put enough mass in orbit to build a moon base or any human-led exploration of the solar system.

So, the US beat the USSR to the moon taking the wind out of the USSR’s progress into ‘deep space.’ Leaving the US with no direct reason to push anymore, and the US with a lift system that was too expensive to use for anything except propaganda. So rather than exploring the solar system, we got ‘war’ on everything from poverty to drugs to terrorism and a focus on earth while we gazed in our navel rather than at the stars.

Leaving us with the joy that is the early twenty-first century.