Monday, July 18, 2011

ALL THE FUTURES OF YESTERDAY












Ten days ago we watched Atlantis – the last space shuttle – take off. At the time I wrote, “is this the end of space exploration as we know it? Yes, I do miss the 20th century when I took acid and other men went to the moon. Once we had space ships. Now we have smart phones.” And now, just to rub salt in the wound here’s this NASA promo from the 1970s predicting we’d have space colonies by the year 2000. Click here and weep.

Click here for The Rolling Stones

The secret word is Failure

2 comments:

Aleleeinn said...

And we would have reached many of our dreams if we had not drowned ourselves in wars (hot and Cold).
It seems hard to believe, but it seems that simple to me. The whole damned world with few exceptions squanders their collective national wealth on machines of death and destruction.
And what do we have to show for it--MORE OF THE SAME BULLSHIT!
We live in a world led by men (and women--Maggie) without vision.
Without art in its myriad forms, I'd have been dead long agon and damned glad about it.
So to quote Mick Farren: "What the fuck are we supposed to do now!"

Unknown said...

Aleleeinn - 'What the fuck are we supposed to do now!'

Good fucking question. The space shuttle was originally supposed to be part of a space travel infrastructure including a space station, space tug, moon base and trip to mars. If that system had been setup in the '70's as proposed we could have had the O'Neill colonies n the '90's.

As it is we humans are so broke on a planetary scale we could be seeing the end of the space age.