Posted on 06/24/2010 2:37:38 PM PDT by xjcsa
I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.
This may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans. 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have *not* been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.
(Excerpt) Read more at charltonteaching.blogspot.com ...
Go to the moon? How on earth can we do that when we have to fight poverty and global warming?!?! There are environmental impact statements to be made.
No, it’s the Alien Moon Base that’s kept us from going back:
http://www.consciousape.com/news/moonbase-are-there-aliens-on-the-moon/
LOL
Well the proof is in the White House...
Bravo Sierra
Peak human?
Yep, we have to devote “resources” to “fight poverty”, “fight racism”, “fight gender bias”, allow “homosexual marriage”, promote “economic justice” and “social justice”. A moon landing and space exploration are trivial compared to the problems of the poor and downtrodden and “ghetto” conditions under which the poor and downtrodden are forced to live by a sinister exploitative system.................(sarcasm)
It’s not that we’ve lost capability...it’s that our politics have become more and more stupid as time has gone on. Our time, energy and intellect is spent [wasted] solving “problems” that don’t really exist as directed by the political forces seeking permanent establishment at the top of the heap.
“Bravo Sierra”
Nah... read the article. The premise is sensational, I suspect to draw attention to the piece, but the guy is right-on with his observation.
Why we haven't been back is multifold.One of course is politics and spending. A second is education.Having just retired after 38 years in the classroom I recall the many arguments I have had over curriculum and methods.I always reminded my colleagues that we went to the Moon, led by men whose early education was in a world of rote, screw down desks and inkwells.I illlustrated the point using the ApolloXIII scene where the engineers have to find a way to scrub the CO2. They're told two parts have to be connected and are given only the materials at hand in Aquarius.Modern education has not been able to develop people to match the critical thinking and problem solving skills shown by the NASA and Grumman enginners in Apollo XIII. That's why we seem to have stagnated intellectually. It's not nature. It's nurture.
Ridiculous.
Since the Apollo landings on the moon we have launched many historic explorations into space that have proven our intelligence and progress in space exploration.
Right now, the Cassini mission is discovering amazing new and interesting things that we never even knew existed.
While zerobama’s budget cuts for further manned moon exploration are a huge dissapointment, it has no real bearing on what we are capable of.
But the notion that we're less capable because we haven't colonized the moon is flimsy.
We only went there to begin with because of the Cold War space race.
We'll go back if we have to or if we think it's worthwhile.
I think he’s right and wrong but mostly wrong.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
However, it can be explained culturally, that is, the 3rd world tards who have been encouraged to come here, breed, and get teaching degrees would certainly have the same effect.
For example, there is no Mexican or Muslim invasion of China, and they are arguably getting "smarter" (what's actually happening is their application of capitalism has increased).
Tell you what, Pal.
If the government raises your taxes high enough that you pay for it, then you can go to the moon.
It is from a generally very interesting site. I will spend some time there, I think.
Not to say that humanity doesn’t have serious problems, but I think “been there, done that” is a more plausible explanation.
I’ve been to San Francisco twice, and have no desire to go there again. But I do still retain the capability.
"What? You mean it's all downhill from here?"
I am old enough to have witnessed the whole space program. When flights to the moon ended prematurely, I sensed that something was wrong. The infamous oil embargo further convinced me right then that I had witnessed America’s zenith. I remember the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and the spiritual/moral/educational decline since then. I lay the blame squarely on the Communists that have infiltrated our institutions and rotted our society from within. The spectacle is sickening. I am ready for another revolution which may never come.
Tell him that correlation does not equal causality. This is about cultural decay, not human capability.
actually, I agree with this opinion mostly. It reminds me of Iron Man when that government employee was screaming at his scientists to build a suit like Iron Man’s “He built it with spare parts!!....IN A CAVE!”
We can only wonder how our grandparents generation did so much more than our own.
The fastest production air-breathing aircraft is, to this day, the Blackbird family (A-12/SR-72/YF-12). Which was a late-1950s design retired in the 1990s. At the time the Blackbird was revealed to the public, either Ben Rich or Kelly Johnson (of Skunkworks fame) said that the next step would be Mach-8. We’re still not there for airbreathers ...
Wonder this turdface ever saw a cellphone, or a laptop computer? Which, by the way I’ve heard is to be outmoded. Many inventions were devised on the drawing board, and had to await technology to enable them to actually be produced.
Certainly that's true for some of us.
Well, you can say that, but I think people expected a plan of increasing our presence on the moon and doing all kinds of things. They said the public got “bored” with it - well, after you’ve watched a few grainy vids of dudes in white armor jumping around on a dead black and white surface, you’ve pretty much seen it all. What the public never understood was that apparently there was never a plan for what we were going to do when we got there. There was never a reason to go except to say we did. Same with the little house circling around 180 miles up. They’ve built it, now they don’t know what to do with it. The more I think about it, maybe that b-stard is RIGHT. Why pay for a manned space program when they don’t have a purpose, it’s just feel-good fun.
You’re right. The joke is on us. The punchline is, one day the communists are going to laugh and say what you talking about capitalism? You’ve been communist for 50 years and you never even knew it.
But the laugh is really on them because all they’ve done is prove (again) that communism doesn’t work.
There also is a decided decline in program commitment. For all its stumbles, NASA was a dedicated team who worked night and day to get it right, down to the last nut and bolt-- with equipment that today would be considered downright primitive.
This decline began to be seen with the shuttle program, when the mandate to do it cheap began to pollute the commitment to zero defects. Challenger was the canary in the coal mine--many do not recall that the day before the launch, there was a stuck valve, and the technician fixed it by climbing up and hitting it with a pipe wrench. The media thought this was cool-- and marked the beginning of the end of the manned space program.
Actually, it’s been downhill since the garden of Eden.
Who was it that said 90 percent of humanity don’t contribute anything to the world and are simply using up oxygen?
In academia, business, government, the markets, any industries, any sectors of the economy, any set of organizations for profit or not, and the vast majority within any representative samples will follow this rule:
The competency pyramid is completely upside down. The farther up the ladder of responsibility you look, the less qualified and less competent you will find the holders of those positions. Our whole civilization is being held together with baling wire and bubble gum, and mostly by people whose incentives to keep showing up are being diminished day by day.
...and Chappaquiddick.
So it basically started declining once the Pittsburgh Steelers started winning Super Bowls.
Yup, the decline can be traced exactly to the Super Bowl IX moment, when Fran Tarkenton assumed the fetal position on top of the ball in his own end zone.
I disagree, for the reason that America didn’t go to the Moon just once, but several times. We had learned so much with the existing technology that there was little else we could do there, and we had many other very potent science priorities that we wanted to attend to.
For example, we finally created and launched one of the greatest scientific instruments of all time, the Hubble telescope, only because we had moved from the Apollo Program to the Space Shuttle Program.
And what it achieved was far more important to science than the Moon landing. And it was not alone, but accompanied by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. And soon to be launched James Webb Space Telescope.
And that ignores all the probes that have been launched, all at a fraction of the cost of a manned mission to anywhere. Probes to the outer planets, even out of the solar system. Probes landing on Venus and Mars.
In fact, for there to be another manned mission to the Moon or Mars, we first need to launch tunneling robots, so that our stay there won’t have to be a short one. If you’re going to spend four months going to Mars, and four months coming back from Mars, wouldn’t it be better to spend some months there, rather than just a few days?
And the way to do that is to have an underground “Mars Hilton” waiting for you. Even going to the Moon, underground accommodations take you out of the extremes of heat and cold, vacuum, cosmic and enhanced radiation, and they terribly abrasive Lunar dust.
And once robots are there, they are in no hurry. Powered by nuclear power, they can keep working like Energizer bunnies, until they wear out.
Oh, back when we were smart, and had the technology...
One of the really cool things about Science is that it helps us accomplish heretofore unimagined tasks, and in the process, we discover even more stuff that needs to be explained, and then done- ever more affordably. Saturn-V rockets were way cool, but not cost effective. Prestige for its own sake can be extremely expensive, especially when there's a missile gap to be abated. Nostalgia is even worse; if our goals are behind us, then we have no future. It seems that the older I get, the less I know. Not because I'm getting feeble, or that humanity is getting dumber, it's because in absolute terms, the pool of new stuff to consider is expanding at a hyperbolic rate. Too much for my pea brain to process- even Wernher Von Braun would crack if he didn't specialize to a "T".
I've noticed that over the last decade or so the Universe appears finer and more elegant by the day. That ain't no accident.
Read the article? You've got to be kidding. No one on FR actually reads the article.
The same people who rail for hours about Congress not reading the bills they pass into law feel completely free to waste time and bandwidth pontificating about articles they're sure they understand after having read a one sentence excerpt.
Sigh.
“No one on FR actually reads the article.”
Right you are... I’ve caught myself doing the same thing then feeling like an idiot after catching up... it’s an easy trap to fall into since we’re conditioned to perk up on a soundbite, but it’s also what’s leading us down a very dark path.
If we conservatives don’t start reading past the headlines I’m afraid we’re all done for, in my humble opinion. Knowledge sometimes is actually power.
I do, however, agree that as a culture we no longer strive for exceptionalism, in fact competition is frowned upon.
We have a reduced sense of pride in a job well done and a reduced sense of shame when we don't meet our responsibilities.
We implement diversity for diversity's sake.
We fear lawsuits more than we desire success.
I don't see us making a comeback.
Wow. What a downer.
The left side of the bell curve is out breeding the right side, the only way things can go is down!
“I’ve noticed that over the last decade or so the Universe appears finer and more elegant by the day. That ain’t no accident.”
Certainly not, no accident.
The Universe is appearing more beautiful each day. Because we are seeing more of it now than ever before, thanks to Hubble, and a score of new telescopes that allow us to see some amazing sights, and thanks to the Internet because we can instantly share them.
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