"What? You mean it's all downhill from here?"
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 ...
"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.
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