Apollo 11 Dismembered

So, today is the 40th Anniversary of the history Apollo 11 mission landing on the moon. And let me tell you, from all of us here in Armstrong City on the moon, the celebration is looking to be…

Oh wait. Drat.

Welcome to the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11, from the planet Earth.
In memorial, I’ll be watching the movie Apollo 13 today. Which always pisses me off. Not the movie itself- the movie is great. The launch sequence is one of the best sequences I’ve ever seen put on film, and the first time I saw it in the theaters, people (including me) stood and cheered the ending.

What pisses me off is this. Of all the technology they used to go to the moon, with the possible exception of hydrogen/oxygen fuel and the parachutes, we can do way better today. A computer that can hold millions of bits of information, and navigate men to the moon? Costs ten cents and runs for three years on a watch battery. The thin aluminum skin, the width of a couple of sheets of aluminum foil put together? Replace it with carbon composites, lighter than air and capable of bouncing bullets. On and on- these guys went to the moon with the technological equivalents of stone knives and bear skins.

More glory to them, but what does that say about us? These days you’re lucky if you can hitch a ride to low earth orbit on one of three remaining shuttles- and you better do it quick, because there are only a few shuttle missions left. After that, nada. Nothing. Zilch. Oh sure, NASA talks about designing a space plane- but they’ve been talking about designing a space plane since before Neil took his ride- and I ain’t seen one yet. Bluntly, the era of manned space flight seems to be drawing to a close.

And while it’s easy to blame NASA for the problems, the truth is the problem is deeper than that. Much, much deeper. Yes, NASA has bureaucracy problems, but nothing like the military has- and yet, by throwing enough money at the military, we still seem to be able to fight wars. Adjusted for inflation, the whole of the Apollo program costed something like $135 billion- which seems like a lot until you realize that this is something like ten months of the Iraq war, less than 1/3rd our annual defense budget, or 1/10th the cost of Bush’s tax cuts. Or, if you prefer, this about 1/5th the amount it took to bail out Wall Street, or about 1/7th the cost of Obama’s health care reform. Left or right, it doesn’t matter- the point is that the Apollo program was cheap.

So why aren’t we doing more? Why would a proposal like throwing a few hundred billion a year at NASA (they can’t do worse than the DOD or Welfare, after all) meet with such hostility and contempt?

Because we’re idiots.

No, really. The dumbing down of America isn’t just political slogan, or whining about the good old times, it’s a real, honest to god, phenomenon. Anti-science anti-logic anti-knowledge sentiment has always been an aspect of the cultural makeup of the United States. The difference is, the idiots are taking over.

Example: We’re having a debate in this country over whether or not evolution is true. They have half a point- evolution isn’t science, not anymore. Today it’s technology. Disbelieving in evolution in the era of genetic engineering is like disbelieving in the round earth in the era of space flight. That ship has sailed.

Example: Speaking of disbelieving in the round earth, notice how many people seem to disbelieve that we actually landed on the moon.

Example: How many people know that the US has had more than one depression, or more than two (1932 and today) banking crisis? I love the Paulities who bash the Fed and yet know nothing about the banking crisis of 1906, or the corruption associated with the Second Bank of the United States. The roll of margin in the crash of 1929 was (poorly) explained when I was a kid, it seems to have dropped completely off the curricula these days. We used to make jokes about how the Soviets subscribed to the loose-leaf version of history, but it’s us, today, who have no knowledge of our own history, let alone anyone else’s. Comming soon, César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall will be added to the dustbin of history, if Texas has it’s way.

Example: On advice of a friend, I read “Storm Front” by Jim Butcher, and I encountered these paragraphs:

The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium had seen something of a renaissance in the public awareness of the paranormal. Psychics, haunts, vampires- you name it. People still didn’t take them seriously, but all the things Science has promised us hadn’t come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn’t changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.

Science, the largest religion in the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of omplacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something- I think they just didn’t know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.

Really? I just read that? In a book I got from SCIENCE fiction section? Only the monumentally ignorant wouldn’t know that- to take one example- that smallpox killed between 300 and 500 million people in the 20th century alone- more than all the wars humanity has had so far. And most of those fatalities were in the first half of the century- the disease was eradicated by 1980. And not by mysticism, faith healing, or magic, but by science. “Science is a religion” is a proposition that can only be put forward by the abysmally ignorant, of what science is if nothing else.

I could go on and on, railing about the rampant, virulent stupidity which is engulfing our nation (indeed, our culture). But I want to ask a deeper question: why? Why now? I mean, this strain has always be latent in the population, but why is it so aggressive these days, compared to, say, 1969?

Part of the problem- a small part- is the media. I note that Jim Butcher’s books are getting made into a TV series. Ron Howard and Tom Hanks made Apollo 13- but they also made Angels and Demons, which has to qualify as one of the most howlingly science-ignorant movies of the year (the “secret church of science”? Really?). And despite the fact that Walter Cronkite died just days ago, I’m willing to bet that Jacko’s death will have had more coverage, when all is said and done, than Cronkite’s and Apollo 11 combined.

But the media is mostly interested in what sells- in that way, they’re a symptom not a cause of the problem. If pro-science sold, they’d sell pro-science, even if they did it badly. If it sold, you’d see a lot more shows like “Eureka” kicking around- which, while the science is often- strike that, usually- laughable (and calling it “laughable” is generous- it makes “Armageddon” and “The Day After Tomorrow” look like “Cosmos”), it’s at least presented in an overall positive light. Science may cause problems (generally because we don’t know what we’re doing), but science also solves the problems. But the reason why shows like Eureka are a minority compared to shows featuring the paranormal is that shows featuring the paranormal sell a hell of a lot better.

The “conspiracy theory” explanation doesn’t hold together. No, the real cause is much broader based. What I think is really causing this rising tide of anti-science/anti-reason is wide spread future shock.

Future shock was a concept introduced by Alvin Toffler back in 1970, and is summed up as a feeling of too much change too soon. Any change in society will have it’s opponents- people who are future shocked by the change. But the more change, and the faster the change, the more people who will be future shocked. It’s been decades since I read his books, but I don’t remember him describing (except in the vaguest of platitudes) what a future-shocked society would look like. I would argue that it would look like this: the natural reaction of a human to something causing them pain is to dislike and oppose the things causing pain. Science and technology cause change, which causes pain, thus science and technology are bad. Whether the change is beneficial or not is irrelevant- the change itself is painful, and thus the cause of the change is bad.

Take, for example, one of the technological advances I mentioned- that a computer that holds millions of bits no longer fills a room and costs millions of dollars, it now costs pennies and fits comfortably on your wrist. This has non-trivial implications for our society. It means that a knowledge of and familiarity with computers is going to become a necessity of life. And ubiquitous computing is changing everything from how we pick our presidents to how we run our investment clubs.

True story: my parents are involved in a major investment club organization, and (being the technophiliacs they are) are leading a movement to require the board members have some computer skills, of the “make a spread sheet and attach to an email” variety. Which many of their board members don’t have. In 1969, while Neil Armstrong was standing on the moon and Alvin Toeffler was penning “Future Shock”, most of these board members were already adults. Computer skills were optional then- something only the technical elite needed. Now, they’re being told that computer skills are required even if all you want to do is help run a convention of investment clubs in your retirement. Is it any wonder that they’re feeling there has been too much change, too soon?

So this is the emotional meat-grinder that NASA, and science and technology in general, has run into. People are opposing science and technology, not because they think it won’t produce any changes, but because they think it will, and they’re already experiencing more change than they can handle. And it’s not just science and technology either- any and all culture changes face the same problems.

In a very real sense, the anti-government libertarians are right. NASA isn’t going back to the moon, not any time soon. But not because of some bureaucratic incompetence, but because they won’t be allowed to. Any change which can be opposed will be opposed by the increasing numbers of future shocked people, and in a democracy, this opposition dooms the project from the get go. This is a failure, not of government, but of the people. And even individual efforts are likely to face similar problems (and if you need some sympathy, go talk to the stem cell researchers). And it’ll remain this way while large elements of our society remain in future shock. Which is likely going to be a long time, because all indications say that that the rate of change is going to continue to increase, driving yet more people into future shock.

If you know of some solution, some cure, for future shock, by all means let me know. Until then- enjoy the future. No flying cars, no food pills, no lunar bases, no smallpox, no polio. Excuse me, my portable communicator is chiming. Oh, hi mom- yeah, I was just thinking about you…

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