Guest post by Viv Forbes
The deaths of Steve Jobs and Neil Armstrong could signal the end of a remarkable era of scientific and engineering achievement that started about 200 years ago when James Watt and Robert Stephenson managed to harness coal-fired steam power to drive engines and locomotives. This was followed by technological innovations like electricity, diesel engines, nuclear power, the Model T, Colombia and the Apple 2.
During that era of innovation, we progressed from horse and buggy to supersonic flight; from semaphore to smart phone; from wood stoves to nuclear power; from the abacus to the PC; from flickering candles to brilliant light at the flick of a switch; and from wind-jammers sailing to the New World to rocket-ships landing on the Moon.
That era brought prosperity, longevity and a richer life to millions of people while creating the surpluses that allowed them to take better care of their environment. It also gave the free world the ability and tools to defend itself from aggressive dictators in two World Wars and the Cold War.
We are now living in the after-glow of that era, relying on past achievements and investments while Green doom-mongers are allowed to scare our children and reject our heritage.
What will today’s “Green Generation” be remembered for?
Already they have re-discovered wind power, wood energy and electric cars that were tried and largely rejected a century ago; they now encourage the production of once-banned ethanol corn whiskey, but waste it on cars; they spurn the energy potential of nuclear, coal, oil and gas; and they would close our airports and lock up our resources whilst developing computerised spy-ware to record, regulate, ration and tax our usage of everything.
And one branch of NASA, the once-great risk-taking body that put Neil Armstrong on the moon, is now supporting an anti-carbon cult that advocates the closure of the whole coal industry from mine to power station.
The legacy of today’s doom-mongers will be measured by the number of dams not built, the number of mines, factories, farms, forests and fishing grounds closed and the number of humans living in poverty.
Like the emperors of the Nero era in ancient Rome, they celebrate their destructive achievements by staging expensive Climate Circuses, while behind closed doors they plot to destroy the last vestiges of the freedom and property rights that allowed past generations to “Reach for the Stars”.
The slogan of the coming era should be “Retreat to the Past”.
So vale Neil Armstrong and Steve Jobs – we are losing far more than most people realise.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
I am happy for my email address to be published.
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Most true
I remember as a young man in the 70’s, when such a deep depressing pessimism of the future seemed to permeate everything. We were bombarded by negativity of all types. Global famine, nuclear war, Arab oil embargo etc etc etc.
The world will shake off this funk just as it did then, I have confidence.
“Green doom-mongers are allowed to scare our children…” This redounded for me as Green Gom jabbar. “I hold at your neck the gom jabbar … the high-handed enemy. It’s a needle with a drop of poison on its tip … It kills only animals.” (Mohiam to Paul, Dune (1965), Frank Herbert)
I remember that funk. Back then, though, there was still plenty of upbeat, happy music that refused to be dragged down in the dumps to wallow in the dregs. Sammy Davis Jr would probably be burned at the stake if he dared to sing People Tree nowadays!
Well written!
Of course, the system of government that allowed NASA to survive is the same system that feeds the green doom-mongers’ agenda. It’s the same system that Frank Herbert demonstrates as the not so ideal system; where government keeps us safe from ourselves by taking away our freedom and coercing from us a large portion of our labor. Power corrupts.
It was theft from citizens to send someone to the moon back then. Today, they steal money from citizens to build windmills and solar panels. It’s all the same system. Pride comes before destruction. Can we truly approve of a system that used the coercive power of the state to support trips to the moon and then say it’s wrong for them to use funds to build windmills? Just because landing on the moon sounds like a cool, manly, adventurous thing to do, doesn’t make it right to take people’s money under threat of force in order to support the effort. It’s the myth of science as a public good; the tyranny of good intentions. It’s theft.
@Steve R says: August 27, 2012 at 12:39 pm
As a fellow young man of the 70s, I have to add to your list that we were all going to freeze to death. Sigh.
What utter nonsense. We live in an astonishing epoch. I am collaborating on a project with people in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and France, not to mention several in the US. It is public domain code development. The final product may be useful but will not be earth shattering.
I don’t doubt that similar groups are evolving things which will revolutionize the next 20 or 30 years as much as the innovations to which you refer.
Nothing like this was possible much before 1980, given that our’s is a pick-up gang of people who happened to be interested in the same thing.
You would have to be totally out of touch to surmise that the quality and extent of communication today will not enable astonishing and rapid development in many areas.
I just read this essay to my 17 year old son, then set him the task of restoring humanity to a noble race of achievers and reversing the thinking that humans are a virus that needs control or eradication.
He said he would do it.
Yes, but NASA’s new mission is Muslim outreach isn’t it? You can see how well that’s been going. /sarc
And just think of what this generation has accomplished in the technical realm: Facebook, Twitter, et al.
Wiglaf says:
August 27, 2012 at 1:06 pm
wiglafthegreat says:
August 27, 2012 at 1:15 pm
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Let me see if I understand you correctly. You prefer to ignore the government, not pay taxes, stay humble, abstain from technological improvements and scientific understanding?
It’s always nice to hear a word from Amish country. I won’t tell Jebediah about your internet blog post if you won’t *wink* 🙂
I agree with “Steve R” above. The nattering nabobs of negativity are with us always. Fortunately they are frequently wrong, and proving them wrong provides added bonus to the forward-thinking innovators. 🙂
Steve Jobs… yeah it is business model such as Apple that is killing innovation… from someone that did not even anything but did very well innovating on other people’s ideas… and now they sue anyone that will innovate based on the same inventions on which the i-products were based on.
It is not with people like him that we can dream of a better future.
Neil Armstrong made us dream… Apple is give us nightmares.
Wiglafthegreat, I agree with you. It was theft. The government really has no right to force people to give up their money to send men to the moon. But of all the things the government steals our money for, the space program was perhaps the best.
First of all, not a dime was spent in space. It was all spent here on Earth, promoting innovation, expertise, exploration, discovery, knowledge and accomplishment. Now consider all the other things government takes our money for: war, nanny-state programs and fear-mongering. Most of our tax dollars are now spent on fostering individual dependency, and as a consequence…despair. Our government is using our tax dollars to cultivate the seeds of its own destruction and Atlas is about to shrug.
If we must pay taxes, isn’t it better that our government does something truly marvelous with those dollars?
I’d say the death of Neil goes with the death of Big Science. And it’s a well-deserved death.
Big Science turned away from useful and understandable goals (which were mainly military), and now works on utterly pointless Quantum crap and utterly murderous Gaian lunacy. The sooner it dies, the better.
Little Science is coming back, especially in biology and software; and the good new stuff is coming from Little Science.
The death of Steve China-Jobs doesn’t really mark anything, because his Big Corporate spirit is still growing, still ripping up America and sending our jobs and treasure to China.
J. Fergeson…Yes, we are in a marvelous age of communication, and that is the one thing that can reverse the cycle of collapse of Western Civilization (besides my 17 year old son).
All attempts to tax and regulate such communication must be fought tooth-and-nail to avoid the collapse. It is in this freedom of speech that our salvation rests.
I love that you are a part of such innovative collaboration, but how willing are you to defend your freedom to participate.
I would add medical advances and antibiotics to the list of past glories, and to the list of diminishing advancement. A paltry few medicines are being approved each year now, and many of those are for cosmetic use, not illness.
Power Grah says:
August 27, 2012 at 12:51 pm
I remember that funk. Back then, though, there was still plenty of upbeat, happy music that refused to be dragged down in the dumps to wallow in the dregs. Sammy Davis Jr would probably be burned at the stake if he dared to sing People Tree nowadays!
Probably so since he would have to come back to life to sing it. (sarc)
Steve R says:
August 27, 2012 at 12:39 pm
I’m with you Steve!
I had two small daughters in the early 70s and was young and inexperienced enough to be somewhat terrified on their behalf. Fast forward to today, and nothing (that I can think of) that I was afraid of then has happened. Thanks Paul Ehrlich et al for those fearful years (not), but also thanks for the fact that I don’t believe a word you or any of your ilk say now, and haven’t for the last 25 years. Human ingenuity is still our greatest asset.
(I still have two daughters, plus a son, but bigger now!)
No one knows how to use their own brain anymore because we now let machines do all the “hard” work; it’s no different than our muscles atrophying from lack of exercise. Is it any wonder that students are poor at math and science when we put a computer on every classroom desk to make them totally dependent on the machines for every calculation?
Take away all the computers and calculators from classrooms, (excepting computers for learning programming languages and a few in the library for research). Force children to use their own brains to do math and science again – just like those people who invented them used to do back in the 50’s & 60’s.
If we do not do this there will ultimately be very few people who can understand and do the calculations these machines can do and there will be even fewer capable of understanding how they work let alone capable of designing better ones.
In an unforeseen way the Apollo programme sowed the seeds of destruction for the age of progress which had started with the industrial revolution. The view of earth as a small blue marble in the vastness of space was a powerful inspiration to the upcomming enviromenal movement and its “fragile earth” meme. In particular the Apollo 8 photgraphs provided the graphic backdrop for many of the apocalyptic visions of the seventies. The irony was of course that if the environmental movement was as strong in the sixties as it is now the Apollo programme would literally have never got off the ground. Can you imagine trying to build the Kennedy Space Centre today?
Jim Clarke, “defend my freedom to participate?” are you kidding?
My take is that many of the people who are depressed about the present have absolutely no idea what is going on. They are the same type of people who thought the end was on the horizon in Macaulay’s time.
To be blunt, my appraisal of the folks who think our peak of accomplishment is behind us are people who contribute next to nothing themselves to what is happening now, and likely little to what happened in the past. They think because they aren’t doing innovative things, no-one else is. Again, total nonsense.
More, the number of people who have time to do things which don’t directly put bread on their tables is increasing exponentially worldwide. It may be that future innovations will come from people one or two generations from subsistence survivals.
Doers are NEVER pessimists. BTW, why do you think this freedom of communication needs to be defended? I don’t see how it can be prevented except maybe sporadically and briefly.
I’ve never had so much fun in my life. 50 years ago I used to have a terrible time finding anyone who knew anything about the things I was working on – even in Chicago. I knew they were probably out there, but they could be very hard to find.
So i say nuts to the pessimists ignorant, unimaginative drones that they are.
Inventions require Axemaker Minds and the official global education push is to try to prevent those from arising.
We are in for a bumpy ride as long as the UN and many of the governments around the world are determined to integrate the social sciences and the natural sciences into a single unified science.
That’s called a state against its people and it has a tragic history.
The lust for safety is the most destructive power in life. It deprives us from freedom first, then knowledge, finally the volatile dream of safety itself is gone.