What Will the Moon Landing Mean to the Future?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Should’ve people of other races and genders walked on the moon too? Certainly. Because we shouldn’t have stopped going there once the symbolic victory was attained. But to disparage the achievement by draping it in the cultural terms of our time is just... hideous revisionism.
I’m beside myself with contempt for the author and the editor. Stuff your revisionism and woke virtue-signalling where the sun doesn’t shine and at the awkwardest angle you can devise.
So I think it'll be remembered as a hoax in the future thanks to memes and just general internet fuckwadery.
Memes come and go but the effects linger and shape culture.
To explore and understand our universe cannot diminish it- it only enriches our ability to appreciate it. I for one hope the future will regard Clive Staples Lewis as a dogmatic, small-minded fool.
For Lewis, science is not evil, but it can be used to dehumanize, especially when people focus solely on the scientific and throw out or de-emphasize all other aspects of human existence. Anyone who cannot see some measure of dehumanization in the modern world is blind. I see huge changes just during my life. When I was a child, we knew the names of at least 20 families within a block of our house, and had been in the home or had had in our home at least half of them. Now, most people have much less knowledge or contact with their neighbors, and that isolation is greater for those who benefit the most from the fruits of modern technology.
If Lewis had lived to see the moon landing, I think he would have admitted it was an awesome achievement. I certainly think it was. It was a defining moment in my childhood (I was 6 years old). However, if you compare the pre-modern conception of the moon with how we see it today, it has been reduced from a heavenly body to a large rock in space. This reduction is symptomatic of the reduction of our conception of our own humanity from spiritual beings loved by the creator of the universe to accidental products of random, blind, impersonal, physical interactions. The modern conception of man is a product of evolution that was probably a bad turn since we seem to be damaging the planet on which we arose.
If you think Lewis was dogmatic, I'm sure you must really think Tolkien was, since he was Roman Catholic, which is by definition dogmatic. (To be a faithful Catholic, you must believe the dogmas of the Church. Anglicans, which Lewis was, have no such requirements. In fact, I don't think the Church of England has anything they call a dogma, but I could be wrong.) I don't know if Tolkien said anything against space exploration, but he did have strong views against the headlong rush of scientific progress that had no regard on its effects on humanity or the environment. I think most people today can see that his environmental concerns were well founded, even if they don't see the deeper human impacts.
If it was easy to extract water from the moon then we would have colonized the moon merely a decade after the first moon landing. The true space age could have started before the age of the internet. Unfortunately it just didn't happen.
And a space ship is not an isolated system: it can shed waste heat, and as long as it has a power source, the entropy of the living space can be controlled.
Is that really a fact? Is it guaranteed to be true in the future? Past discoveries seem very lumpy and unpredictable to me.
What's next? How one feels about vanilla icecream? I don't understand the human race sometimes, I have to admit :)