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Comment by the_third_wave | Hacker News Reader

Imagine this were the reaction when Kennedy proposed the USA should put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, "not because it is easy but because it is hard".

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It's a good thing the Nazis came up in the 40's because we would lose the war if it happened now.

You're probably downvoted for invoking the Nazis but the sentiment holds and the question to be answered is what current generations would want to fight to protect. This used to be called "freedom" but that term has gotten a severe beating starting in the late 60's, especially in the USA. The end of the cold war also plays a big role here since it robbed "the west" of a clear direction by robbing it of its "enemy". After the demise of the Soviet Union those who fought its influence were left aimless while those who supported it were left (spiritually) homeless. The former group seems to be searching still while the latter group has proven to be more agile in (re)finding their cause, the results of which are showing more clearly by the day. This may eventually lead to the former group uniting around the cause of fighting the latter group, destabilising the country even more.

Doing it the first time is interesing.

I'm sorry I don't see your point. When Kennedy proposed USA should put a man on the moon, fewer people were concerned about climate change than there are today.

How do you make sense of the intensifying forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, and someone burning fossil fuels to go to space?

People had another cause to worry over back in those days, this being the cold war between the west and the east. With the demise of the Soviet Union came the freedom (for some) and need (for others) to find new causes to fight for, climate change being one of them. The USA was hit by a number of record-setting heat waves in the 30's [1,2] which are probably best-known under the colloquial term "Dust Bowl" - the 1930s (the Dust Bowl years) are remembered as the driest and warmest decade for the United States, and the summer of 1936 featured the most widespread and destructive heat wave to occur in the Americas in centuries [3]. Even though many of the temperature records set in those years still stand [4] there was no talk about climate change because people were too busy trying to survive the dust bowl and the resulting economic effects while still reeling from the great depression which preceded it.

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016EGUGA..1815380C/abstra...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_North_American_heat_wave

[3] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2010/06/...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_tempe...

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