Major Tom

Forty two years ago the Apollo 11 Moon landing took place. It was the first of six manned landings with the last one in 1972.  That makes it nearly thirty nine years since a human last set foot on the Moon. There are no concrete plans to ever return.

This induces a feeling of melancholy in me, since I’ve been reading classic science fiction the last few years. Those wonderful books of adventure, especially those aimed at teens, predicted a vast new frontier to be conquered.  Most authors expected us to have large functional space stations and a lunar colony before the year 2000 rolled around.

But somewhere along the line we lost the spirit of adventure and exploration. Most likely it is the extreme wealth that has been generated in the West and developing parts of the globe that has ironically hampered this impulse. If we had really wanted to, those predicted things would have been made into reality.

I’ll concede that relying on governments to implement space programs is a huge culprit. Wasteful and always subject to the political whims of the moment, these bloated bureaucracies are rife with incompetence and  corruption. Perhaps if private corporations had been allowed to pioneer in the starry skies things would have been different.

Instead, man has to be content looking at the Moon through a telescope with no hope of touching its dusty surface. Our dreams have fled, drowned out in a cacophony of cellphones, Twitter, video games, and all the myriads of distractions of our day. We are too content and lazy to dare anymore.

This actually bothers me more than the financial doom that looms overhead.