by KaiserJeep » Sun 20 Oct 2013, 14:52:03
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', 'I') have no need to understand what the details are, and neither do you. We have begun to explore space in my lifetime, the process will continue in spite of anyone's - or everyone's - opinions about how practical it is.
Blind religious faith? Or are your grand assertions merely a simple nerd chick-attractor scheme? At 62 you are too old to be playing dress up at Comic-Con. LOL
No, just observation, over five decades of it. Electronics became my favorite toy when I was a child in the 1950's, playing with vacuum tubes. Then one of my college professors (John Bardeen) was one of three credited with inventing the transistor at Bell Labs. I took extra courses in History, Astronomy, and Economics just to satisfy some vaguely felt curiosities that sometimes seemed more like itches - things I had to scratch. Then the Dean had a serious talk with me and basically said I needed to go out and earn a living.
Politics became an interest when I helped my Father who was a volunteer poll worker in the 1960 election (JFK vs. Richard Nixon). Both candidates were Conservative and to the Right of center, they almost had nothing to debate. But I saw Mayor Daley (the elder) steal the election when thousands of dead Democrats voted, and began to understand the thirst for power. This was while living in a state where crosses were burned on people's lawns by men wearing sheets, and our Governor (Earl Long, younger brother of the "Kingfish") was governing the state from inside an asylum, from which he escaped by appointing his own man to administer the State hospitals. Then he shacked up with a stripper named Blaze Starr, who would subsequently bed JFK, and I was watching all this in wonderment with the eyes of a nine year old boy.
Our home in the suburbs of New Orleans was rocked by sonic booms from a nearby US Navy Air Station, and we were taught "duck and cover" in school, to save ourselves from nuclear weapons by hiding under our desks. My parents had a spirited debate about whether or not to build a fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At school, the teacher handed out a theme assignment, some four page paper related to current events, and the class laughed hysterically, knowing (in the 5th grade) that we would all be radioactive vapor by next week.
Later that next Summer, a strange little man named Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table and promised on TV to bury us. It seemed credible, the USSR had after all beaten us into space. You have NO IDEA what the Cold War was like - I first felt relief when I viewed the inspired Stanley Kubrick film "
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" - unfortunately I was already at University in the late 1970's.
This was when the pendulum swung back and the Republicans and Democrats really switched places and ideologies. The Republicans had been the Liberal party since the US Civil War, championing the rights of minorities. The Democrats had been the ultra Right Wing of American politics, the most extreme were called the Dixiecrats. The changing point was when Johnson succeeded JFK after he was shot. Johnson was an ultra-Liberal, just how much so surprised everyone, and was unusual for a man from Texas. Liberal Johnson's inclusion on the presidential ballot with Conservative JFK was what we then called a "balanced ticket" - which allowed the same pair of candidates to appeal to both Liberals and Conservatives, in an era when most campaigning was via local radio broadcasts and personal appearances. There was up until then, a span of political opinions stretching from Liberal to Conservative within each party. Following Johnson, the Liberals clustered in the Democratic party, while the Conservatives clustered in the Republicans. This was the beginning of the extreme partisanship which just paralyzed our Federal government.
I have seen the space race in it's entirety. I have seen the digital world replace the analog, including the advent of the Internet. I was on design teams for the unique computers that created and enabled the entire system of electronic money that enables Internet commerce. I have seen the arrival of environmental consciousness, which in my country began when Rachel Carson published
The Silent Spring in 1962.
I tell you this with absolute certainty: the rate of change is accelerating, not slowing. Some of you already want to hide from this, it would seem.
Which is why I can tell you without any doubt whatsoever, that there are very few - perhaps zero - politicians interested in saving us from Climate Change. They will use you and your sincere beliefs to increase their own power - because if you are frightened enough, they get to spend more of your earnings than you do.
Now a related point: I have repeatedly made the point here that human overpopulation is the one and only environmental issue we face. It is the root cause of all the others, of all forms of pollution and all forms of resource depletion. Those 7.3B people are here already - they are not going anywhere. In their struggle to live, this planet that is our home will be ruined. Not ruined beyond redemption, not sterilized, just damaged for a Geological age, a few million years. Perhaps only a few thousand years if we can preserve the diversity of life in space, until we can again restore the Biosphere.
If we are wise, we will not let humans live there again.
Learn to separate the things that people DO from the things that people SAY. All it takes is carefull observation. Note that more often than not, they are saying and doing exactly opposite. Those few that both say and do the same things, and have the power to bring about change, are great men and women.
It just so happens there are no great men and women on the Earth today. There is no one to follow, no leadership to be had. The rest of us will have to muddle through, by doing the right things.