The whole image reflects adventure and when one considers the technology that made it possible, I feel that we are not nearly so ready to take real risks these days. Dredging a working harbour suddenly becomes fraught with dangers. There may be a small colony of undiscovered snails that will be wiped out, the surf break may suffer and surfers may not be able to surf there as in the past, and so it goes. The masses wave posters about global warming and a raped planet and no progress can be made without coughing up a million impact studies printed on the bodies of a thousand trees. If this attack fails, the hordes fall back on the bread before roses argument: millions are hungry, millions are dying, millions are ill, as if this is something new!
While this is happening, this civilisation slowly recedes into navel gazing and emotional derailment. It is all about my little village, my little garden, my fishing spot, my house at the sea side, or, the small village on a continent on the other side of the planet, the orphans of war, the people ravaged by the effects of a drought, the latest quake and the latest acts of a dictator. I look at the daily news and it is filled by the wailing naysayers forever getting in the way of any new ideas. Do not build the new soccer stadium before you have spent money on my local school, rather spend the money on relieving my tax burden so I can buy more of this or that. People work from Monday to Friday, feel like there is no hope, and join causes on FaceBook to save the rhino, to save a whale, to save the planet, supporting the next battery car, without actually being part of the emotional effort and the financial pain! Sales of anti-depressants soar and people cannot understand why addiction to all sorts of substances go through the roof.
Could it be that we are just not designed to be so focussed on mankind and its primary survival? Is it possible that when we lose our sense of adventure and when we are not pushed into the unknown, we are by default into a mode of decay? Maybe we can only survive when we are looking beyond ourselves (meaning that we move beyond worrying constantly about man and the environment) and when we have audacious goals, like putting a man on the Moon when our technology does not even allow us to calculate the orbit of our tin can that well.
Do not get me wrong, we only have one Earth and we must tread lightly, we must be kind to it and all of its inhabitants. But we should not forget who we are, and I leave that for you to decide for yourself. For myself, I am one with a longing for the future that is grander than any imagination of the now, and where we manage better, where we go from stones to stars. I am not part of the clan that wants to remain small and I am not ready to cope with the same beans for dinner and marrying my cousin, however comfortable it may be.
All information from NASA, used under agreement on site: http://history.nasa.gov/ap11fj/01launch.htm
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