Whenever I hear an adult talking about an interest in space travel, I immediately peg him as a child in a man’s body, and I am always right. Serious adults are not interested in space travel. That is, they are not interested in it beyond the great body of science fiction works we all love. When someone talks about space travel as something that could or should happen in real life, coming at me with something like “so how long do you think it will take us to get a habitable colony on Mars?” is not different to me than if a man asks “so why didn’t the king send surgeons and scientists instead of horsemen to put Humpty Dumpty back together?”
How often do you see space travel and Humpty Dumpty juxtaposed?
1 comment:
I get the point the commenter is making. But the difficulty is what's significant about space travel, whether it is ever practicable or not. Manned space travel is one of the most unforgiving enterprises out there. It's pretty much the opposite of "AI". It's not about rhetorical tricks, it's not about what you can make people think, it's just about learning from nature and trying to adapt. Really, it's about humility.
It's true that people in the early to mid twentieth century underestimated the difficulty of space travel, but comparing the fact that space travel was what they considered worth aiming towards with what people now consider worth aiming towards speaks volumes.
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