Fantasy vs. Reality

 In 1969 I was living in a third-floor walkup apartment in New York's Lower East Side.   The apartment building dated from the Civil War era; the bathtub was in the kitchen.  On July 20th of that year I hosted a Moon Landing party for a group of friends.  It seemed to me at the time to be quite a unique opportunity to witness a remarkable event in human history.  I was surprised that the noisy socializing in my two-room apartment showed that no one other than me had much interest in the tv images showing the first steps on the Moon.

By 1970 we were in San Francisco where both our daughters were born.  We were living in the Outer Mission in a second-floor railroad flat in a building that was likely built not long after the 1906 earthquake.  I recall enjoying the Star Trek series which I think was by then already in rerun.  In those early days of the often-reborn series the sets were pretty primitive and the depictions of imagined extraterrestrial life were really corny.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the upbeat, adventurous plots and their depiction of a human society that had evolved beyond the petty prejudices of the present.

Fifty years down the road I have lost track of how many versions of Star Trek have appeared, and the rockets have gotten a lot bigger.  Astronauts regularly shuttle between Earth and the orbiting space station.  It looks like humans will again set foot on the Moon within a short time, and there are plans to send people to join the robots already on Mars.  I find myself now less than enthusiastic about the prospects of sending humans beyond Earth's gravitational embrace.

The satellites allowing vastly enhanced understanding of weather and climate patterns are of undeniable value, and the pictures brought a million miles back from the Webb telescope are breathtaking.  Lofting humans into Space, however, seems to me to be an irrational distortion of priorities.  Space travel enthusiasts tout the advantages of human perception, performance and flexibility, but those traits' long-term value seems questionable in the face of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and robotics.

More importantly, given the current trajectory of Humankind, it seems doubtful that a human society with the resources to support something like interplanetary travel will be viable long enough to make that happen.  The odds of avoiding catastrophic, irreversible climate change seem no better than 50/50.  Given the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the the present state of international relations, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight.

Those billions aimed at carrying a few humans into Space would be better invested now in giving  us a chance for a real future.