65 years ago, America announced the names of its first astronauts

When I was a kid in the 1960s we had UK-wide fleets of electric vehicles delivering food items every day in reusable containers that were collected a few days later (hint: 'milk floats' with glass bottles).

All the stuff we were 'promised' that we didn't get, like personal jet packs, flying cars etc, would cost a lot of energy to run. All the computing advances we did see were possible in the stagnant energy budget.

Nuclear energy would have helped keep the energy budget growing, but for a variety of reasons, it was never really widely enough adopted. I'm very optimistic about photovoltaic, because thanks to it being a semi-conductor technology its costs have been falling along a similar curve as other electronic products. I expect that to keep going until installation and land rent will be the predominant cost factors.

So per capita energy budget might go up again for a while, and with them labour productivity improvements might return for a while.

Born in '89, the 90s was my childhood. I will tell you today holds none of the magic the 90s had, it's ancient history. I pity the children of today.

Also, what was that old saying?: Everything you grow up with is magic, everything you see in adulthood is mundane, and everything in your senior years is fucking blasphemy?

But the Internet and social media have truly shifted society.

Social media has entirely transformed how people interact with the world and discover new things, for good and very much for bad.

People born past 2000 never knew a world without computers in every classroom (or in front of every student). Most never experienced having to be at home to receive messages from people, unless you went to their house. Needing to plan ahead with people when to meet. Everyone in society watching the same shows (mostly).

I think AI will fundamentally alter the world, like the Internet did. We're in the infant stages.

I would rephraze this as 'humanity's capability to sustain a large range of psychological profiles and the capability to filter out from the general population the particular individuals fitting for a given task'. My understanding is the astronauts were a very specific niche group and mostly wanted to fly faster and higher than anyone before them, and were willing to pay any price to achieve this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09080-6

And in our chemical processes https://news.mongabay.com/2022/09/chinese-companies-slated-f...

I imagine we’d be talking about going carbon neutral by 2100 instead of 2050 if we hadn’t burned so much coal

We should reach peak coal sometime in this decade: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-15/coal-s-pe...

Recall, only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Unfortunately it didn't also herald in a new (and rather more ethical) era of colonization at the time. In fact we've been in a bit of a space exploration winter for a while. But new developments look really promising. This time we might end up a 'multiplanetary' species.

I worry though that like a scene from the book, "Days Between Stations", the U.S., 55 years later, still has Neil Armstrong in B&W stepping out onto the Moon on constant replay on their television sets as that one golden moment in our history that we've never been able to again measure up to.

Arguably, it was primarily a way to garner public support for the technology and infrastructure to build up the US's ICBM force, and to beat the Soviets in having a military force in space.

Remember, in the 60's people were envisioning manned space stations for the role that unmanned spy satellites later served.

The Outer Space Treaty happened in 1967 and forbade the militarization of space. I don't think it's a coincidence that 1964-67 was by far the apex of NASA's budget as a percentage of GDP.

It immediately started going down as it became clear that the treaty would be enacted. By the time of the last Apollo mission it was down to around 1.5%, and would drop to below 1% a few years after that.

In an alternate history of those events you might have had a Soviet constellation of nuclear-armed satellites in LEO by the 80's, making a first strike a lot more appetizing.

If we spent our money on nothing except Apollo Program type projects, the world would be imaginably different today. We could very well be living in the sci-fi future that many living through the 60s would have expected to see emerge over the next 60 years. If you told them that, instead, in 60 years we'd be struggling to achieve a manned flyby of the Moon, not a soul would have believed you.

Think about this another way - if we had decided to pass on the geopolitical stupidity, we could have afforded a program (with no increase in spending) of more than 6x the scale of the Apollo Program. It's really tantalizing to think about what that could have been like. Alas that's for the other timeline where humanity is already on the verge of constructing a Dyson Sphere. In this one, maybe we'll finally manage to achieve a manned Moon flyby sometime soon.

War is destructive by nature, military campaigns are expensive, hurt both the attacker and the defender, and the only reason is that governments want to govern instead of the other governments. There are some beneficial side effects to war, but overall, it is all about destruction.

The space race, culminating in the moon landings was not destructive, it was about doing something that hasn't been done before. Sure it was a pissing context, but it was for progress, not destruction.

As for astronauts as heroes, it sure was part of the propaganda, but they were actually part of something great. Compare to war heroes, who, in different contexts, would be called mass murderers.

I am not into heroes and adulation in general, but should we make people heroes, I think astronauts are in a good spot. There are generally good people (it actually was an important criteria for selection), intelligent, hard working and healthy. And they put their lives on the line for something awesome.

> It has 38 nuclear power reactors in operation and 19 under construction1/. It has increased its number of operating reactors by more than ten times since 2000 and plans to bring five units into commercial operation this year alone. It is China, the fastest expanding nuclear power generator in the world.

-International Atomic Energy Agency

https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/how-china-has-become-the-world....