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Stuhlinger's thoughtful reply seems like something very few people would do today. Not just the part about taking time to reply to a random letter, but the part about deeply considering the role of their work and its effect on humanity as a whole. Perhaps he's just rationalizing a greater good because he really likes space exploration, but if that's the case he did an excellent job of it.

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I see no reason to conclude that the number of people who "deeply consider the role of their work and its effect on humanity as a whole" has gone down since 1970.

I don't have any quantitative data, agreed. The Internet certainly provides a lot more visibility for such contemplation, and I can't recall seeing a lot of it.

To the contrary, I think one of the defining factors of the Internet is that it creates an unprecedented amount of visibility to shallow contemplation, thereby drowning out any marginal increase in deep contemplation.

Every era has its overwhelming amount of shallow contemplation. Historians and archivists are excellent at sorting out the deeper material in retrospect.

Today you'd get a tweet written by Russel Brand calling the nun a stupid whore.

Bad example. Russell Brand is a thoughtful person. Read his essay on addiction: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/09/russell-brand...

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