"Picture a man or woman of the late 19th century, perhaps your own great-grandfather or great-great-grandmother, sitting in an ordinary American home of 1890. And now pitch him forward in an H G Wells machine, not to our time but about halfway – to that same ordinary American home, circa 1950. Why, the poor gentleman of 1890 would be astonished. His old home is full of mechanical contraptions. There is a huge machine in the corner of the kitchen, full of food and keeping the milk fresh and cold! There is another shiny device whirring away and seemingly washing milady's bloomers with no human assistance whatsoever! Even more amazingly, there is a full orchestra playing somewhere within his very house. No, wait, it's coming from a tiny box on the countertop!
The music is briefly disturbed by a low rumble from the front yard, and our time-traveler glances through the window: A metal conveyance is coming up the street at an incredible speed – with not a horse in sight. It's enclosed with doors and windows, like a house on wheels, and it turns into the yard, and the doors open all at once, and two grown-ups and four children all get out - just like that, as if it's the most natural thing in the world! He notices there is snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a "telephone"? He'd heard about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them. But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country - and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And she says she'll see him tomorrow!
Oh, very funny. They've got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they? What marvels! In a mere 60 years!
But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even further into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!
So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.
And when he dismounts he wonders if he's made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: The layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone... Oh, wait. It's got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem ...larger, and dressed like overgrown children. And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days.
But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.
Let's pause and acknowledge the one exception to the above scenario: The computer. Instead of having to watch Milton Berle on that commode-like thing in the corner, as one would in 1950, you can now watch Uncle Miltie on YouTube clips from your iPhone. But be honest, aside from that, what's new? Your horseless carriage operates on the same principles it did a century ago. It's added a CD player and a few cup holders, but you can't go any faster than you could 50 years back. As for that great metal bird in the sky, commercial flight hasn't advanced since the introduction of the 707 in the 1950s. Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to bi-planes to flying boats to jetliners in its first half-century, and then for the next half-century it just sat there, like a commuter twin-prop parked at Gate 27B at LaGuardia waiting for the mysteriously absent gate agent to turn up and unlock the jetway.
...
'I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability. 'Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something... But I am suggesting that all this is BS... I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.'
Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early 21st century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a 19th century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace."
That missed the semiconductor revolution which brought us GPS, internet and pocket mainframes.
Weather forecasts have improved tremendously, giving tornado warnings which are useful. Knowledge is instantly available instead of just hoping that the local library has a book on the topic.
The house might look the same now as in the 50s, but life has really changed a lot.
Apollo was a symbol of national unity that hinted at the possibility of planetary unity. It was an inspiring collective game changer - even if it was mostly about beating the USSR - and it happened during a time when The Future was still an undiscovered country.
Up until about the mid-90s, when computers and the Internet started to become consumer commodities, technology was The Future. When you bought an 8-bit micro to learn BASIC you weren't buying a nearly-useless blob of circuitry that crawled along so slowly you could barely do anything with it - you were buying The Future. It was the same Future that Apollo, Star Trek, electronic hobby culture, and
Around 2000 - in fact around 9/11 - that Future disappeared and was replaced by a reversion to idiot tribalism. A few elements continued - notably gender and identity politics - but the last product that came from The Future was the iPhone. And that turned out to be a kind of shrink-wrapped version that turned you into a passive consumer of The Future instead of someone who could help build it.
Life has changed in that it's now far more backward looking, and there's no optimistic Future to build and look forward to. The Future is just as likely to be corporate, brutally oppressive, manipulative, inhumane, systemically dishonest, psychopathic, disempowering, and dystopian as it is to be a positive sun-filled utopia full of incredibly bright, competent, and creative people doing amazing things.
This will probably change again at some point in the future, but humanity seems to be going through one of its depressive self-destructive phases at the moment, and it's going to take a while to find that collective sense of optimism, possibility, and adventure.
Our traveller stares out through the double-glazed window which keeps heat in and noise out. The house is toasty warm yet the heating hasn't been on for a while, but the roof and wall insulation is invisible to them. One room over, the cutlery is being cleaned in a dishwasher so quiet our traveller doesn't consciously register that it is running at all. The buttons on the telephone reflect that the exchange has electronic switching instead of human operators plugging in wires, but this is not obvious.
Were it night time, they could marvel at the switching speed and brightness of the LED bulbs. If they stayed longer perhaps a year with no power cuts would interest them. A ride in the car outside would not reveal disk brakes, power assisted steering, crumple zones, fuel injection, catalytic converter or make clear the Interstate Highway routes. Air conditioning they might feel, but GPS and dashboard camera might pass as uninteresting blank boxes. They can't compare the smoothness and quietness of the vehicle, or the reliability of motoring with 1950, or the convenience of calling a breakdown truck when the mechanic has a cellular telephone in the cabin.
Glancing at the clock on the wall, our traveller cannot tell it has a quartz movement and a small battery, and has not needed adjusting or winding in several years. Overhead, radioactive material ionizes air and causes a current between charged plates, but the traveller is unaware of smoke detectors. A device able to cook food using microwave energy is mistaken for a traditional oven and dismissed. The orchestra is still playing in the house, this time not from a radio with a small choice of stations, but from an internet service with several million songs, but the workings are invisible and therefore unnoticed. The speaker came over the Pacific Ocean, for an amount of money that would drop jaws if known, but jaws stay still.
Our traveller does not contract the Polio virus, but thinks nothing of it. They undergo no CAT or MRI scan, experience no painless dentist visit. Nor do they realise they even have DNA which could be tested for anything. Out on the road, a Lithium Ion battery powered vehicle moves past the window, but attracts no attention. Far overhead, a space station orbits, footprints exist on the lunar surface, and a spyplane passes by on the edge of space while travelling faster than the speed of sound. Ordinary invisible impossibilities. Straight through our traveller's head passes digital video signals, from a radio controlled plane; they will be received by a small antennae and then shown to a hobbyist wearing a head-mounted display. At the same time, digital television signals - once passing through an undersea optical fibre - cross the room and move towards a hiking group on a nearby hill, people wearing light yet dry artificial fabrics and carrying an entire tent in a small backpack.
Passing the affordable yet durable Ikea furniture, mistaking it for more expensive items with worse fire resistance, mistaking the DVD and BluRay collection for a bookshelf of glossy-spined texts along the way, our traveller does not order a takeaway, does not explore the wide range of foreign cuisine foods in the freezer, or notice the absence of sewing machine and thread in the cupboards and become curious about the changes to clothing which makes home repair unnecessary. Hot water comes on demand as in 1950, but the lack of water tank makes no difference to the effect.
The clean air act of 1956 makes London air more breathable. The air has no leaded gasoline fumes. For whatever that's worth to our traveller, who is only looking for macro scale changes immediately apparent to a glance from a person from 1890. But not looking very closely, for a desktop calculator, a biro, an absence of logarithm book, few stamps for letters, and spectacles so thin and light with lenses personalised one could hardly believe it, are too subtle for a quick glance to take in. Struck with an idea, they decide to take a look in the workshop - garage, shed, place where tools will be - and there they are, garden tools, same as ever, painted hobby soldiers quietly not made of lead, a soldering iron, and of course a bicycle. But they don't pick it up to notice how light and strong the frame is, or observe the LED lighting as anything noteworthy. A treadmill puzzles them for a moment - they guess what it is, but why is it here? Several things like it, does the house owner run a gymnasium?
What they do see is a wall of bright plastic tubs, one apparently containing a dismembered Christmas tree. They aren't made of wood, or cardboard, and they aren't painted. The material is unusual - were these anywhere in 1950? This isn't a Bakelite telephone, for sure. Inside, small and thin and very very light bags - some coloured, some transparent, a label, "plastic". Suddenly they notice it everywhere they look. That wasn't like 1950. Some things are hanging from the wall by means of a scratchy rope which sticks to itself. Superglue, white-out correctional fluid, WD-40, unfamiliar products to a house of 1950.
Somehow still unimpressed, they walk back past the non-stick cooking items, past the CFC-free energy efficient refrigerator, past the gas cooker which needs no matches to light it, past the Mandelbrot fractal design on a mug, over the Penrose tiling on the floor, noticing the "broken" headphones with their missing wire, unaware of the electronic music they aren't playing. There's no note on the fridge reminding anyone to feed the cat, as a timed food dispenser does that. Instead our traveller recoils at a picture - a coloured woman sitting next to a white man, in a restaurant, both smiling. No sign of argument or police removing her from the premises. She's holding - drinking from? - something bizarre, a cylinder of metal with a ring top. Behind her, two golden arches on the wall. On the table a child playing with a toy vehicle with a skirt instead of wheels.
Puzzled again, the traveller looks around at the sheer amount of stuff in the home, how wealthy are these people?
"Picture a man or woman of the late 19th century, perhaps your own great-grandfather or great-great-grandmother, sitting in an ordinary American home of 1890. And now pitch him forward in an H G Wells machine, not to our time but about halfway – to that same ordinary American home, circa 1950.
Why, the poor gentleman of 1890 would be astonished. His old home is full of mechanical contraptions. There is a huge machine in the corner of the kitchen, full of food and keeping the milk fresh and cold! There is another shiny device whirring away and seemingly washing milady's bloomers with no human assistance whatsoever! Even more amazingly, there is a full orchestra playing somewhere within his very house. No, wait, it's coming from a tiny box on the countertop!
The music is briefly disturbed by a low rumble from the front yard, and our time-traveler glances through the window: A metal conveyance is coming up the street at an incredible speed – with not a horse in sight. It's enclosed with doors and windows, like a house on wheels, and it turns into the yard, and the doors open all at once, and two grown-ups and four children all get out - just like that, as if it's the most natural thing in the world! He notices there is snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a "telephone"? He'd heard about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them. But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country - and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And she says she'll see him tomorrow!
Oh, very funny. They've got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they? What marvels! In a mere 60 years!
But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even further into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!
So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.
And when he dismounts he wonders if he's made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: The layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone... Oh, wait. It's got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem ...larger, and dressed like overgrown children.
And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days.
But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.
Let's pause and acknowledge the one exception to the above scenario: The computer. Instead of having to watch Milton Berle on that commode-like thing in the corner, as one would in 1950, you can now watch Uncle Miltie on YouTube clips from your iPhone. But be honest, aside from that, what's new? Your horseless carriage operates on the same principles it did a century ago. It's added a CD player and a few cup holders, but you can't go any faster than you could 50 years back. As for that great metal bird in the sky, commercial flight hasn't advanced since the introduction of the 707 in the 1950s. Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to bi-planes to flying boats to jetliners in its first half-century, and then for the next half-century it just sat there, like a commuter twin-prop parked at Gate 27B at LaGuardia waiting for the mysteriously absent gate agent to turn up and unlock the jetway.
...
'I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.
'Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something... But I am suggesting that all this is BS... I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.'
Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early 21st century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a 19th century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace."
If you listen to the technoliberterians on the respective subreddits, BTC and ETH will destroy all fiat and central banking. The realists realize that is highly unlikely.
At this point, I think we need to define a "currency". I googled it, and wikipedia (what else?) told me that:
"Currency in the most specific use of the word refers to money in any form when in actual use or circulation as a medium of exchange, especially circulating banknotes and coins."
Also in Investopedia:
"Currency is a generally accepted form of money, including coins and paper notes, which is issued by a government and circulated within an economy. Used as a medium of exchange for goods and services, currency is the basis for trade."
CCs are circulating as a medium of exchange; emissions and transactions are [dis]proven by automated government (consensus of participants, iirc). What's the difference? In that uncommon "government", consisting of real demos this time?
I have no doubt they will eventually be used as a class of currency. Thinking they will replace/destroy fiat currencies that have been around for hundreds of years is a bit of a stretch though.
I wonder if Take-Two Interactive considered the morality of acquiring a company that paid slave wages. Maybe they should change their name to Take-Two Thousand Annually.
A wage that is agreed upon by both parties without coercion is not, by definition, a 'slave wage'. Yes, there are poor people who live in hellholes and are used to much lower salaries than you and me. It may make us feel uncomfortable or guilty, because we don't 'feel' as if we 'truly' deserve so much more money than them. But thankfully, following irrational feeling of injustice is not the only foundation of ethics that we have.
Rape, imprisonment, threats, assault, etc. are already illegal. I fail to see how adding an additional law will suddenly fix these situations.
But raising the marriage age above the age of consent (like what was attempted in New Jersey) will cause real harm to people who have nothing to do with those situations. Teenagers won't be able to cover their pregnant partners under their insurance. Soldiers won't be able to get married before joining. More children will be born out of wedlock. What do democrats shout at Trump's plans to end Obamacare? "If you do this, people will die!"
The minimum marriage age should be the age of consent and not a year higher.
According to the article, more than half the states have no firm minimum age for marriage. For many states, it is below the age of consent. In some states, statutory rape is not considered such if the partners are married. It seems that the laws need an overhaul like you say, to bring in line with age of consent at least.
There is a reason why marriage age limits are frequently below the age of consent.
One of important reasons why society wants to push age of consent way above puberty age - is because society wants to prevent teenagers from having promiscuous sex and have pregnancies out of wedlock.
Marriage helps to reduce both these risks. That is why marriage is allowed at a lower ages than age of consent.
Did you read the article? They are making the case that communities are using early marriage as a way of covering up rape in places where underage sex is legal (or at least overlooked) if the person is married. Hence banning it would reduce the amount of rape going unpunished, and therefore the amount of rape.
There are studies that show correlations, for example, with income and education [1]. Correlation, however, does surely not proof causation.
Personally, our son was also born out-of-wedlock and we are still not married. For us it was simply a choice of wanting children but not seeing the need to affirm our relationship through the public statement of a wedding. While in our country no one is taking offense with that, it is unfortunate that there are still negative side effects such as higher taxes and a lot of paperwork to ensure my spouse and I have the same rights and obligations with regards to our son
Yes. Children with only one parent are more likely to be physically and mentally unhealthy, go to prison, not go to college, use drugs, abuse alcohol, etc. It should be obvious that children are better off when there are two people responsible for taking care of them.
In the situation from this article, without marriage one of the parents would likely go to jail. Then the child would be raised by a single parent (a teenager).
You've repeatedly been uncivil in this thread. We ban accounts that engage in flamewars, so please don't do that again, regardless of how poorly understood you may be.
More unmarried couples => more single parent families
That's the link that people were questioning. Marriage is not a necessary condition for having a two-parent family, even if the US law is lagging behind in recognizing it. Why would you think that any of those bad things would happen if two parents, who were already planning on living together and raising their children, had to postpone the wedding for a few years?
I'm not like you. I won't pretend to be something I'm not by hiding behind passive aggressive phrases like "I'll make this easy for you".
You screwed up. You conflated correlation and causation. You fumbled dictionary definitions, suggesting that having unmarried parents was the same as having only one parent.
Numerous people called you out on this. You doubled-down and then, when you saw the way it was going, tried to change the conversation and tried to suggest that you were talking about general trends; unmarried parents correlates more strongly with single parents than married parents does.
These are ways you screwed up. You can learn from this, and become a better person, more able in the future to have meaningful discussions, or you can ignore it and spit out some more passive aggressive phrases in which you pretend everyone just misunderstands you, posturing for complete strangers who don't even know you. Either way, we're done here.
For all I know the difficulty and bitterness of divorce could make it harder for separated couples to co-parent, leading to more single parenting in families that start as married.
I'm not sure about that, I'm open to persuasion. But I'm not persuade by people saying {it's obvious}.
Actually, I should retract my previous statement. I don't really know what I wrote that, maybe something I'm personally reactive to.
As far as I'm aware what the family relationship counsellors are saying these days (the ones I've spoken to anyway) is that it is conflict that harms children.
It matters less whether the parents are together. What's important is that children aren't exposed conflict.
Is it a fact that everything else being equal, a lack of a legal marriage document causes more single-parent families? How did someone prove that?
Because if it's just a correlation, then you're might just be measuring the obvious third-cause: that deadbeat parents are not willing to marry. And that wouldn't be affected by preventing their marriage, since they wouldn't marry anyway.
The reason I asked this question is because my parents have always been, and will continue to always be common law. They love each other and raised my brother and I together.
I was born out of wedlock, and still raised by two parents.
I've always found it exceedingly bizarre that in the US, one can enlist in the military and be prepared to kill or be killed at age 17, while even at 20, it's illegal to purchase a non-alcoholic beer. I think America is very strange.
I'm a little unclear how that's different from any of the other things US federal, state, and local law allows minor children to do with their parents' consent. In any case under federal law, the lowest age limit for enlistment is 17 with parents' consent.
>Teenagers won't be able to cover their pregnant partners under their insurance
Then maybe force insurance companies to cover partners too?
>Soldiers won't be able to get married before joining.
Then maybe they shouldn't be sent to kill and get killed before they are like 21 either? This way they have 3 full years to get married and enjoy their marriage, even after joining at 18.
I agree. Their app became popular as a place for uncensored, anonymous speech. When they started censoring and requiring usernames their customers spitefully deleted the app.
There are so few places left in the US where someone can engage in free speech. Free speech is nearly nonexistent on college campuses. Yik Yak was offering a product users couldn't find anywhere else. But they threw it all away.
You can engage in free speech wherever you want. But others are also allowed to engage in their free speech as well, which they can use to choose to rebuke you, and choose not to associate with you.
And free speech is not dead on college campuses. Speech without consequences is dead, and that's probably a good thing.
i think everyone is just trying to fit it to their narrative of harassment or free speech when in reality it just wasn't that compelling of a product after a while. At my school it devolved into horny guys trying to get laid and shit talking about professors.
I believe the current internet is a living creature and the sarcasm and snark it produces are natural defenses against any new internet someone tries to create.
> It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors.
We have a winner. It's the same thing killing ESPN. It's not wise for companies to take political positions on the left or on the right that will alienate half your users. Just don't do it.
Sorry, but sometimes companies do indeed need to take political positions if their existence is threatened. SOPA was a huge example of this and net neutrality is an upcoming partisan issue. If you'd rather they sit back and get shackled in the name of neutrality, you're not really for the project, you'd rather see it be at the mercy of other politicians without having any say or doing anything to counteract it at all. (it's also completely naive of the massive lobbying already going on. sounds like you just want your side to have a say and any opposition offends you)
You buy a box of old documents on Ebay. It contains an original manuscript of The Fellowship of the Ring with J. R. R. Tolkien's edits and notes in the margins. Tolkien's estate demands the copy back so they can burn it. You should mail it to them because they own it, right? It's just a book, right?
No, you shouldn't. They owners shouldn't be able to destroy it for the same reason we have laws protecting monuments and historical sites. When something has historical or cultural value, the public has a right to preserve it even against the wishes of the owner.
>>They owners shouldn't be able to destroy it for the same reason we have laws protecting monuments and historical sites.
Monuments and historical sites require Acts of Congress or Executive Orders to establish. If you care so much about this game's source code, maybe you should write to your congress critter.
The boundaries of legal ownership and those of what some consider morally acceptable might be different, so I don't think it's so black and white.
On the other hand, I agree that people shouldn't be criticizing someone for not doing something illegal, especially because they are the one who would have to face the consequences of taking illegal action.
The music is briefly disturbed by a low rumble from the front yard, and our time-traveler glances through the window: A metal conveyance is coming up the street at an incredible speed – with not a horse in sight. It's enclosed with doors and windows, like a house on wheels, and it turns into the yard, and the doors open all at once, and two grown-ups and four children all get out - just like that, as if it's the most natural thing in the world! He notices there is snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a "telephone"? He'd heard about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them. But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country - and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And she says she'll see him tomorrow!
Oh, very funny. They've got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they? What marvels! In a mere 60 years!
But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even further into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!
So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.
And when he dismounts he wonders if he's made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: The layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone... Oh, wait. It's got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem ...larger, and dressed like overgrown children. And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days.
But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.
Let's pause and acknowledge the one exception to the above scenario: The computer. Instead of having to watch Milton Berle on that commode-like thing in the corner, as one would in 1950, you can now watch Uncle Miltie on YouTube clips from your iPhone. But be honest, aside from that, what's new? Your horseless carriage operates on the same principles it did a century ago. It's added a CD player and a few cup holders, but you can't go any faster than you could 50 years back. As for that great metal bird in the sky, commercial flight hasn't advanced since the introduction of the 707 in the 1950s. Air travel went from Wilbur and Orville to bi-planes to flying boats to jetliners in its first half-century, and then for the next half-century it just sat there, like a commuter twin-prop parked at Gate 27B at LaGuardia waiting for the mysteriously absent gate agent to turn up and unlock the jetway.
...
'I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability. 'Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something... But I am suggesting that all this is BS... I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.'
Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early 21st century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a 19th century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace."
--From Mark Steyn's "After America"