We live in a country where truth is increasingly stranger than fiction, mainly because fiction in Trumpworld is so often taken as literal “fact.” The latest is a poll that indicates that nearly one-third of Republican voters believe that Donald Trump will be “reinstated” as president by Labor Day, apparently based on the belief going around QAnon circles that the fraudulent Arizona recount will discover such egregious “fraud” that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the election and just hand it over to Trump. There are people who actually believe this will happen, and you can’t stop them because some people are more susceptible to cult derangement than others. Even a few Democrats are susceptible; take for instance Sen. Joe Manchin, who insisted to an incredulous Chris Wallace on Fox News (of all places) that there were Republican senators that he could “work” with—that is, of course, if it was for the advancement of the Trumpist agenda.
Thus when it comes to discussing topics that are in fact “otherworldly,” it is almost like returning to the world of reality. Take for instance the revelation that an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) task force had been initiated in last year. The rationalization for this task force was to investigate what was formerly referred to as “UFOs” as potential “national security threats” rather than as evidence of extraterrestrial life; interestingly, this was part of the “pandemic relief” bill signed by Trump. The task force reviewed 120 reported sightings, of which it was decided that most probably did not involve U.S. technology. Apparently all of the incidents investigated were first reported by military personnel, with those incidents reported by civilians ignored.
The Department of Defense has since released videos of objects that “outperform” known technology and appear to leave no exhaust trails—objects that military pilots operating off the Atlantic coast claim to have seen “every day” for the past few years. Few actually believe these to be evidence of extraterrestrial life; some think they are currently unidentified technology by foreign actors like Russia and China, while most scientists seem more skeptical than expected, viewing these sightings as “mirages,” “space junk” or lighting from natural or manmade objects mischaracterized by the type of camera used, especially infrared cameras which show a “shape” based on areas of greatest heat release. Of course, without absolute “proof” that these objects are not extraterrestrial craft, what exactly these objects are is left to the “interpretation” of the individual:
Of course in this day and age when people are consumed with Earth-bound gadgets like “smart” phones, it is difficult to explain how “naïve” people back in the day were for being so fascinated by the “probability” of the existence of UFOs, alien life (not border crossers), Bigfoot, ESP and other strange phenomenon like the Nazca Lines in Peru, which could only be seen from high in the sky by somebody "up there":
But some “fantasies” seemed real enough; people believed that after landing on the moon, going to Mars and the outer planets was just the next easy technological step away. But unless you were spent nights listening to Art Bell’s radio show, it was eventually time to leave the world of imagination, and return to the “normality” of real life.
But what happened to those dreams of a world “out there”? The website Flashbak recalled that the 1970s were not just the “Have a Nice Day” decade full of great music that is still used in films and television commercials, but was also a time of “crisis and collective panics.” There was the Oil Crisis, where the OPEC initiated an embargo that quadrupled oil prices overnight, with gas rationing and gas stations shutting down. What followed was the “fiscal crisis” with American-made gas-guzzling cars going out of style, Native American beads “Made in Japan,” and interest rates and inflation skyrocketing, The Vietnam War still going on, then Watergate, plane hijackings and serial killers galore. For some people, the end times were “near.” What to do? According to Mad magazine:
Of course, if you really wanted to get away from it all, you could, if you could afford it (like Howard Hughes), lock yourself in the top floor of a penthouse, or be a “hermit” like Ted Kaczinski and plot vengeance on the world, or just kill yourself. Or you could seek solace in the “teachings” of far-out cults like the Rosicrucians (like my mother), or pack up and get away from the city to the country to grow your own vegetables, raise chickens and live off the land just in case the rest of the world went to pot. Or you could just escape into the fantasy world of the world “out there.”
To be certain, most people just took the punches the world gave them and got off the ground and carried on. But considering what we see today, some of these outlets for frustration with the “real” world were relatively harmless. On the other hand, surely we have to consider the fact that we are destroying this planet, and we have to figure out a way short of complete annihilation of the species to get people off this planet for long-term survival. So just what kind of progress have we made to accomplish that? I mean, the Stanley Kubrick film 2001 A Space Odyssey suggested we’d be exploring Jupiter—20 years ago.
What happened was Richard Nixon, who cut NASA funding, and cancelled the last two scheduled Apollo moon missions, with what funding was left reverting to the Space Shuttle and Space Lab programs. NASA had in fact laid out a plan for a manned mission to Mars in 1969, which they hoped to accomplish sometime in the 1980s. In a report prepared by the Space Task Force, NASA’s most ambition proposal was to double the size of its current budget by 1980 to do the following: “enable a human Mars mission in the 1980s, establishment of a lunar orbiting space station, a 50-person Earth orbiting space station, and a lunar base.” A reusable transportation vehicle to support the space stations, presumably meaning what would become the Space Shuttle, was also in the mix.
Nixon eventually ignored the report, seeing “no compelling reason” to continue manned space flight outside of Earth orbit, and downgraded NASA to just another domestic program competing for funding. In his book After Apollo: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, John Logsdon wrote that as a result, “What has happened is the least desirable outcome—for more than 40 years there has been a mismatch between space ambitions and the resources provided to achieve them.” Nixon apparently hoped that NASA would operate as an “advanced technology” agency, but without a clear “mission” to go above and beyond, this never materialized. And there has been indication that as time has passed, the public just doesn’t care one way or the other about a return to the moon and beyond—outside a few dreamers, space exploration no longer captures the “fancy” of imagination.
In the 1960s, NASA’s budget was as high as 4 perfect of the federal budget; today it is one-tenth of that. The current “hope” is that the Artemis program utilizing the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion crew capsule, will send a mission to the moon by 2024, but that program has been so fraught with delays and funding issues that it might not happen for awhile, if ever. Whisperings about taking shortcuts because of budget constraints calls to mind those that were at least partially responsible for two Shuttle disasters. Private companies have jumped into the fray making their own claims about moon shots, but that is mostly powered from the exhaust coming out the mouth of people like Elon Musk. You can’t fault NASA for thinking “big,” though. This is what the agency envisions as their “base camp” for a potential Mars mission:
So as bad as things seem to be headed under the cult of Trump, we don’t have much choice but to wait out the insanity, because this country is unwilling to spend the money necessary to “expand” its horizons much beyond its own gravitational pull, and no advanced life form is going to arrive to supply us with the know-how to get our act together.
No comments:
Post a Comment