I think technology is too often confused with progress. As a country, we commonly point to the introduction of a top-line technology as evidence of progress. We consider something like NASA as validation for all the hard work we do to move forward as a nation. Reader, thanks to NASA, we can send a white dude to outer space – and back! – without having Ed Harris sitting around and reminding everyone that failure is not an option!
But improving the technology of transportation and extending a trip beyond the limits of any voyage ever made before shouldn’t be confused with progress. This is merely technology and technology isn’t progress. I first had this realization a couple of years ago while volunteering at a food bank. I was thinking about why we bother sending men to the moon when half the clients we were expecting that day were vulnerable to the unpredictable delays of the bus system. Neil Armstrong never would have made it into space if he'd taken the bus to the launchpad!
Maybe I just don’t know, reader, maybe I’m just not clever enough, not ambitious enough, not wise enough, not STEM enough, not you-decide-what enough, to do the math and figure it out. I guess. Maybe I don’t understand how all the stuff we did to get to the moon – and back, most of the time, anyway – led to all kinds of advancements at home. The moon mission gets credit for inventing a whole list of impressive stuff - check out this link for ten examples. All those things are major achievements in their own right (the water purifier really stands out) and the application of these space-age inventions has meant miracles for so many in the ensuing years. It's kind of surprising, really, when I look at all those advancements that the famous line isn't 'Houston, we have a solution.'
But it’s also been a half-century since we humans first stomped around on the moon and, well, we still seem to have a lot of the same basic problems to worry about on Earth that we worried about back then. One invention that didn't make that top ten list was the end of hunger - it's true, reader, no one has ever starved to death in space. And I think this is great, it's great that no one ever starved in space... so maybe we can apply that solution at home, too? It's only been, you know, fifty years? Plus, what good is a cordless vacuum cleaner if you don't have any cookie crumbs to hoover up? Maybe we’re supposed to wait another five decades for all the crumbs to trickle down, for everything we greedily suck up at the top to dribble its way down to the bottom. I can wait, I suppose, but for how long?
