I’m reading (and immensely enjoying) Dan Wang’s new book Breakneck. During the course of reading I was thinking about “engineering cultures” and had a moment of profound sadness in realizing the following:
It is very likely that sometime in the next 3 years, we will return to being a species without a single living member who has ever left our planet’s orbit.
Its kind of amazing that it hasn’t happened already. The 5 surviving humans who have left the orbit of our planet are 89 to 95 years old, and Earth could hold eight billion people and not a single living witness to deep space very soon.
The usual reply is that Artemis is coming. If the schedule holds, four astronauts will loop around the Moon in 2026. I hope it happens, but given the state of affairs at NASA I am not optimistic.
The internet unlocked our century but the physical world has not kept up, as Peter Thiel has been telling us for two decades. We now measure all progress against the potential progress that equal effort applied to software systems could have yeilded. The result is a kind of weightlessness. We float above the tasks that make a civilization real. Software has just too damn much leverage, it broke our sense of progress.
This is different than supersonic passenger aircraft or nuclear buildout; its a 50 year stoppage both civil and military, where the best of us left our planet behind and then became old men and died before anyone ever tried it again. It makes me heartsick to think about.
Dan Wang’s book has some very eloquent things to say about this, how society can prize process or output and the consequences of this; a good frame to hold my sadness about this moment.
If Artemis II flies in 2026, four more humans will cross the boundary our species has not crossed since the early 1970s. If Artemis III follows, we will plant boots on the moon after a lifetime away. That will not solve every other problem, but it will signal that the world of atoms is still negotiable.
Until then, the image lingers. A planet with no old men who can tell you what it felt like to watch Earth set behind the Moon.
