“If we can put a man on the moon,” you have probably heard someone postulate, “we must certainly be able to:” cure cancer, double gas mileage, stop global warming, save the trees, educate the children, end poverty, have world peace, or solve any other problem that has gone unresolved for decades or more — and mighty our penises.
Surely if we can put a man on the moon, we can all have mighty penises cars that emit no net emissions and get 1000 miles per gallon.
Pipe dreams, my friend.
It is a nice thought. We developed a daring, some said, impossible goal. By putting together a lot of great minds — mostly scientists and engineers working with a lot of those dangerous theories — with motivation and big government backing they succeeded.
Barely.
Decades later we have made a handful of moon landings — none very recently. We still regularly shoot people into space. It remains enormously dangerous and even more expensive. Joe Everyman is more able to travel space now than he was forty years ago.
So the postulators are probably correct. If we put the minds together and give them full financial backing and encouragement, we can blow a lot of money, kill many people, and generate a product that is too expensive to ever really be used — just for the sake of achieving a goal.
But hey, it means jobs for engineers. I’ll be rich because the American public are ignorant sluts.
Cha-ching!
You could argue that the effort to land a man on the moon spun-off and sparked a lot of technology that helped build a foundation for countless innovations. Think, “Space age:” polymers/plastics, materials, fibers, gadgetry, propulsion, rocket scientists, etc. It also helped to bring science and engineering to the forefront of the nation’s collective consciousness. Heck, maybe you’d have been a lawyer if not for NASA.
But I get your point.
I knew one of your smart-asses would chime in with something like this.
I don’t disagree.
Smart-ass.