"Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress." -Ted Levitt
On the 40th anniversary of the Apollo mission landing on the moon there has been much discussion about the future of space exploration. This question goes right to the heart of a larger question about research and development, innovation, and evolution. Most of the discussion I saw today (and some over the weekend in anticipation of the event today) had a common conclusion: we could not do today what we accomplished 40 years ago. Not because the technology doesn't exist, but because we seem to have lost the competence and drive for major scientific achievement.
All of this has me wondering if we've been under a Dark Age for at least the last 2-3 decades. What have we done since Apollo? What great leaps in technology have been made? I see myriad examples of incremental changes with existing/known technologies, but where is the great big whiz bang innovation?
Sadly, it seems that we've seen a great erosion of many values over the past few decades. The average person now works harder and longer for less relative compensation. We seem to generally take off less time, to the point that many people think it's their obligation to work well beyond the 40 hours/week mark for a "full-time" employee.
Under the previous U.S. President we saw unparalleled attacks on intellectualism and academics. We have seen an increasingly extreme religious movement attempting to eliminate freedoms and dictate "norms" for behavior, literature, science, intellect, and beyond. This matter is highlighted by the recent announcement that Ireland has made their anti-blasphemy law stronger, neverminding the political uses of warrantless wiretapping and the emphasis on forfeiting freedoms in the name of "national security" as enacted in the USA PATRIOT Act. I digress...
Some have tried to argue that we could, in fact, do Apollo all over again. After all, look at the success of the Mars Rover program. This point is certainly good and true, but it misses my point. What about the Mars Rover program was revolutionary? What amazing new technological or cultural benefits have we experienced as a result of this successful program? My answer is that there are few, if any, benefits.
Some have also questioned the wisdom of continuing programs like the Mars Expedition that seeks to put humans on Mars for the first time. Some of these people ask "why not the moon again?" In either case, my answer is the same: it is only when striving for the "unachievable" that we're able to free our minds from the constraints of conventional thinking to find the "achievable."
The fact of the matter is that, in terms of R&D, we've fallen into a bad trap where the expectation is to capitalize all research investments. What this means, quite plainly, is that if an idea is not seen as having an immediate path to profit, then it is to be discarded. Such an attitude has a chilling effect on pure research in that it strongly discourages the exploration of hard, abstract, and/or philosophical questions that don't have an immediately seen path to consumerism. Unfortunately, this thinking extremely faulty.
So it is that I wonder if we're in a Dark Age given that our culture appears to have regressed, that more emphasis is put on religion and "faith" instead of logic and reason, and that our drive for scientific achievement seems to have failed. Incremental improvements using existing technology, or even application of new technologies to different problems, do not, in my mind, constitute major scientific achievement. I discount growth and use of computer technology, for example, as not being truly revolutionary, no matter how much it's come to mean to our daily lives (one could argue technology like this has made life worse in many respects).
Where and when is the next "big thing" - and how will we get there? Do we even collectively care any more? Or are we happy to rest on our laurels, self-satisfied with the stale and stymied state of scientific advancement?
(Side-note: I can't take credit for this Modern Dark Age idea. Instead, I attribute it to a friend who mentioned the idea several years ago.)
