Alas, Crikey edited a lot of the significance (and poetic vibe) out of my original submission. Perhaps I should have explicitly pointed out that Woodstock festival was held in the month after the first moonwalk, and it is hard to believe that Joni Mitchell was not influenced by that momentous event. Here is my original post (slight edit by me. Did I go too far with the last line? Couldn’t resist the fun.).

We are stardust
(Billion year old carbon)
We are golden
(Caught in the devil’s bargain)
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

(With Joni on the jukebox, no funny cigarettes required for bliss!)

Noble ideas, Guy, and as a science-geek kid that was sent home from school to watch the Moonwalk I reckon I can match your romantic imagination.

But yes, we have a few problems on the little garden planet, and if we (H.sapiens) want to be around to see it in another 100 years perhaps we should focus a tad more on those problems and get ourselves back to the garden. But wait, the two things are not mutually exclusive; let’s send Wilson Tuckey, Ron Boswell, Barnaby Joyce and Steve Fielding to Mars! Please. Oh, let’s not deprive the boys of some female company on the long trip: squeeze up lads to make room for La Albrechtson. Truly we will have Planet Janet! And dare I say, a fine gene pool to create the first generation of Martians.

John M

The first networking of remote computers occurred in the late 60s yes? The GUI was developed in the late 60s yes? Any sort of more comprehensive roll-out of the 2 together - as the early developers assumed would happen - stopped short when the 70s private recession occurred, and govt funding also dried up. the ethernet stuff is a later development. i dont understand your point about berners-lee. thats the point i was making - it was a development not for private gain.

If you think we’re going to travel to the stars by quantum entanglement youre on stronger drugs than i am

Your timeline for Net computing is wonky, but what the hell. It wasn’t the 70s sludge that killed off ‘visionary’ endeavours, it was the gradual return of the market to something like ‘normal’ after WWII.

Tim Berners-Lee invented http so the folks at CERN could share thoughts about high energy particles. Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC in the late 70s, and the related technologies were deployed at Chalk Creek missile testing range, before Steve figured they might be useful at Apple.

We can probably thank the post WWII implementation of the Cold, Korean and Vietnam Wars for the Raytheon minicomputers in the Apollo landers. The Apollo project was as innocent as my thoughts about Helen Mirren.

Your Beautiful Dream (of interstellar space travel) is wonky, too. Why would we want to cross 20 light years to visit Gliese 581c, a location that’s dodgier than an Apollo Bay real estate development at sea-level? Far better to contemplate the mystery of “spukhafte Fernwirkung” (“spooky action at a distance”).

Or the night sky, which probably looks much the same from Gliese 581c.

.

This would have to be acted on soon though, because until we find other means of propulsion we will need significant amounts of fossil fuels to get the infrastructure off Earth that we need to build the moon base (which will build the interstellar ships etc)

The whole US economy spins off the back of better guns and equipment; R&D money gets poored into the military, who discover other things while making new guns, and they sell these to the public. Why not cut out the middle man, stop killing each other, and just invent some cool stuff?

I’m with you Guy.

But in all seriousness, this is the kind of thinking that is impossible for modern leaders to get away with. It simply will not get them elected for the following term, due to the ‘what have you done for me lately’/’whats good for the hip pocket’ syndrome which has take over modern society.

Wonderful article (until that last paragraph anyway, what’s healthcare and carbon emissions got to do with it?).. perhaps project orion could be resurrected?