NASA claims the technology that helped humanity to set foot on the moon or at least to leave low level orbit way back in 1972, has been lost to us.
As if the indispensable science, we’re coercively often asked to trust, was destroyed in the same fire that razed the Library of Alexandria.
Even with half a century of technological advancement since the last official Apollo moon mission, no country, including the United States, has been able to replicate this feat.
Are there no longer any astronauts and engineers with the proverbial ‘right stuff’? If not for great feats how else might we measure, even imprecisely, our civilisation in the form it momentarily subsists?
Another theory, of course, persists. What if we never went to the moon? What if the space race was a giant public relations stunt for liberal democracy? These questions have grown more troubling as the years have gone past especially for those who get troubled turning their minds to such questions.
Whatever the case the public appetite for major crewed space flight would seem to have shifted injudiciously.
As the quest for feats of engineering greatness moves from the public arena to domains of private equity, the greatest scientific discoveries, once celebrated as international historical events, move increasingly inwards, if the strange rites pursuant to CERN and its stakeholders, are the new industry benchmark.
In Osaka, where the next World Expo will take place in 2025, the theme of ‘Designing Future Society for Our Lives’ hardly smacks of adventure.
It sounds, at least to suspicious ears, like more lockdown life only with virtual reality.
During the first world fair held on the Champs-Élysées in 1855, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Thomas Edison’s phonograph were unveiled.
At the 1889 event, where the Eiffel Tower was conceived as the entrance arch, millions of visitors were amazed by Emile Berliner’s gramophone.
Few decisive, absolutely, new inventions have been unearthed since that period according to historian Stanley G. Payne, who points out that the development of the computer and discovery of nuclear fission happened only a few years later.
Nobody it seems told Duke Ellington.
Stereo, generally regarded as an invention of 1985, along with the lithium-ion battery, looks to have been the brainchild of a sound engineer at RCA Victor more than half a century earlier.
Two record collectors, called Lasker and Kay, when going over old recordings in 1981 found what, at first, they thought to be an alternate take of Ellington’s band recording a medley in 1932 — the same year the Waldorf Astoria was upstaging Uber Eats with room service.
Upon closer inspection of the newly discovered recording, which was also designated its own session number (71837) it seemed almost identical to the original pressing only with one jarring difference.
The drums of Sonny Greer sounded more immediate, while the horn section was muted, acutely distant.
It was almost as if they were listening to the same performance from two different perspectives.
Could there have been another directional mic located on the other side of the bandstand?
Years pass by. Eventually the two records are synchronised on separate channels of a stereo tape machine.
It becomes apparent that RCA-Victor recording session 71836 and 71837 when put together make stereo.
The conventional progressions of technology people have grown used to are suddenly thrown out: true stereo 20 years ahead of hi-fi.
By the time of the discovery, Wellington was no longer around to reap what Plutarch called the “advantages of continuity”.
Many others, however, have. NASA might take note.
Without the willpower and the means of distribution genius, as Edison, Berliner, Ellington all verify, languishes in a realm of dream, the metaverse of desire.
It’s here where the ideas of innovation don’t get realised.
In the metaverse you don’t happen.
The digital sphere in this way substitutes the eternal for the internal.
Teenagers, of all ages, are fomenting strife right now battling Moors, Nazis, Pirates, South Central cops, in worlds of adventure that have already happened.
The era of boredom well might be over.
Should it become a thing of the past, as it is surely destined to be, the conditions conducive to living up to greatness are likely to follow with it.
.jpg){kind=small}
