Sunday 11 December 2011

30 Years later!

30 years ago when I was granted the right to vote despite what everyone says today, neither I nor my mates were waiting for hover boots to be invented. I know what interested me as I was band by my school from building liquid fueled rockets. I'd stood next to my dad on the drive looking up at the moon in 1969 and realised they there were people up there. Fuelling a lifelong interest in space and more precisely rockets.
In January 1986 standing on another drive in the snow I learnt of the Challenger disaster, and was shaken. I was still as naive about technology as the rest of the population, how could an organisation like NASA, which had put men on the moon have such a failure. Still to this day I'm angry at the lack of integrity of the engineers who said fly, I have never put on my management hat. Though I never been in a position where I not doing so has had the slightest effect on peoples' lives.
I had hoped to see Moon and Mars bases by now. I knew even then that that would only come with easy access to space and on orbit construction, before the end of the 70s, I see Apollo as a smash and grab raid for the political kudos not for the benefit of man. The entire job of a politician, as far as they are concerned, is to get themselves elected and once elected to get themselves elected next time. Cameroon capitulation to the Xenophobic part of the country and his back benchers is not the act of a leader. We cannot rely on politicians for anything other than dealing with other politicians, but on the other hand, we cannot rely on capitalism of private industry to take a longer view. Our future will have to be put together by visionaries who can in a piecemeal fashion produce the tools to take us forward. We cannot plan it, we can only go along for the ride, and find ways of letting people explore their futures and then let history whittle them down. It is a task beyond man to see or predict his future except in the most general terms and even the best predictions will only be a range of options.
When it comes to managing the day to day running of society which have little choice but to leave that to the democratic process as it is the worst except for all the rest.
It isn't small government we need, but an appropriately sized and enabling government not one that wishes to claims societies victories for itself and its apparatchiks.
The various political movements of the moment from the Free men to the hard left have failed to understand that the future is emergent. They have a Newtonian world view, one that has no place for Chaos theory, and its uncertainty.
I didn't expect the 1 Farad capacitor BTW, that was impossible according to Mr Stacy my Physics teacher.

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