On 09Jan2019 1356, Catherine Berry wrote:
> I think a lot of us share that inability to let go. I was seven years old
> when i watched Apollo XI land on the moon, and I still get a tingle when I
> remember how that felt -- the enormous possibilities opening up, the
> beginning of a new Age of Exploration, a chance to be part of humanity's
> next great migration...
>
> And none of that happened. Since I was 11 years old, no human being has
> been farther from Earth than San Francisco is from Los Angeles. The loss of
> that grand dream has been an ache my whole adult life. Yes, our robotic
> explorers are doing an amazing job as our proxies, but I still want to
> watch the blue-tinged sunset from the hill above my dome city on Mars, or
> prospect for volatiles in Jupiter's trailing trojans, or scale the gigantic
> cliffs of Miranda. Or even slide into orbit around Proxima b, and watch an
> alien sun rise over the limb of an entirely new world.

I'm young enough that I have conscious memory of even the last moon
landing (though I was at school at the time, it wasn't newsworthy
enough). However, my parents are/were both SF and fantasy fans and I
grew up on AC Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov stories (not to forget Van
Vogt, Niven, & etc.). This timeline we're on has proven to be most
disappointing.

I'm also old-fashioned enough, and still have enough of an infantryman's
gut feelings that to me you haven't been somewhere unless you've seen it
with your own eyes and walked on it with your own feet, even if you
can't breathe the air and feel the sand between your toes because the
place won't sustain unprotected human life. Also, something isn't yours
until you can walk across it your own self -you have to occupy a place
to be able to claim it's yours. We, the human species, don't even own
our planet's moon, and have barely walked on it (as tourists).

As I said, it's really disappointing, and the idea of relying on AI
robots to do the work doesn't make me feel any better.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief