By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
You already know the answer, I think. It’s because they didn’t land.
Orbiting the moon - super cool. Seeing new stuff from far side - super cool. Emotional investment in something we’ve more or less done before? Well…
Which is actually a damn shame, but brains are funny like that. The entirety of human progress (and hubris) is down to chasing the next dopamine hit - and that probably includes the original moon shot.
Artemis is asking you to feel the same thing twice. Your lizard brain isn’t stupid - it’s just honest and lazy. If novelty is the drug, then this isn’t a new drug. It’s a carefully rebranded rerun with better CGI and a press kit. Plus, you’ve probably had a lot of other proxy hits to the ol’ reward center so that something as big as “humans in a tin can fly around the moon” just registers as “meh - I’ve seen better on For All Mankind”.
And I hate that for us.
Honestly I don’t even think I would care if they had landed. If they were setting up some sort of base I’d be into it – mostly to geek out over the new tech and techniques that would have to be developed for construction, environmental control, etc. But for just boots on the ground? Still kinda meh.
I’d be excited for boots on Mars, but again maybe for the same reasons - just to get people there and back would require an almost unthinkable (today) level of development and dedication of resources.
We’ve become so…jaded. I remember flying home from Japan, watching movies on my Ipad and dicking around on the net via inflight wifi. Literally flying over the ocean, in a chair, in the sky, with a supercomputer the size of a book, using invisible waves to communicate instantaneously across the globe.
Yawn.
Our calibration for extraordinary is out of whack. That’s the issue, I think.