Another challenge, by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views December 2018

Another challenge

by Groff Schroeder

 

"My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," so spoke President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on January 20, 1961. Kennedy's inspirational inaugural address provided a hopeful counterpoint to the prescient warning in the farewell address of the outgoing President, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

 

In 1961, ever increasing numbers of "delivery vehicles" bearing nuclear "warheads" many thousands of times more powerful than those dropped on Japan characterized the dangerous, expensive, and corrupting "cold war" "arms race" between Allied democracy and Soviet totalitarianism. On May 25, 1961 President Kennedy suggested a "political and technical alternative to the current arms race," a "space race" with the goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

 

In 1964, Los Angeles, former police officer Gene Roddenberry registered a television program combining two popular television genres, the western and science fiction. "Star Trek" was first broadcast on September 8, 1966, weeks after the second unmanned suborbital test launch of the Apollo Command/Service Module, and days before the manned Gemini 11 mission. While 1960's astronauts relied upon analog electronics, communicated with a global "deep space" radio network, and addressed their guidance computer in octal, crew members of the "United Space Ship Enterprise" employed pocket "communicators," used "tricorders" to sense their environment, addressed their ship's super-computer with voice commands, and teleported as energy patterns.

 

The space race and Star Trek inspired countless individuals to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and "Trekkies" soon populated academia and technical workplaces. As a result, today everyday people communicate globally with "smart phones" that not only sense their environments, but also allow voice addressable access to an almost unimaginably powerful library and computer network - all in a single hand held device - and modern "entangled" particle physics might someday yield the fabled Star Trek "transporter." But the deadly real space race and the fictional Star Trek were about more than cool technologies, both also shared the goals of creating social justice, repairing corrupted political systems, and ending the enduring madness of war. But Star Trek went even further, imagining an economy that transcended money, freeing 23rd century humans from "filthy lucre" - and thus the bonds of corruption, debt, greed, hunger, inequality, and poverty.

 

Over 50 years, the brilliant minds, imaginations, and workers of Star Trek planted the seeds of many of today's most important advanced technologies, and the brilliant minds, imaginations, and workers of the "space race" birthed countless scientific technologies - leaving six Apollo Lunar Landing Sites on the moon using analog engineering so outdated today it is extremely difficult to recreate. Imagine the "impossible" goals we can achieve in the next 50 years applying modern science, engineering, and the same kind of bravery, cooperation, determination, imagination, and hard work that John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Gene Roddenberry embodied and inspired in the 1960s.

 

Albeit sometimes distressing, the disruptive nature of the "disastrous rise" of "unwarranted influence" and "misplaced power" might offer an opportunity. Why wait for the 23rd century? How do we get there from here?

 

 

 

Another challenge appeared in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs Freethought Views column in the December 5, 2018 edition of the Colorado Springs Independent with the quotation below.

 

"Fortune sides with those who dare."

Virgil