My friend Paul Levinson has a new book out, Realspace, about the subsumption/sublimation of humanity's space-dreams into the Web. The first chapter and a video interview with Paul are online, though ABC's dumb-ass Javascript-and-RealMedia combination means that I can't watch the video and when I try, every running browser on my system starts to spawn lots of windows and popups and the dark hand of proprietary software reaches through my screen and grabs me by the throat and squeezes.
It is amazing that we made it out into space at all. Lifting ourselves totally off and beyond this planet is — as far as we know — without precedent. In contrast to just plain airflight, which was old news to birds, insects, and other winged creatures for eons before we joined them in our flying machines, our movement into space is apparently something really new under the sun. Or, at least, under ours.
Perhaps such extraordinary leaps are always followed by decades — maybe centuries, even millennia — of indifference and coasting. None of us, after all, were around when fire was harnessed, when writing was invented, when crops and livestock were first domesticated. Historical records for such signal events are not available. Perhaps lack of progress in their immediate aftermaths was lamented just as some of us now lament our lack of progress in space.
But here we are, nonetheless, heirs to walking on the Moon a little more than a decade after Sputnik, followed by three decades of humans not setting foot on a single extraterrestrial body. It's hard to avoid the question: what went wrong?
