What Happened to Us?

Today - July 16, 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. On this day, Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr left the Earth and flew to the moon. On July 20th, Armstrong announced those now famous words, "The eagle has landed."

After Armstrong descended the ladder of the landing module and he took his first step on the lunar surface he said, ""That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind"



I was five years old and I barely remember the event, but the influence of the flight lasted a life time. Or so I thought.

What happened to us? Since that historic journey, things have gotten worse. We wrecked the environment. There are more wars and more children starving. With all the new technology we can't even seem to leave orbit. My God, there are even more people who think the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

Okay, there's the Internet. I guess that cool. And there's WoW and gastric bands for when you get too fat from playing WoW. There is HDTV and computers. And the first black president. But really the spirit of adventure has died.

My first scifi novel was "A Wrinkle in Time". I didn't really identify with Meg, but that was okay, the whole premise was fantastic. Next, I got hooked on the Heinlein adolescence series. Stories like, "Starman Jones" and "Have Space Suit will Travel". This was a time when everything was possible. There would be a base on the moon and then to Mars and then to Jupiter and then My God it's full of stars ...

But slowly and incrementally I slipped into cyberpunk. In the 80's I lost all those dreams and descended into the decay of society. I was into "Neuromancer", "Armor", "The Forever War", "When Gravity Fails" and "A Scanner Darkly".

And then came acceptance that we totally screwed ourselves and I started reading organic science fiction like "Ender's Game" and "The Dispossessed".

Forty years have passed and we are still no closser to leaving the orbit of this planet. We are at least ten more years away from getting back to the moon and maybe fifty years away from going to Mars.

What happened to us?

Boston.com has a great selection of photo's from the historic mission
NASA's Apollo 11 page.