Are You Still Here?

 

Colour me unimpressed. It frankly disenchants me that the human attention span has degraded to the point where, unless there are subtitles or footage of car crashes playing in the background, we seem to move on from otherwise incredible things in a staggeringly short amount of time.

Two years ago, one of the single greatest -real life- miracles took place… For those of us that have aspirations lying in our (hopefully not too) distant future. Elon Musk and his band of merry astro-engineers accomplished something that not even the great Gene Roddenberry completely conceptualized in between his rampant alcohol benders. (Let me just say this, I do overexaggerate, I do not judge, but one would have to be on some kind of unorthodox medication in order to come up with horny green women… Just saying.)

SpaceX caught, what is essentially a twenty-story building with a pair of sticks. A twenty-story building that, as near as makes no difference, fell back down from space to settle ever so gently betwixt the bosom of a few welded and bolted chopsticks (That’s what they actually called them). This was arguably the single greatest event in the mind of the hopeful explorer that has ever turned their eyes to the sky at night, dreaming that Star Trek would very soon be somewhat of a documentary. (Horny green women included... Remember kids, we are not sexist or speci-ist, unless absolutely necessary).

Yet here we are, barely two years later and -from what I can tell- not a single functional care is given anymore. In a land, long, long ago (57 years) the entire planet was buzzing with a hopeful future for months, if not years after the first man set foot on our closest neighbour. Of course, after the fourth or fifth time the novelty wears off, but catching a whole building with a pair of aluminium twigs only happened twice!

I shudder to think what kind of calamity could recapture the global imagination like the Apollo missions (at least 11 to 13) did. And I say calamity, because I unfortunately fail to see my people celebrating good things anymore… Even the religious folk suffer from this – if something good happens, ah, God is good. If something bad happens? THE END IS NIGH!

How did we get to a point where we are effectively bored with miracles? I refuse to accept that it’s because there are so many happening so regularly, because they don’t. These kinds of technological miracles come once in a lifetime, and we have buried ours under 23 gigabytes of hilariously unfunny Trump gifs.

We are slowly but surely making our way deeper into the cosmos. Just – please - try and pay attention before you miss it.

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