I have been wondering what sort of space program we would've had if kids of the thirties didn't read sci-fi pulps like Amazing Stories or some such adventurous fiction and instead played games on computers that simulated all the things computers simulate now.

Would a space program have ever gotten off the ground? Hugo Gernsback the pulp king met Nikola Tesla early in the last century and was so impressed with his visions of the future that he had his top illustrator, Frank R. Paul draw the Wardenclyffe tower (a proposed wireless power transmission station that was unfinished due to lack of funding).

Have video games taken a generation or two of potential propulsion scientists and explorers and redirected their efforts and energy on blasting pixels to bit and conquering a programmers lat night code writing?

I can't help but think that our technocracy is acting as both a boon and the largest ball and chain ever manufactured for our youth and the youth of the future.

Why leave the comfort of home and put your life in danger by exploring new frontiers when one can be a pseudo-explorer in an artificial reality? What would motivate kids when they have an endless selection of time consuming options to spend every spare moment of their free time?

A lack of luxury obviously has driven people to accomplishment. The rags to riches tales of inventors like Tesla, Edison, Whitney and others should give ample evidence of this great motivation hardship provides.

In the middle east suicide bombers and terrorists are mostly born of this same poverty and "having spare time to kill" - if you will pardon the expression.

As even the poorer kids now generally have some access to computers and games, are we redefining our technological progress as simply the race as who can build more complex games, with better graphics on a faster processing chip?

I don't like the way things are going. The FDA is willing to ok cloned foods even when cloned animals are known to be inferior and die early. They are prostituting themselves to the biotech companies who stand to make billions of dollars on patent royalties when lazy farmers with dollar signs in place of pupils take up this inferior produce development for an easy buck.

The progress is being made in all the wrong places. The pharmaceutical industry shoves drugs at everyone like candy and the doctors become de facto retail distributors for the pharmaceutical industry.

Then there's the abhorrent method of chemotherapy which is performed almost always to a patients detriment. The radiation destroys their white blood cells and almost always accelerates the cancer process.

Why do they do it? The hospital has paid lots of money for this equipment and each use sends a huge bill to an insurance company. It's a glorified money maker and it preys on cancer victims. By scaring patients into taking chemo - they kill more often than they heal and they make enough money to choke an elephant with each treatment. Anyone who knows what radiation does to blood and understands how blood works would never submit to chemo as an option. It's modern day bloodletting and it is repugnant. The doctors get in trouble with the hospital they work for if they don't push chemo - hey doc it's "better to start treatment early" right?

I've watched many folks just get anemic and die after starting chemo - and the merciless doctors schedule another treatment just as soon as their white blood cells start to come back! Callous?

Beyond callous....murderous.

Yes, technology for a buck. The art of preying on the ignorant whom are impressed by big machines and put their trust in someone who has long ago forsaken the Hippocratic Oath and his good yet often ignored advice, "Sometimes doing nothing is the best treatment."

A world where the FDA and Doctors can't be trusted is not a very good world. Watching the FDA folks leave their 50k jobs and get on the board of a pharmaceutical or a biotech for millions of dollars after paving the way for this companies product/drug approval while they were at the FDA is not only unethical - it is revolting.

Progress in the wrong areas and retrogression in the ones that count. The Concorde is retired now - a painful reminder of the US failure to proceed with the SST, the space program is laughable (what program?), our transportation efforts seem to be geared towards making plastic cars that can be both uglier and more deadly simultaneously all due to the erroneously proffered propaganda back in 1973 that we would run out of gas by the year 2000 and which manufacturers have used as an excuse to sell less for more.

Monorails, mag-levs? Japan and Europe have a few but nothing serious ever gets started in the US as long as a few companies exist to torpedo such research, buy up the patents and bury it every time someone unearths it.

Here's another example: Electroluminescent lighting.

In the early sixties, Westinghouse pioneered a process a new way to create light. Superior to light bulbs, by sandwiching a phosphor and pulsing an alternating current through it it would emit photons - light. All out homes were supposed to be fitted with panels which could light a room as bright as day or as dim as moonlight with the turn of a dial and with another dial one could change the color of this light.

What happened? We should have had flat panel displays in the late sixties! The flat plasma TV hanging on your wall would be a fat monstrosity worthy only of 1963 technology! All the designers at Westinghouse were shot down by the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) divisions which were doing very well enough, thank you. Several left and tried to start their own companies - but they were all sabotaged by the folks that be at GE, Westinghouse and other big firms that did not want to convert assembly or disrupt the CRT gravytrain. The patents now are all over the place and buried for the largest part by firms who have a vested interest in the status quo.

Progress? Hah.

The visionary of today has a real handicap. Even the visionary of yesterday met a glass ceiling. Nikola Tesla after his breakthorugh alternating current wanted to move ont better things and provide wireless transmission of power - but wireless power was way too far ahead for the money folks? How would it be controlled? Why should they invest in it when they already have large investment in wires all over the world and are making out handsomely? Steinmetz was paid by GE to steal Tesla's polyphase system and make enough modifications so they could patent their own design and rip off Westinghouse and Tesla. Yet, even he knew the future was broadcast power.

Now I am not opposed to making a buck - but what I am seeing happen is the dead wood building up and the tree of creativity is dying. Reality TV. Bachelor Bob and the like are examples of the pandering to a completely moronic level of intellect that is becoming pervasive in our culture.

While there have always been these type folks - their numbers and influence seem to be increasing as the worldmakers of yesterday fade away.

A world with too much entertainment and not enough impetus to create and build is a world doomed to oblivion. And profit should only come before progress in a dictionary.

Is it just me? Am I overly pessimistic this morning? I don't know. Space folks like us may become relics of a bygone era.

SDAI-Tech1