“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
We’ve all probably heard this quote before. And unfortunately it reflects a sad reality that grows truer and truer every day. Lately it seems that we’ve been endlessly embroiled in one overseas conflict or another. Of course, that’s nothing new to us. As it stands, a better part of the last century has been spent in military engagements around the globe. But if that weren’t bad enough, we’re not spared from conflict here at home either.
Every time you flip on the television you’re met with images of another war in a far off location, seemingly incompetent politicians perpetually engaged in mudslinging, and a relentless onslaught of media indoctrination. With such a toxic environment, it seems almost reasonable that we have retreated into our proverbial skeptical shells – blatantly smearing new ideas and faces to suit our own bleak and cynical outlook. I think the problem is, we’ve stopped dreaming.
Take for instance, the space program. I keep hearing all these claims that there isn’t a large enough budget in the world to properly fund NASA, but did you know that the $850 billion dollar bank bailout is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it brilliantly:
“The federal budget is three point something trillion dollars. If you want to count to a trillion, it would take you one hundred thousand years, and that’s one number per second every waking and sleeping moment of your life. It’s not that we can’t afford it, it’s that we have chosen not to afford it. The NASA budget is four tenths of one penny of a tax dollar. If I held up a tax dollar, and I cut horizontally into it four tenths of one percent of its width, it won’t even get you into the ink!”
Think about it – there was once a time when a president said he would put a man on the moon, and within ten years it would be done. Could you imagine what it would be like if we had attempted a moon landing now instead of in the 60s? The idea would be scoffed at and ultimately filibustered into obscurity. I can almost picture the criticism now: “Who cares about space? We need to take care of our affairs down here first!”
And it is this sort of mentality that brings me to my next point. There seems to be some sort of a fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to space exploration and scientific discoveries. What people need to realize is that the stuff we spend millions of dollars on now won’t effect the world of today, it will effect the world of tomorrow. Take, for instance, early experiments with electromagnetism. At the time, magnets and motors were considered a cheap party trick, something for magicians to dabble in. Take it one step further, the quantum model of matter. At the time the scientists had no idea what the future would hold for their research. It’s almost impossible to imagine living in a world without computers, cellphones, cars, and technology, yet without this past scientific investment, it would be all we know.
I think that if we truly want a future worth looking forward to, we need to start investing in science. We need scientifically literate politicians. We need schools to teach students how to understand the world, not teach them how to memorize textbooks. We need to stop belittling scientific endeavors and new ideas. We need to shift our priorities from unsustainable conflicts to a sustainable future. We need to start dreaming again.
In the 60s and 70s you wouldn’t go one week without hearing about the home/city/transportation of tomorrow. Well, tomorrow is gone. We’re playing for our quarterly reports, and our politicians are playing for their next election cycle. Pretty soon, the rest of the world is going to pass us by. Heck, it’s happening already.
It’s one of the fantastic things about the human race – our ability to dream, to imagine, to hope. The biggest mistake anyone can make is revel in their own ignorance. The moment we ‘give up’ because something is too unrealistic, or too far-fetched, is the moment a little piece of that human spirit dies. You might think that these sort of ideas are too big for any one person to achieve on their own. You couldn’t be more wrong! Turn off the TV, go outside, go stargazing, open a book, learn something new, learn something for the sake of learning, get inspired!
Here is the video that got me started on this whole rant: