Everyone is a skeptic and a believer, when you get right down to it. Everyone has their own set of beliefs and their own set of hopes and dreams. Everyone has had disappointments and experiences that teach them to be wary and untrusting.
Oftentimes, you can scratch a skeptic and find a closet believer, and vice versa. Sometimes the difference between a skeptic and a believer is just a few drinks.
I once was a believer in Progress, the inevitable linear march towards the future. Now I am--maybe not a skeptic so much as a (very) cautious believer. Or maybe just a wishful thinker. I see Progress not as a straight line but a scribbly one. Things get better for some people and get worse for others.
In my lifetime Syria, Iraq and Ukraine were modern, industrialized countries with educated populations. Now they are disaster areas. But by the same token the opposite can be said of many other countries who were mired in war and poverty 30 years ago but now are forces to be reckoned with. Like I said, it's not a straight line.
Industrial Progress was once America's surrogate religion.Gordon recently wrote about the late Edward Condon, a hero to debunkers but a man who had the professional ethics of a schoolyard meth dealer.
Condon's religion- the religion of the "March of Progress"- was so existentially threatened by UFOs that he rigged the report, fired whistleblowers when his deception was revealed and then burned all his notes so no one could review his work. Had this been any other topic, Condon may well have been put up on charges (Uncle Sam was footing the bill). He certainly would have been disgraced by his peers; but his peers shared his religious beliefs so he was rewarded for his acts. THE UNFOLDMENT
The Western world once believed in Progress towards heavenly salvation. The entire world was revealing itself and unfolding in such a way as to glorify Jehovah and lead to a paradise on Earth. With the Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution, these same exact expectations were merely transposed onto Science. We have more sophisticated technology than ever before, but it hasn't led to Paradise, and most certainly not the stars. Silicon Valley isn't the engine of Utopia, it's the engine of the new Feudalism that dominates California, which went from being a middle class paradise to being one of the poorest and most economically stratified states in the country, a place of grotesque inequality and near absolute-zero social mobility. FUTURAMA
I'm old enough to have heard how the next world-changing technology is "just around the corner" but all we really seem to get are faster and smaller versions of things we already had. I remember seeing articles claiming that bionic limbs were "just around the corner" when The Six Million Dollar Man was popular. Virtual Reality was "just around the corner" 20 years, it's still "just around the corner" today. Hovercraft as personal transportation was "just around the corner" around the same time. When's the last time you saw a hovercraft?
Transhumanism was all the rage a few years back, but now it's somehow landed on the attack list for online skeptics. Desperate Singularitarian and Transhumanist true believers increasingly look electronics companies who went all in on the Betamax format. We were hearing how uploading our minds into robot bodies was the way to achieve immortality, but now Silicon Valley is going all in on medical (read: pharmaceutical) solutions for longevity.
Androids are supposed to be "just around the corner" but I feel like I've been seeing the same creepy Japanese fembot press conference on a tape loop since the Reagan Era. Sure, computers can beat grand masters at chess, but can they build a birdhouse and take out the trash as well? Artificial Intelligence is supposed to be "just around the corner," but I've seen a lot of serious skepticism about that as well.
Of course, there's also the "Disclosure Movement", which forever keeps the illusion alive that the government is going to reverse 70 years of policy and admit that not only do UFOs actually exist, but that they are extraterrestrial spacecraft. That's always "just around the corner" too. The Edward Condons of the world may feel threatened by the possibility of someone possessing greater technology than themselves but the government does so for an entirely different reason, believe me.
But for guys my age, space is the biggest disappointment. Star Trek electrified a generation of kids who didn't have a lot else to look forward to, and then of course there was Star Wars. But it seems like they're both in a galaxy far, far away these days. The two success stories of the space program, the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter and the Mars Opportunity Rover, are being unceremoniously defunded by the Obama Administration, who seem content to keep NASA alive as a mouthpiece for "global warming" propaganda (the New England area just received the most snow in recorded history, a headline we seem to be seeing a lot lately). There's another probe being talked up for Mars but not much else.
I can't help but wonder if all this Flat Earth and ISS hoax material out there is in some way a reaction to the broken promises of the space program and of the better-living-through-technology paradigm altogether.
I have to say these videos are entertaining, and there are a lot of curious anomalies in the ISS footage, but the question you have to ask is why bother? Who really cared about the Shuttle, never mind the ISS? The Apollo hoaxes have a compelling motive; keeping a country together during a period of extreme crisis by creating a massive "feel-good" diversion. An ISS hoax? Who cares?
People my age grew up expecting there to be bases on Mars by now and certainly some kind of colony on the Moon. But what if the skeptics are right? What if outer space is an impassable hell of lethal radiation? (Radiation could certainly explain why we aren't picking up any coherent radio signals- they're being garbled as they travel through giant waves of radiation trillions of miles wide.)
I'm not saying I necessarily agree, but certainly there are a lot of huge gaps in the orthodox position on space exploration.
Joe Rogan said, quite cannily I thought, that when the Apollo missions were done that no one could have foreseen the age of home video recording, to which I'd add they didn't foresee the age of image analysis being available to anyone with a decent computer either. When challenged about whistleblowers, Rogan brought up Gus Grissom. He could have brought up several other astronauts and NASA employees who died violent deaths during that same time period. He could have also brought up the fact that there were whistleblowers, like Bill Kaysing.
It's not something I want to believe.I want to believe in the March of Progress. The alternatives aren't very appealing. I'd say most of the serious Apollo skeptics started out as serious space nerds. I'd also bet there are a lot of quote-unquote believers who are in fact skeptics, but are afraid to speak up.
Technology has very often solved many of the existential problems of the human condition (see irrigation, agriculture, medicine, air flight, etc). But technology also has a tendency to empower the worst of us to do harm to the best of us. It's why as I wrote before we may see ever stranger expressions of dissent from the dominant consensus, which preaches Progress and the salvational force of Technology. What form they take and where they go will be something to watch, you can bet on that. Social revolutions often spring from the most unlikely sources.
