Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project - Posts Tagged "star-trek"
To Boldly Go
“Poison in the ground. Perchlorate variety. Though christ only knows what else. Gets in the air when the wind blows.” “Is it safe?” “Put it this way. I wouldn’t raise crops here.” Bell knew this area well from too many briefings on too many explosions. Rocketdyne used burn pits in its active zones. It destroyed contaminated items in the open air itself. “This whole hill is a chemistry laboratory. We use this place for testing fuel. Different mixes. Different strengths. Every ounce of that stuff is pure poison. And when you burn poison, you get more poison.”
The Santa Susana field laboratory remains a mess. Per the EPA, the “primary chemical contaminants include a variety of radionuclides, trichloroethylene (TCE), perchloroethylene (PCE), metals, and petroleum hydrocarbons.” The clean-up is ongoing. That poison we put into the ground to put our men on the moon was real. That's what it took to get so high. It was pretty rough stuff.
I look at what technology has offered in recent years: some good telephony (and we don’t destroy our own back yards anymore, either; we put our poisons in Africa and Asia) (well, fracking, but that’s another story). I don’t want to gainsay the rise of Facebook and Apple. The societal effects of these new communication abilities are still being tested in real time. We’ll see how they work out. It hasn’t done much more than make a handful of billionaires at this point, but perhaps it’s still too early to say.
And our lives weren’t changed by putting men into space, either. It can be argued that our having done so was a giant waste of money and time. We could have been better served by putting those resources towards a dozen other projects more intelligently calculated to alleviate human misery.
Yet one of the most interesting things about the 60’s was its combination of big industry and big consciousness. The line between convention and rebellion got blurred. The most powerful companies, the military men, the crew cuts and the squares, worked for ten years to put a man on the moon. And it can’t be denied. That was cool.
RIP to that ancient mix. And RIP to Leonard Nimoy, a landsman of mine, from Boston and points even further east. That silly old show of his was pretty terrific. Him and Shatner, actors playing actors, each trying to be what they wanted to be: in control, in their own personal ways, of their own personal rides on a very strange trip.
Plus his singing was underrated, and he was really a handsome guy. Who knew.
The Santa Susana field laboratory remains a mess. Per the EPA, the “primary chemical contaminants include a variety of radionuclides, trichloroethylene (TCE), perchloroethylene (PCE), metals, and petroleum hydrocarbons.” The clean-up is ongoing. That poison we put into the ground to put our men on the moon was real. That's what it took to get so high. It was pretty rough stuff.
I look at what technology has offered in recent years: some good telephony (and we don’t destroy our own back yards anymore, either; we put our poisons in Africa and Asia) (well, fracking, but that’s another story). I don’t want to gainsay the rise of Facebook and Apple. The societal effects of these new communication abilities are still being tested in real time. We’ll see how they work out. It hasn’t done much more than make a handful of billionaires at this point, but perhaps it’s still too early to say.
And our lives weren’t changed by putting men into space, either. It can be argued that our having done so was a giant waste of money and time. We could have been better served by putting those resources towards a dozen other projects more intelligently calculated to alleviate human misery.
Yet one of the most interesting things about the 60’s was its combination of big industry and big consciousness. The line between convention and rebellion got blurred. The most powerful companies, the military men, the crew cuts and the squares, worked for ten years to put a man on the moon. And it can’t be denied. That was cool.
RIP to that ancient mix. And RIP to Leonard Nimoy, a landsman of mine, from Boston and points even further east. That silly old show of his was pretty terrific. Him and Shatner, actors playing actors, each trying to be what they wanted to be: in control, in their own personal ways, of their own personal rides on a very strange trip.
Plus his singing was underrated, and he was really a handsome guy. Who knew.
