I ride a motorcycle. It was built in 2008, weighs 450 lbs and makes 120 HP. In 1998 that was crazy power. In 1988 it was GP bike power. In 1978 it was science fiction. In 1908, a gas vehicle smaller than a horse made a hell of a lot less power than a horse, not a hundred times as much.

I hear you, its the narrative we are all familiar with. We are constantly improving and pushing forward with technological advances right? Well...

Lets take one example that breaks the narrative which is the fact that up to 2003 you were able to travel at supersonic speed across the Atlantic on Concorde. But Concorde was retired for various reasons so lets not dwell on that and instead look at where we are with space exploration.

There is another narrative regarding space which is that we are definitively heading as a species toward a point where space exploration will happen. Its almost taken for granted when people speak about our future as a race. Now take that narrative and introduce the fact that NASA no longer has a shuttle program. If we wanted to land on the Moon right now we could not do it unless we dusted off some of those shuttles on display and hope the engine still runs. Now like the Concorde there are all sorts of reasons the Shuttle program was retired (Cost, political etc) but the overriding fact is that it is not running.

So right now, at this moment in time we are not actively moving toward placing Humans on the Moon (apart from a few privately owned companies making a lot of news headlines by saying they are planning to do it), we know how to do it but we have opted to no longer chase that dream.

And that's what it is, its a dream. Its a lovely wonderful dream. Its the story of a species crawling from the primordial ooze and through its intellect and ambition launches itself among the stars. Who couldn't get behind that! There are downsides to it of course, the sense that perhaps you don't need to take as much care of your home planet as its more of a temporary launchpad rather than a permanent prison... There is an air of escapism in this dream don't you think? Perhaps that's just me.

Let me take one second to also point out that our present level of achievement is directly caused by and reliant on fossil fuels. The fact that the efficiency of a motorbike engine has increased dramatically is due to our increased understanding of engineering, manufacturing and refinement of engines and fuel. The energy stored within the fuel was always there, we have just gotten better at extracting it and using it. We have achieved or are extremely close to hitting the upper boundary on the amount of energy that can be extracted from that fuel. Increases in power output from the same fuel on the same curve as we have seen is not possible.

So where does our replacement for fossil fuel come from? It needs to have the explosive energy required to escape the gravity well. We are still working on that one it seems...

Anyway this is a longer post than I intended to write and I feel like I only scratched the surface. All I mentioned was general state of play stuff, we didn't even dive into the really difficult problems that needs to be solved before we can go anywhere.

I need to go listen to some more of my Hyperion audiobook and dream a little more.