The other day I drove through Huntsville, Alabama. Beside the freeway is the Space and Rocket Center, and I could easily see the Saturn V, other earlier rockets, and Space Shuttle on display there.
I thought, "It's like driving past the Victoria."
We think of our civilisation as old and beat down sometimes. But if we survive, a thousand years from now those things will be like Gutenberg's first printing press, Leeuwenhoek's microscope, or Euclid's pen. Art, technology, desire, purity, compromise, all the things that make us us.
Think about it- when you start naming people who lived more than five centuries ago, who are they? Explorers- mathematicians, travelers, artists.
From the century we were born in, Goddard might be the remembered name when Obama and Hitler are obscure Wikipedia entries.
We are just getting started.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I have told my children I watched on live TV as the first human set foot on the moon.
My mother and father told me about remembering the start of WWII.
My maternal grandfather told me about entering this country as a Slovak immigrant, 12 years old, in the year 1900, and how he remembered the first plane he ever saw.
I was told stories of my paternal great grandfather coming from Ireland after the US Civil War, and becoming a farmer in the wilds of rural North Carolina.
Time marches on.
I expect my son to tell his children about seeing the fall of the World Trade Center towers in 2001, and my daughter to tell hers about watching the US military advance on Bhagdad live on the internet in 2003.
Post a Comment