Y'know folks, all we have to do is just wait until the 2030's, Zephram Cochrane will be born in Montana, and BAM, free ticket to Star Trek-land for humanity.
I remain empathetic to the concerns of my community, but do me a favor and lay off the god damn name calling and petty remarks. It will get you nowhere.
I must admit, respect points to Trendy for laying down the law like that.
No we have NOT
No credible independant lab has created a visible (with the human eye) quantity of this theoretical material
its like higgs particles it has only been "observed by effect" by people who are deliberately looking
its seen by other stuff reacting to it (ie its hearsay)
as i say Unicorns , bigfoot , anti matter (actually in theory the existance of ANY at all would be potentially fatal for the cosmos)
you want to prove something exists
make 1 lb of it in a jar
You can't exactly put antimatter in a jar. -_-
But in response to this post, I give you these links.
I read an article from online, it talks about the possibility of warp drive. If I find the article I will post it for you all to look at and make your own opinions on it.
Something I've always rather felt is, that Star Trek is kind of...too perfect, at least the TNG era feels that way to me. It seems to me that in some ways, Star Trek in general, is rather unobtainable, in various ways.
Technology: As it stands now, most technology in Star Trek is still very very within the realm of sci-fi, and until such a time as proved otherwise, isn't currently obtainable for us within the early 21st century.
United Earth: This is the big point to me. Not so much the united governments, but more humanity as a species, at this point in time, I do honestly wonder if humanity could truly put aside all differences and such, and unite for all time like that.
Aliens: Most sci-fi series make aliens be our allies or our enemies, or a mixture there-of. While I don't want to get into an argument on if aliens exist or not, just that if they did, I honestly wonder how...benevolent they might actually be. I mean, what would humanity truly have to offer the greater galaxy?
There's more, but I'll leave it with that for the time being. Do you all think that 'Star Trek' is possible for us in reality?
Nope.
...and I'm so sure of that for so many different reasons I will bet you 100 bucks. You can collect if we live to be 200.
Besides religion is a no no here
science is of course a sort of religion in and of itself
No. Science needs facts and evidence, and speculation and faith is not part of the science, until it has been proven.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Modern people often put absolute faith in science as they once did in various religions
Citation needed.
Anyway... guys... I've "debated" folks like this online since the 300 baud modem. Don't bother. Unless you have a time machine and you go back in time to slap all of the adults in their lives who've educated them into someone who thinks these things your time will be wasted.
And since the forum rules forbid point and laughing you don't have that option as well.
Roll your eyes and move on before you go further down the rabbit hole.
Modern people often put absolute faith in science as they once did in various religions
peer reviewed thoretical science in the pursuit of knowledge, and blind, brutally enforced theocracy for the retention of power and infulence, are not the same thing...anyway, im old enough and wise enough not to get drawn into an internet argument about religion. have fun everybody :cool:
I think Peter David came up with the best response in his blog, based on an incident in the premiere episode of The Paper Chase, in which the professor dealt with one particular student by walking up to his seat, placing a sheet over him, and proceeding to utterly ignore him from that point on. Peter calls it "shrouding" - simply refuse to allow the nonsense perpetrated by the troll to penetrate your consciousness. You wind up not even trying to educate someone who does not wish to be educated, thus saving both of you untold amounts of stress.
As the old saying has it, "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."
On the topic of a United Earth - I don't think it'll happen the way Roddenberry envisioned it, certainly; his future history included WW3 happening, killing over six hundred million people, and then First Contact with Vulcan while the planet was still recovering. In that scenario, humanity pulling together with the example of Vulcan (and its rather violent history) seems more probable than it does in our universe.
If we were ever to have anything that might be regarded as a "world government", I think it might be more like a planet-sized Federation, where each member nation maintained its own form of government under the benevolent protection of the greater republic (not terribly unlike the Articles of Confederation under which the US first formed, but hopefully without the local loyalties causing the whole thing to break down in a few years).
I'd certainly rather see that than Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium, or any of the other rather dystopic one-world governments we've had such persuasive cautionary tales about...
Space is not even a human conquerable environment because one mistake and they are dead, probably along with several others.
Yeah, it's not like we managed to land six manned missions on the Moon, and bring one back alive even after a disaster en route, using 1960s technology.
Oh, wait...
(I could have gone with how long the ISS has been in operation, but its panic moments, while certainly dangerous for the crew, weren't quite so, well, dramatic as Apollo XIII.)
Yeah, it's not like we managed to land six manned missions on the Moon, and bring one back alive even after a disaster en route, using 1960s technology.
Oh, wait...
(I could have gone with how long the ISS has been in operation, but its panic moments, while certainly dangerous for the crew, weren't quite so, well, dramatic as Apollo XIII.)
Our boys and girls in space, even as far away as the moon, enjoyed the protective embrace of the Earth's magnetosphere and were not fried by the solar radiation. Even then they get higher doses of it. And they can't live on the ISS without constant supplies being brought to them.
We're not separate from our biosphere like some seem to think when they get on this topic. Our survival in space requires replicating much of the environment we evolved in. That alone is cost prohibitive. Add to that the costs amd technology required of moving this mini planet we need (and that doesnt even get into the unlikliness we can even survive the biosphere of an alien planet) and space travel is realized to be the wishful thinking it is.
Now, I do think exploiting the resources of our solar system is a wise idea. We're really good at making machines to do this for us. But polital will is so short sighted and narrow focused, that won't happen either.
You and I, most certainly. Future generations? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows.
But I'm sure that if the future generations do get out into the cosmos it won't be in fancy ships with magic food slots, hologram amusement parks and room for families because they've created a society where no one works for monetary payment.
I'll believe Bigfoot lives in my shed before I believe anything remotely like that is possible.
No. Science needs facts and evidence, and speculation and faith is not part of the science, until it has been proven.
Semi-quoting a Voyager episode: believing that science, with time and the proper tools, will eventually find all the answers is still some kind of faith.
Anyway, I don't think Star Trek is posible, sadly, and somehow that is exactly why I like it.
Everything described in Star Trek is theoretically possible, it just requires more energy than we as a species currently consume or have access to. But once we figure out how to mass-produce antimatter, (which we are working on now,) all bets are off. Transporters, warp drive, artificial gravity, inertial dampeners, tractor beams - all of this we know how to do. We just can't yet because the energy requirement is currently prohibitive.
United Earth:
Unfortunately things will have to get a lot worse before they can get better. Even Roddenberry recognized this. That's why he wrote a global nuclear holocaust into the timeline. Even then, Earth wasn't unified until after the Vulcans made First Contact.
Eventually, inevitably, the US and China and possibly the EU will go to war with each other over competing interests or scarce resources. Wolrd War III will be waged sometime in the next half-century, either with conventional weapons or nuclear arms. But after the war there will necessarily follow a dramatic increase in technology. WWII brought us radar, jet engines, nuclear power and computers. Will WWIII see the advent of quantum teleportation, energy shields, and antimatter power? Remember, it was during WWII that we figured out how to manufacture plutonium. I imagine we'll learn to manufacture antimatter during WWIII, for similar purposes.
Aliens:
Depending on how much stock you put into the notion of panspermia it is actually fairly likely that other intelligent life in the galaxy will have evolved into a similar "humanoid" form. When you look at a human being from an engineering perspective, we are actually a fairly efficient design. Not to discount the posibility of interdimensional life (Q!) but I think we are far more likely to discover aliens that we can actually relate to, having similar requirements for food, water, oxygen and an ambient temperature of between 0 and 100C. And among the many hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way, I think we are bound to find more than a few worlds that meet these requirements.
As for where we would fit in amongst alien species, I think again Roddenberry got it right. We'll be far behind some, well of others. But what we bring to the table: or innate curiosity, tenacity and adventurous spirit will bring us more allies than enemies, and the speed at which we can adapt to changes will quickly make us leaders in any "federation."
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
Semi-quoting a Voyager episode: believing that science, with time and the proper tools, will eventually find all the answers is still some kind of faith.
I agree with your basic premise of people believing that science can make magic technology to take us the stars because science is good at stuff is dumb. That's why I don't accept the space travel pipe dreams.
However, science remains a process quite separate from the wishful thinking of the apes that use it. That's why disproving something is as vital as proving it. The LHC, for example, wasnt made to prove the Higgs existed. It was made to test the theory. If it had shown the Higgs didnt exist, it would be just as successful.
It's not that simple. You also have to test the tests themselves. And the material being tested, and so on. And when it can no longer be proven false, a theory is accepted as true... Barring new evidence.
Its a cludgy process. But it have been far more successful at explaining and improving our reality that faith* in it is wise.
* And by "faith" I mean "Expecting it to continue to be reliable based on previous experience" and not the typical "Because I want it to be true" we think of when we use the word "faith".
Yeah, it's not like we managed to land six manned missions on the Moon, and bring one back alive even after a disaster en route, using 1960s technology.
Oh, wait...
(I could have gone with how long the ISS has been in operation, but its panic moments, while certainly dangerous for the crew, weren't quite so, well, dramatic as Apollo XIII.)
The moon missions were in the 60's. Sadly human IQs have dropped exponentially since then to the point where people on the street don't know what number planet Earth is or what the name of their Star is. Jay Leno gets ratings from this.
I predict that very soon we will see the loss of shoe laces, these being too hard on the prevailing IQs.
The ISS is the most primitive POS ever. People from the 60's would laugh at it. It violates the primary function of a Space Station in that it is continuously harmful to those who inhabit it. Zero G is deadly to humans and the current crop of idiots at NASA forgot that they could have built a simple rotating Wheel Station to fix this.
Not a Star Trek future for humans, but a Blade Runner one is inevitable, minus the tech and off world trips of course.
The moon missions were in the 60's. Sadly human IQs have dropped exponentially since then to the point where people on the street don't know what number planet Earth is or what the name of their Star is. Jay Leno gets ratings from this.
I predict that very soon we will see the loss of shoe laces, these being too hard on the prevailing IQs.
The ISS is the most primitive POS ever. People from the 60's would laugh at it. It violates the primary function of a Space Station in that it is continuously harmful to those who inhabit it. Zero G is deadly to humans and the current crop of idiots at NASA forgot that they could have built a simple rotating Wheel Station to fix this.
Not a Star Trek future for humans, but a Blade Runner one is inevitable, minus the tech and off world trips of course.
That would be a "Mad Max" future, and I fear you may be right.
Because yes, people are becoming...well, a lot more stupid.
Used to be you had to have a knack for something, now you just need a piece of paper.
Society is also as a whole a lot more forgiving of failure.
Without the Discipline of the 60's, demonstrated in TOS, the people have become weak.
Another example is the Saturn V rocket. The current crop of NASA engineers failed to reproduce it after they found out you couldn't just pop a panel and copy the design as they were crafted by mastersmiths back then. The fuel mix venturies were especially well sculpted. All this is sealed inside the motor housing and unscanable even by xray, so they gave up.
But polital will is so short sighted and narrow focused, that won't happen either.
Who needs political will? There are plenty of private corporations interested in mining asteroids and the moon, and some others who want to build hotels in Earth orbit.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them." -Thomas Marrone
Are you an engineer, thlaylierah? Because from what I know of engineering, a "wheel station", so beloved of pulp SF back in the day, is hardly "simple". It assumes a steady supply of resources being shipped skyward, requiring an inexpensive and reliable launch method - or mining resources from the moon and asteroids, then making your steel and other materials in orbit.
I was there in the '60s. My father worked on the DynaSoar at Boeing, until NASA cancelled the program in favor of the nascent Space Shuttle (and that, incidentally, was the Shuttle's biggest problem - its design was begun before Armstrong walked on the moon, and construction was done with cutting-edge 1970s technology; it was obsolete before the Columbia ever flew). And the ISS would seem a bloody miracle to aerospace engineers of that era. (Do you have any idea how much trouble NASA had designing a docking collar for the Apollo-Soyuz missions? Simple compatibility with a Russian-built spacecraft would amaze them.)
The ISS is, of course, hardly the last word in space stations - for one thing, the LEO position forced on it by the Shuttle's shortcomings is hardly ideal. GEO would be better; HEO might be best. Its design could be better as well, being as it is a compromise among four separate space agencies. Every journey must begin somewhere, after all...
And pointing to Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments as evidence of humans becoming stupider is confirmation bias at its worst. Have you any idea how many people Leno has to buttonhole on a sidewalk to find those sublimely ill-educated folk whose ignorance he displays for our amusement? In point of fact, it's about once every twenty-five years or so that IQ test have to be recalibrated, because the average is supposed to be 100 +/- 10, and it keeps creeping upward...
Who needs political will? There are plenty of private corporations interested in mining asteroids and the moon, and some others who want to build hotels in Earth orbit.
Businessmen are part of the trifecta of human evil along with politicians and holy men. The main difference is that you can frighten a politician into behaving, being the cowardly little creatures they are. So if I had my choice, I'd go with the politician.
Businessmen are not aliens. Politicians are not aliens.
They don't come from a distant planet to rule over us. They are humans as much as we are, and they are nothign but one face of what we, as human race, are.
The core of ST is the evolved human kind, and that will not happen, Im afraid, any century soon.
Comments
shouldn't you be at church right now?
I, for one, welcome our new female overlords.
Y'know folks, all we have to do is just wait until the 2030's, Zephram Cochrane will be born in Montana, and BAM, free ticket to Star Trek-land for humanity.
You can't exactly put antimatter in a jar. -_-
But in response to this post, I give you these links.
Overview of the concept of antimatter.
Antiprotons
Antineutrons
Antihydrogen
Now, these may not be the antimatter bombs we see in Star Trek, but they could very well be the first steps towards them.
Elim Garak
here is the link
http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive
Kinda puts this thread into perspective
Nope.
...and I'm so sure of that for so many different reasons I will bet you 100 bucks. You can collect if we live to be 200.
No its a Sunday
Besides religion is a no no here
science is of course a sort of religion in and of itself
No. Science needs facts and evidence, and speculation and faith is not part of the science, until it has been proven.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
although that does rely on the existence of a completely fictional element..hmm.
ok, well aside from that, the political/sociological/technological aspect of it, i found quite convincing.
Citation needed
Citation needed.
Anyway... guys... I've "debated" folks like this online since the 300 baud modem. Don't bother. Unless you have a time machine and you go back in time to slap all of the adults in their lives who've educated them into someone who thinks these things your time will be wasted.
And since the forum rules forbid point and laughing you don't have that option as well.
Roll your eyes and move on before you go further down the rabbit hole.
peer reviewed thoretical science in the pursuit of knowledge, and blind, brutally enforced theocracy for the retention of power and infulence, are not the same thing...anyway, im old enough and wise enough not to get drawn into an internet argument about religion. have fun everybody :cool:
Cern is not independant is it
it needs to be proven by someone who is trying to Disprove it
people never get this
if you have 50000 scientists PAID to look for blue unicorns you are going to get evidence of Blue unicorns
I think Peter David came up with the best response in his blog, based on an incident in the premiere episode of The Paper Chase, in which the professor dealt with one particular student by walking up to his seat, placing a sheet over him, and proceeding to utterly ignore him from that point on. Peter calls it "shrouding" - simply refuse to allow the nonsense perpetrated by the troll to penetrate your consciousness. You wind up not even trying to educate someone who does not wish to be educated, thus saving both of you untold amounts of stress.
As the old saying has it, "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."
On the topic of a United Earth - I don't think it'll happen the way Roddenberry envisioned it, certainly; his future history included WW3 happening, killing over six hundred million people, and then First Contact with Vulcan while the planet was still recovering. In that scenario, humanity pulling together with the example of Vulcan (and its rather violent history) seems more probable than it does in our universe.
If we were ever to have anything that might be regarded as a "world government", I think it might be more like a planet-sized Federation, where each member nation maintained its own form of government under the benevolent protection of the greater republic (not terribly unlike the Articles of Confederation under which the US first formed, but hopefully without the local loyalties causing the whole thing to break down in a few years).
I'd certainly rather see that than Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium, or any of the other rather dystopic one-world governments we've had such persuasive cautionary tales about...
Humans are not competent enough to operate in the high energy physics environment of Star Trek.
Space is not even a human conquerable environment because one mistake and they are dead, probably along with several others.
An example: Think of how cool a flying car would be....
Now imagine all those dumb@sses you see on the road everyday flying them around you.
Ruins it every time.
Oh, wait...
(I could have gone with how long the ISS has been in operation, but its panic moments, while certainly dangerous for the crew, weren't quite so, well, dramatic as Apollo XIII.)
Our boys and girls in space, even as far away as the moon, enjoyed the protective embrace of the Earth's magnetosphere and were not fried by the solar radiation. Even then they get higher doses of it. And they can't live on the ISS without constant supplies being brought to them.
We're not separate from our biosphere like some seem to think when they get on this topic. Our survival in space requires replicating much of the environment we evolved in. That alone is cost prohibitive. Add to that the costs amd technology required of moving this mini planet we need (and that doesnt even get into the unlikliness we can even survive the biosphere of an alien planet) and space travel is realized to be the wishful thinking it is.
Now, I do think exploiting the resources of our solar system is a wise idea. We're really good at making machines to do this for us. But polital will is so short sighted and narrow focused, that won't happen either.
To sum up: We're going to die on this rock.
You and I, most certainly. Future generations? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows.
But I'm sure that if the future generations do get out into the cosmos it won't be in fancy ships with magic food slots, hologram amusement parks and room for families because they've created a society where no one works for monetary payment.
I'll believe Bigfoot lives in my shed before I believe anything remotely like that is possible.
Semi-quoting a Voyager episode: believing that science, with time and the proper tools, will eventually find all the answers is still some kind of faith.
Anyway, I don't think Star Trek is posible, sadly, and somehow that is exactly why I like it.
Everything described in Star Trek is theoretically possible, it just requires more energy than we as a species currently consume or have access to. But once we figure out how to mass-produce antimatter, (which we are working on now,) all bets are off. Transporters, warp drive, artificial gravity, inertial dampeners, tractor beams - all of this we know how to do. We just can't yet because the energy requirement is currently prohibitive.
Unfortunately things will have to get a lot worse before they can get better. Even Roddenberry recognized this. That's why he wrote a global nuclear holocaust into the timeline. Even then, Earth wasn't unified until after the Vulcans made First Contact.
Eventually, inevitably, the US and China and possibly the EU will go to war with each other over competing interests or scarce resources. Wolrd War III will be waged sometime in the next half-century, either with conventional weapons or nuclear arms. But after the war there will necessarily follow a dramatic increase in technology. WWII brought us radar, jet engines, nuclear power and computers. Will WWIII see the advent of quantum teleportation, energy shields, and antimatter power? Remember, it was during WWII that we figured out how to manufacture plutonium. I imagine we'll learn to manufacture antimatter during WWIII, for similar purposes.
Depending on how much stock you put into the notion of panspermia it is actually fairly likely that other intelligent life in the galaxy will have evolved into a similar "humanoid" form. When you look at a human being from an engineering perspective, we are actually a fairly efficient design. Not to discount the posibility of interdimensional life (Q!) but I think we are far more likely to discover aliens that we can actually relate to, having similar requirements for food, water, oxygen and an ambient temperature of between 0 and 100C. And among the many hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way, I think we are bound to find more than a few worlds that meet these requirements.
As for where we would fit in amongst alien species, I think again Roddenberry got it right. We'll be far behind some, well of others. But what we bring to the table: or innate curiosity, tenacity and adventurous spirit will bring us more allies than enemies, and the speed at which we can adapt to changes will quickly make us leaders in any "federation."
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
I agree with your basic premise of people believing that science can make magic technology to take us the stars because science is good at stuff is dumb. That's why I don't accept the space travel pipe dreams.
However, science remains a process quite separate from the wishful thinking of the apes that use it. That's why disproving something is as vital as proving it. The LHC, for example, wasnt made to prove the Higgs existed. It was made to test the theory. If it had shown the Higgs didnt exist, it would be just as successful.
It's not that simple. You also have to test the tests themselves. And the material being tested, and so on. And when it can no longer be proven false, a theory is accepted as true... Barring new evidence.
Its a cludgy process. But it have been far more successful at explaining and improving our reality that faith* in it is wise.
* And by "faith" I mean "Expecting it to continue to be reliable based on previous experience" and not the typical "Because I want it to be true" we think of when we use the word "faith".
The moon missions were in the 60's. Sadly human IQs have dropped exponentially since then to the point where people on the street don't know what number planet Earth is or what the name of their Star is. Jay Leno gets ratings from this.
I predict that very soon we will see the loss of shoe laces, these being too hard on the prevailing IQs.
The ISS is the most primitive POS ever. People from the 60's would laugh at it. It violates the primary function of a Space Station in that it is continuously harmful to those who inhabit it. Zero G is deadly to humans and the current crop of idiots at NASA forgot that they could have built a simple rotating Wheel Station to fix this.
Not a Star Trek future for humans, but a Blade Runner one is inevitable, minus the tech and off world trips of course.
That would be a "Mad Max" future, and I fear you may be right.
Because yes, people are becoming...well, a lot more stupid.
Society is also as a whole a lot more forgiving of failure.
Without the Discipline of the 60's, demonstrated in TOS, the people have become weak.
Another example is the Saturn V rocket. The current crop of NASA engineers failed to reproduce it after they found out you couldn't just pop a panel and copy the design as they were crafted by mastersmiths back then. The fuel mix venturies were especially well sculpted. All this is sealed inside the motor housing and unscanable even by xray, so they gave up.
Cavemen using a laptop to break rocks.
Who needs political will? There are plenty of private corporations interested in mining asteroids and the moon, and some others who want to build hotels in Earth orbit.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
I was there in the '60s. My father worked on the DynaSoar at Boeing, until NASA cancelled the program in favor of the nascent Space Shuttle (and that, incidentally, was the Shuttle's biggest problem - its design was begun before Armstrong walked on the moon, and construction was done with cutting-edge 1970s technology; it was obsolete before the Columbia ever flew). And the ISS would seem a bloody miracle to aerospace engineers of that era. (Do you have any idea how much trouble NASA had designing a docking collar for the Apollo-Soyuz missions? Simple compatibility with a Russian-built spacecraft would amaze them.)
The ISS is, of course, hardly the last word in space stations - for one thing, the LEO position forced on it by the Shuttle's shortcomings is hardly ideal. GEO would be better; HEO might be best. Its design could be better as well, being as it is a compromise among four separate space agencies. Every journey must begin somewhere, after all...
And pointing to Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments as evidence of humans becoming stupider is confirmation bias at its worst. Have you any idea how many people Leno has to buttonhole on a sidewalk to find those sublimely ill-educated folk whose ignorance he displays for our amusement? In point of fact, it's about once every twenty-five years or so that IQ test have to be recalibrated, because the average is supposed to be 100 +/- 10, and it keeps creeping upward...
Businessmen are part of the trifecta of human evil along with politicians and holy men. The main difference is that you can frighten a politician into behaving, being the cowardly little creatures they are. So if I had my choice, I'd go with the politician.
They don't come from a distant planet to rule over us. They are humans as much as we are, and they are nothign but one face of what we, as human race, are.
The core of ST is the evolved human kind, and that will not happen, Im afraid, any century soon.