There has been an Omega watch commercial running recently pointing out that 40 years ago an Omega watch was used by the astronauts on the first moon landing.
What struck me more than anything else is how little progress we have made in the FORTY years since we landed on the moon. Seriously, that is President Kennedy speaking about the space race in the ad. I don’t think we even have the capability to get back to the moon now if we wanted to.
Sure, there are probably more important things to devote resources to right now (the environment comes to mind), but I bet the scientists who worked on that moon mission would have thought that in 4 decades we would have been to Mars by now. What’s the holdup? Are we lazier now? Has space lost its luster?
There is a line in the commercial where JFK says we chose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. I am concerned that my generation, and society in general now, seeks the easy path now, instead of taking up the challenges “because they are hard”.
