50 Years of Progress! Part-1 / 4

  Reflection: #017 

For more than thirty years, I have been reading extensively about new discoveries in astronomy. I also enjoy observing the starry sky.  In the years between 1965 and 1985, astronomical information was very scarce.

More or less, we knew the diameters of the planets, the duration of their orbits around the Sun, and some moons orbiting their respective planets.

The Moon of our home planet was best known, probably because of its proximity. It was always mentioned, for example, as the cause of a woman's menstrual cycle—the Moon has the same 28-day calendar as a woman in her monthly cycles—and it causes the movement of seawater, the tides. Good.  The two moons of Mars are well known (Jules Verne already described their exact dimensions and counterclockwise orbit).  Reaching the Moon was a dream that came true in the sixties. The Moon was without an atmosphere, as was Mars. That was the scientific opinion.

Not to mention water on Mars or ice on the Moon. You only read about it in science fiction. The German series Perry Rhodan already described very prophetically and precisely the environment in the near cosmos, like the existence of inhabited planets with all conceivable forms of life.

But a serious man does not read fiction, let alone believe or talk about it.  Anyone who read it knew that they spoke of telephones that also allowed image transmission. While you were talking, you could always see your conversation partner on a small screen.

In the 1970s, not even a computer with much memory and many other details—which came forty years later—was known.

The Church and the staff of established scientists laughed at such fantasies. Well. Time won against them.

What one was not allowed to believe then is now a matter of everyday life for everyone.  So, with all the renewed technology, our lives will change in less than forty years. That's what futurists and dreamers like me thought when I was young—and maybe I still am today. Only now, I no longer dream of radical technological change, but of humanitarian reform.  For me, in 1965, the year 1980—which was still in the future—was magical. From then on, everything that was utopian in the days of the sixties would become reality, and in the nineties, one would live in a magical world.

At the age of 9 or 10, I prayed to God that I might experience this moment.

He fulfilled my wish and allowed me to experience the magic date.  The date of the magical year 1980 came, and neither the press nor anyone else spoke of a historical event. And so it was in 1990.

I was already living in the future of my old dreams, and it was nothing special.

Cars smoked, made noise, crashed together; people died of hunger and simple diseases. They ate and drank contaminated food and water.  The clocks were still analog. Although I already had an automatic Swiss watch—i.e., by moving my arm, it always kept running—there was still nothing of another world. People also used electric calculators, and those who could afford it bought a scientific calculator.

Color television became implemented and installed in many apartments.

The interest in the Moon had vanished.

Nothing was reported about it anymore. Not a single satellite went in its direction.  Landline telephones came equipped with modern buttons instead of the rotary dial with numbers.

What progress!  Airplanes no longer used propellers so often, but turbos with hellish thrust—thousands of horsepower in these engines with impressive kerosene consumption. One hundred and fifty thousand liters of kerosene is stored in the wings of a jumbo to carry the weight of two hundred people!

What progress! 

Continue … 

Josef Bauer