Forty Years Ago

I wouldn't be born for another 6 years. But my half-sister was watching the moon landing with my parents, who might or might not have been married by then.

There's cool filk about it all; see here for a couple samples.

I used to be more into space and space colonies and such, but now I have no problem with the thought that sending people to space is currently expensive, dangerous, and nigh-useless. I wouldn't make any predictions about "we don't go back" -- seems likely that if wealth increases, someone will eventually go privately. Colonies are a harder bet but I hope Terragen life has a long, long, future, plenty of time to expand. Especially as AI or robots better built for it all. But for now, I care more about sustainable wealth on Earth, and bringing 5/6 of the world's population into the promised land of electricity and running water, and Americans into universal health care, and such. And doming cities and managing vulcanism and deflectng asteroids and generally being a deep-time Kardashev Type I civilization. And immortality, biological or or cyborged or uploaded. Give us that, and space will take care of itself.

Moon the movie

This is mostly a Facebook Beacon test. But we saw it last night, and it was good. I thought it was pretty flawed at first, but most of the major flaws turned out to be actual plot points. There's still the fact that I see claims lunar He3 isn't that good a resource --- takes more energy to extract than you'd get from fusing it -- but if that were the worst still say about a space movie it's pretty good. I still thing the political-economics are probably dodgy but not as much as they first appeared. OTOH, Gerty is a big gaping mystery and question mark aimed at the premise.