As society is willing to take fewer and fewer risks, can we make great strides and advances?
Today, the space shuttle Discovery was supposed to take off, marking the return to flight for NASA after nearly 2 and a half years following the Columbia disaster. It was scrubbed however due to a faulty fuel sensor.
I can understand the desire to make sure everything is 100% a-ok, but this is a piece of a larger puzzle we've seen NASA put together over the past 20 or so years. A shift from exploration and experimentation to that of safety and reliability. It makes me wonder if we'll ever see a radical leap like we did with the Apollo program in the 1960s. We went from not having squat in space, to planting a man on the Moon in under 10 years. It was an amazing feat, and advance in technology and science such that we've never seen before, and perhaps even since.
The space program has always been about huge risks. Air Force test pilots were the first ones to go into space. It's always been a matter of sitting on a tin can that was tossed into space by several tons of high explosives. Reentry has always been a tricky matter. Space is not "safe" not by a long shot. This was understood and because of that it used to be that risks were able to be taken in the process. Now, we're so afraid of making an error, any error, that we sit and do nothing at all out of fear.
We haven't been back to the Moon in years
We dabble with the space station but haven't done much significant with that in a while, and now that it's starting to fail it doesn't look like we're willing to put something new up.
We went 2 and a half years with no shuttle flights, and for a period it looked like we were close to scrubbing the shuttle program entirely until a new vehicles was designed, tested and put into production, something that could have taken us decades to do.
What happened to our sense of adventure? Our need to explore and conquer the unknown? We've become so afraid of risk, so afraid of failure that we won't even try. Everything you buy comes covered in safety labels and warnings because someone somewhere thinks we need to live in a soft padded world where nothing can hurt us. Risk is unacceptable to society now. Change involves risk, and change is a necessary thing in a society. Our fear of risk is going to impede change and may help lead to stagnation.
Great strides and advances have always involved risk. Nothing great is achieved without the possiblity of something going horribly wrong.