It was just last week, early February, that much of the United States was awe struck and ahhh-ing! as they watched Elon Musk’s rocket launch into space.
Mankind, of course, has been to space previously and repeatedly. Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin of the Soviet Union was the first human to take the cosmic joy ride. That was in April 1961.
A couple weeks after Mr. Gagarin’s historic leap into space the USA’s Alan Shepard followed suit and a year after that it was John Glenn’s turn to soar above and around the planet we call home. Since then more than 500 people have left the confines of Earth, adding to the list of remarkable human accomplishments.
Musk’s rocket launch, in the context of space exploration, would have been relatively mundane had it not been for the simultaneous vertical landing on Earth of two booster rockets after they delivered a shiny red convertible — complete with a dummy outfitted in a space suit — into the vast darkness of space.
Plenty of Earthlings applauded the non-government funded rocket launch while some of the more skeptical ones viewed it as an astronomically expensive vanity project that ultimately saw a billionaire littering space, albeit with a shiny new car that was deemed debris worthy of floating aimlessly in the heavens.
Nonetheless, the accomplishment overall is an example of the remarkable advances and progress of which people are capable.
Earlier this week Boston Dynamic, an engineering and robotics design firm, released video showing what looked like a robotic dog opening a door so that its counterpart could pass through.
The accomplishment is much more compelling to see than reading about it and the applications — from search and rescue to bad-guy hunting — are potentially life-saving as well as life changing. (Boston Dynamics is the same firm that developed a human-like robot that can move, hop, jump and flip like the elitist of Olympic gymnasts.)
From launching people and roadsters into space to creating robots that can do what humans do but only better, to developing artificial intelligence that writes predictive behavior algorithms, the human potential for progress and ingenuity are, truly, amazing.
The imagination, research, time, money and intellect poured into these and similar projects demonstrate what we can accomplish when we demonstrate the will to accomplish a noble goal.
Incidentally, earlier this week 17 people were killed and 14 others were wounded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida after a 19-year-old gunman opened fire on an unsuspecting campus. It is the 30th mass shooting of the year nationwide and the 18th to take place at a school. Lawmakers sent their thoughts and prayers to victims and families. Again.
Progress, huh?
