I’m Sorry and You’re Welcome
A Take Down of “Generational” Hot Takes

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of NASA’s first manned Apollo missions. I wasn’t around then, but I often think about what it would have been like to have worked on Apollo. It’s a fun thought experiment to consider, and it’s even tempting to think back on this era as a better time to work in science and technology — a better shot at making the history books, or at least being a footnote.

“The Golden Age Fallacy” is one of my favorite humanities concepts, and comes from sociology. According to RationalWiki, this “good ol’ days” thinking is “used in when engaging in nostalgia, remembering only the positive aspects of times past while sweeping concomitant negatives under the rug — no period or people have ever had a monopoly on virtue or development globally.” For example, when Western Europe entered a period we know today as the “dark ages,” it seems that no one in the Arabian Peninsula got the memo. They just went on creating modern algebra and having their own renaissance in math, science and art, just a few centuries ahead of schedule compared to the rest of the world.

Sure, the world we woke up to on January 1, 2018 isn’t perfect. However, I’m confident in my assessment that today is the best time to be alive in human history and the Golden Age Fallacy is not just a whimsical myth, but rather some socially-caustic crap.

Modern journalism is complicated, to say the least, and the adage, “if it bleeds, it leads” has never been truer than it is in a click-driven business model. Readers often have to go looking for positive science news, but it’s there.

Here are just a few examples from 2017 alone:

  • The discovery of two neutron stars violently colliding confirmed suspicions that neutron star collisions are responsible for creating neutron-rich heavy elements, such as platinum, gold and uranium. It also confirmed Albert Einstein’s century-old prediction that the gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.
  • NASA found seven earth-like planets orbiting a dim star.
  • Scientists have successfully used a gene-editing technique, CRISPR-Cas9, to cut a disease-causing mutation from human genes.
  • Anthropologists recently unearthed remains of five early H. sapiens that were dated at 300,000 years old, making our species 100,000 years older than we thought.

As a digital marketer/writer, I probably won’t be on the nightly news or the front page of Reddit or Facebook anytime soon, and that’s just fine. The engineers who made the auxiliary power for the Apollo missions, keeping Neil and Buzz breathing the right mix of oxygen and other noble gases weren’t famous either. Neither were the army of female “calculators” doing the math behind early NASA missions nor the QA team that tested the heat resistance of the re-entry capsule’s materials. None of that mattered to them because they knew what their goal was: to put a man on the moon.

All of us all born at an amazing time. Women don’t have to silently accept being groped at work anymore, or risk getting fired for being pregnant. Civil rights have nowhere to go but up, though the fight is still perpetually uphill, and folks from all walks of life can get a grant to learn STEM skills at local technical schools.

We might not have seen the Kardashians coming, but our generation made it possible for her to break the Internet. Now, driverless cars, 5G-enabled city blocks and watching Netflix on Mars is no longer the stuff of science fiction but rather the engineering challenge of a new generation. We’re going to need everyone here for this one: engineers, scientists, creatives, accountants, project managers, CAD engineers, journalists — we all have a part to play.

Carl Sagan warned us that “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America … our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

However, we would be wise to remember the origin of the word “dystopia.” I like to see the world more from the lens of Bradbury and quote Picard in saying “Courage can be an emotion, too.” and “Every choice we make allows us to manipulate the future.”

Or to be even more succinct, in the words of ’80s one-hit wonder Timbik3, “Things are going great, and they’re only getting better … The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”

PS: House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi to guest judge on the next season Drag Race. Stay tuned for more.