Charlie and I have talked a lot about this, but the notion that we live in an era of technological stagnation is shown to be absurdly false nearly every day.
The latest via the New York Times:
It’s the plot point for more than one Hollywood blockbuster: A rogue asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, threatening tsunamis, mass destruction and the death of every human being on the planet.
Humanity has one shot to save itself with brave, self-sacrificing heroes piloting a spacecraft into the cosmos to destroy the asteroid.
But that’s the movies. On Monday evening, NASA showed what the reality would be like.
There was an asteroid, but it wasn’t threatening the Earth. And there was a spacecraft, relying solely on sophisticated technology. The human heroes of the mission were actually at a physics and engineering lab between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
And there was a collision. In this case it was the final act of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, a spacecraft that launched in November and then raced around the sun for 10 months as it pursued its target — a small space rock, Dimorphos, seven million miles from Earth.