And we got to the moon. Great. Took a fe picturs, biut that's it. A moonbase is proibitaly expenieve and mars is too damn far. Absent warp dirve or 2001-esque cryotubes, we're pretty much done. We're not going tobe livcing underwater and the deepest ocen depths ae always oigng to be off limits to us except in very excepton aocases. Helll there' caves we can't even find thebottom of whch woul dbe ince to collec th eboie othe dead tht keep trying. But we cna't.

Nor an we freeze poeple nor have we made any progress in chronic diseod any thype in 70 years. We odn't get to have any ot the htings promised tous i the late 50s and sixties and early evnties before the relaity set in that although wwii had died sown, we're still psending almost a siuch and there's always a war in some damn plce noboyd really thikns is a good idea.

so get use dtoit maggots, hyie been lied to and hyoplve been lied to be nefore an youll be lied to again. Othe than ipods and cheap wuartz watches, things really aren' that much different than they were 50 years ago.

Exccpt for one thing: ubiquipis free copmonuncations and the exhange of text, pictures nd video, Britain stil sdoes have more than 1/3 of hosue swith cnetnla ehating and maybe hal fof africa has power. Bu tyo ucan be in any jundle in the wlrld and wach youtube. For hours.

What's all this got to do wihtthe GOP suicide cult as the tea party nutbags are called? Plenty.

Their platform is non existent and all their claims false and even obvious things like using precoeduarl elements to make it impossible to vote to get govenrment mocing again depsite a mjaoroity of those wishing to do so while the next day protesting a government shut down is meaningless to the gop base if thye son't get it.

and they don't care, they don't wan to know. thye know they're scared and that's all. but what are they scvsred of.

None of this crap. that's just PR that amplified ans playes of their real and actual fears. Wich are probebaly ore to do with mortgage and sick kids than any mystical ideological themese played out in the press for hire that pases fo rjournalism these days.

So, given we've mad ealmsot sero progess in anything but computers and communitcaitons these are the only tools we have.

I assert for any person X, there exists a perspm Y that can make life 50% easier for X.

The world isn't gong to chyange itself. Neither the government or the deity of your choice will help. It really is up to us. At this juncture, everyting needs to be reexamined, reengineered and replaced, since we've only advanced as a culture in communications (and hey, don't knock it, that's what got H. sapeins to come out on top) then we have to adimt we're licing in an 18th century version of pradise and we know damn well this is no the vision any competant sience fiction (save the most hystrcially sstopic, Heinein's Friday for example) author ever had in mind.

We can do noting and in two hundred years it'll all pretty much look the same of we can use the power of wht we do have not to help ourselevs, but to help others. That poor bastard waving his fist with righteous indignation demanding Obama be impeached (sorry honey, hyou need a crime to do that, and if there was one, oh, you'd have heard) isn't doing that because he thinkgs it's a good idea, he's oding it beause he's in pain over something and he's now beynd ratoinal. He doesn't even know enouh to know why he's wrong, literally. But that thing he's afraid of - and this ius true on both the rigfht and left. Just say "climate" and "national debt clock" and that'll freak out 99.999% of people in a room, depsite the fact both are irrratinal fears that nojting can be done about and are of zero consequence anyway - is what dirves irrational behaviour. And it's from a simple cause totally unrelated wo thwa he's arging about and probably eminenntly fixable, 50% if not 100% by soebody out there that knows what to do.

That, is the challenge. Not a flying car or moonbase or transwaro drive with dithium (althohg that ouwl dbe nice). It's almsot crtainly mathematically the formula to the way forward and the sort of thing any decent diety owld (do to playu on the same irratoinlity)