Post 578 - February 23, 2024

Fifty-two years after we sent the last one, we’ve finally landed another spacecraft on the moon.

I vividly remember the first time we did it. I was seven. I watched it happen in real-time from a rocking chair in our TV room. It’s one of the most vivid early memories I have. After that, it was all I could think about. For years. What was out there? What would they find?

Since then, I have remained riveted as we’ve sent objects hurtling past the most distant planets in our solar system. We’ve sent equipment into the sun and landed rovers on Mars. It’s all fascinating to me.

It’s the same fascination that I have with the early European explorers. Magellan, Diaz, Columbus, Hudson, and Cook. What must it have been like to come across places on our planet where nobody had ever been before? What must Hiram Bingham have felt when he saw Machu Picchu high up in the Andes for the first time? What must it have been like for Howard Carter when he beheld the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt for the first time? “Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon asked him as they first broke into it. “Yes, wonderful things!” Carter replied.

When I read that Odysseus had successfully made it up there, though, I thought, “Oh right. The moon.”

Yesterday was a slow news day. The New York Times led with an almost Op-Ed story about Putin. There was also something about a couple trying to buy a house in Hudson, NY, and wondering if they could afford it. The moon landing made the front page, but only just. It was about three or four stories down.

Fox News led with some coverage about a dead Georgia nursing student. A day later, there’s no coverage on their scroll about the moon landing at all.

The BBC, however, has the moon landing at the top of their feed. In their story, they said, “It was an important moment, not just for the commercial exploitation of space but for the US space programme in general.”

One of the main reasons that Kennedy pushed NASA to get us to the moon in 1969 was for the propagandistic benefits it would give us over the Russians. In other words, bragging rights. The world’s imaginations were captivated by the journey, not by what we would find up there to exploit, but simply by what it would look like. We all desperately wanted to know. For all of us onlookers it was purely a voyage of discovery for the sake of knowledge itself.

I’m not seven anymore. That kid was living in a state of blissful ignorance about the world. While I have no doubt that some of those first European explorers were genuinely interested in seeing what was out there, their expeditions were all funded by people who merely wanted to own whatever was out there. All those backers wanted more than the simple joy of new knowledge, they wanted a financial return, new markets, new resources, and new investment possibilities.

None of those explorers, of course, were the first people to get to the places they discovered. They were merely the first European people to land there. More often than not, their arrival on those distant shores meant death and enslavement for the people already there.

The archaeologists I have spent decades being enthralled by were sometimes little more than grave robbers. These days, the ownership of objects that were looted and dispersed to museums throughout the world is under constant dispute. Many pieces are now being sent back to where they came from.

We have ignored the moon during the last fifty years because we couldn’t figure out how to profitably get at what might be up there for us to use back here on Earth. We’ve known from those early visits that there are some valuable minerals in abundance up there. Until now, though, nobody could figure out how to mine it and transport the ore across space.  You can be sure that we’ve only begun to go back because somebody now has an idea about how we could do just that.

With corporate exploitation on my mind, during the last few weeks, streaming services have begun breaking up their programming to add commercials. They now give you the option to continue the service with commercials or pay even more to get the service you originally paid for, without them.

Hulu has been charging $7.95 a month for its streaming channel. Like the others, they’ve now added advertising to everything they are broadcasting. For $17.95 a month, which is an additional $10.00 every month, more than twice what we had been paying, you can get the original service you signed up for.

Hulu generated a reported $11.2 billion in revenue last year with its subscribers all paying $7.95 a month. This year, they will add to that total the money they will make from these new advertisements PLUS the additional payments its loyal customers will have to make if they want to watch uninterrupted.

Hulu is owned by The Walt Disney Company which bought it in 2019. The Walt Disney Company reported revenues of $88.94 billion last year.  Disney + has now also added commercial interruptions.

Netflix, Paramount +, Amazon Prime, and Max have all added commercials to their services.  The entire video streaming industry, by the way, is projected to earn $116 billion by 2026. This extra profit for them is just that, extra profit.

Capitalism and Corporate health are judged on growth. It doesn’t matter that you’ve made money, you must have made more than you did the year before, or else your company is perceived to be in trouble. That perception makes your stock value dip.

This new trend in streaming adds zero value to the consumer. It, in fact, seriously detracts from the consumer’s experience.

In the golden age of network television, content was created knowing it would be interrupted by three minutes of advertising every so often.  Last night, Michael and I watched a movie on Hulu that was interrupted several times while a character was in mid-sentence. It seemed as if the choice of where to insert the ads was being done with a stopwatch rather than with any creative thought.

When HBO first appeared, the fact that movies were shown in their entirety without any breaks was revolutionary. People were happy to pay for the experience of not being relentlessly sold something they didn’t want and didn’t need every few minutes. As streaming services gained a larger following, for the same reason, the networks faltered. They had to start their own streaming services. Now that the networks have been all but gutted, we are being forced back into the same situation we were in before.

Streaming services, who cares? Story-making is something that human beings rely on. We need to see fictional struggles to help us through our very real personal ones. The Brothers Grimm told horrific tales that have helped generations of children deal with their own childhood traumas. The stories about the Greek, Roman, and Hindu gods among countless others help us understand the world and our place in it.

During the pandemic when we were all trapped at home, long-form programming helped us through. The world around us was literally falling apart, but we could keep the panic at bay by watching the travails of somebody else on our televisions.

Attendance at religious services these days is way down. Television viewership is up. Like it or not, I think we need what they are showing. After all these years of not having to watch insipid and repetitive commercials, however, I am just not sure I can do it. I refuse to pay Hulu an extra $10.00 a month for the privilege. I think we will just cancel it.

It was so sad to see the urban sprawl that has taken over the Arizona new-age town of Sedona. Is the same thing going to happen to the moon?

When will we decide that we have grown enough? Sadly, according to the financial system we live under, the answer is never. We will keep going. As we reach the end of what we can take from the earth, of course we are going to turn to the moon.

The Odysseus mission is the first of several that are designed to deliver small payloads to the lunar surface. In time, we will start sending up machinery that, using AI, will be able to dig for the ore we need without having to send people up. The ore will be loaded onto ships and sent back home so we can keep building. Eventually, I am sure, we will figure out how to refine what we need up there, so we won’t have to transport anything back that’s waste.

It's not that far off. We are nothing if not inventive, especially when we are all chasing after the same financial carrot.

On that note, I am going to shower and go out for a walk.  I may go to the Met and have a look at some of their ill-gotten gains.

Humankind has made some astonishing art over the millennia. It’s as vital a part of our storytelling as our actual stories are. That living here in New York City gives me so much access to it, leaves me profoundly grateful.

I don’t know how to balance how that art got there with the profound joy I experience in being able to see it. For the moment, I am just going to enjoy it while I think about it. Perhaps an answer will present itself or perhaps I will just have to learn to live with the uncomfortable contradiction.

If the answer to that conundrum is anywhere, it’s in a story.