Hi Friends,
Greetings from sunny Brooklyn. It’s almost Halloween and yet it still feels like summer. I could say this is my favorite season but every season in New York is just as delightful.
Until next week,
Florian
Moonshot
I put the book down and stare through my living room window. A Half Moon is glowing with a pale yellow hue. I squint to try and see some of its features.
Usually, my attention would quickly drift. But this time it’s different. I’m halfway through Michael Collins’ autobiography of the Apollo 11 mission. And the moon is exerting its full gravitational pull on my mind.
From the window of my kitchen, the pale celestial body seems so impossibly remote. And yet fifty two years ago, two men took a walk on its dusty surface.
They did it with 100,000 times less computing power than the device I use to keep track of my friends’ life on Instagram and order pizza on Sundays.
This comparison is sometimes used as an example of how much technological progress we’ve made. Look at us, so advanced with our NASA-like control system in our pockets! But perhaps what it really tells us is how narrow a definition of progress we seem to have adopted. Progress expressed in terms of mere computing power.
So, sure, we can process near-infinite amounts of information in less time than the flap of a butterfly’s wing. But the airplanes we’re flying, the microwaves we’re using and the buildings we live in are by and large the same as they were in the 1970s.
The last decade threw high hopes of technological breakthroughs. Somehow though, we’re still stuck with robot vacuum cleaners who seem to be in a perpetual state of inebriation.
In his iconic 1962 speech, JFK laid out a vision of progress founded on pursuing deliberately unrealistic goals: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard [...]”.
Progress from that perspective, was not how much you could do with existing technology. It was looking at the technological rift separating us from our goal and still taking the jump.
Weekly Wisdom
🧑🔬 NASA’s First Software Engineer: The Name Margaret Hamilton may not sound familiar but without her there would have been no Moon landing. She was NASA’s first software engineer and is credited to have coined the term “software engineering”. I was disappointed not to find a single mention of her in Michael Collins’ biography.
Lateral Thought
“Procrastination is not what it seems. What looks from the outside like our delay; our lack of commitment; even our laziness may have more to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time and a central struggle with the core realities of any endeavor to which we have set our minds.”
David Whyte
Love the piece this week! You might enjoy this that we made a few years ago to celebrate the legend that is Maggie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oprumUQddk