If society has a problem, can it deal with it?

This blog started off with the notion that there are solutions to our problems.  Hence, the saying: Houston, we have a solution.  That is opposed to focusing on the problems and throwing up your hands in frustration, and giving up.

I suggested that the solution was to master energy and space.  This was begun previously in modern societies, but for some reason, has stopped.  Humans seem to have lost confidence in themselves and their abilities to solve their own problems.  We seem to regressing into a more primitive state.

History is repeating itself, as what happened to Rome is now happening to us.  Did Rome fail because it could not ( nor would not ) adapt to changing times?

Rome's adaptation was to invite barbarians into its realm.  Eventually, the barbarians took over and that was all she wrote for Rome.  Seems to be happening again in modern times.

Rome didn't have technology, but it had the opportunity to develop it.  But once you kill off the incentive to innovate, you will certainly get stagnation.  What I'm referring to here is what I call the Tiberius Syndrome.  This Syndrome occurs when the powerful stifle any material progress because it is deemed to be a threat to their self-interests.  For example, the Emperor Tiberius of ancient Rome had a man executed for inventing a way to mine a new metal which we now know as aluminum.  It stands to reason that if a man can be executed for coming up with something new, then new things won't be invented.  The new things that could have helped Rome advance weren't developed.  Rome could have had an industrial revolution, but it never did happen.

Modern civilization did have an industrial revolution, but this is being deemed as a threat.  Hence, we have had a movement toward Limits to Growth.  Limits to Growth is the new Tiberius Syndrome.  Anything that is man-made is now deemed to be a threat.  The only exception to this seems to be in electronics, which does not seem to threaten anyone powerful---yet.

But nuclear energy has been thwarted.  It is like the aluminum of ancient Rome.  Nobody has been executed for developing nuclear energy in these modern times, but there is now a vast bureaucracy that is devoted towards suppressing it.  If the molten-salt reactor had been commercialized, instead of suppressed like it was and is, many things can become possible.  For one, you could recycle virtually everything.  It could be converted to plasma and then reconstituted from its elemental parts.  The plasma takes a lot of energy, and that's what one of things that nuclear energy promised.  Instead of recycling things, we continue to mine the stuff we need, and then we throw it away.  Not a good solution.  It feeds the notion that technology only causes problems and can't solve any.

Space travel has been thwarted as well.  A nuclear powered upper stage was developed in the Apollo Era, but shelved.  Likewise, a half-hearted attempt was made with the Shuttle that was purportedly developed so as to make space more accessible.  If the attempt was more sincere, it would certainly succeeded.  Somebody in powerful positions didn't want it to succeed.  As a consequence, space as the new frontier still awaits, and may never be achieved because nobody believes we can do it, or nobody really wants to do it that badly.  Or more accurately, some powerful people do not want it.

There is a saying---"Two men looked out from prison bars.  One saw the mud, the other saw the stars."  Will human societies lift their thoughts from the mud, and towards the stars?  Or will we relive the history of the Romans who didn't.  Not because they couldn't, it was because they wouldn't.