

Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined - theoden
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/human-capability-peaked-about-1975-and.html

======
mtraven
You might want to look over some of the frankly racist and reactionary stuff
on Charlton's blog before buying into this simplistic thesis. Or the story
about how he got fired from the editorship of his flaky pseudoscience journal:
[http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/elsevier_to_medica...](http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/elsevier_to_medical_hypotheses_editor_br.php)

Hm, actually you don't need to read past the linked post for obvious
indications that the man is a complete crackpot. Molecular biology is trivial?

~~~
russell
From the masthead: "An Orthosphere Blog. Ortho-sphere = orthodox sphere =
reactionary Christians (Christian = 'Mere Christianity' of all denominations)"

That was enough for me.

------
henrikschroder
...and nostalgia isn't what it used to be either.

The world is a much, much, much better place now than 35 years ago. We are
healthier, happier, richer, and better off than then. The world is a freer,
richer, more democratic, more connected, more diverse, more tolerant place
now:

<http://www.gapminder.org/world/>

The author can't see the difference betwen _focus_ and _capability_. We're
spreading all the human capability more evenly now, because we're not stuck in
a myopic and monomaniac cold-war world where the only thing that matters is
beating the other guy.

------
tiles
Very weak premise, basing human capability on lunar landings alone. I can
argue that if we do not reproduce the Higgs boson in forty years that we've
peaked right now; more likely, the interest simply isn't there in repeating an
experiment for the good of science unless capitalist interest catches up,
which we are seeing in spades with private companies making strides toward
suborbital and orbital flight.

------
jamesaguilar
> 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have _not_ been
> to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon
> since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the
> capability.

This sentence makes a lot more sense of you replace instances of "could" with
"wanted to" and "capability" with "desire". As does the remainder of the
article. There's no particular reason to go to the moon and it's
extraordinarily expensive, so we don't do it.

Edit: I guess this guy is just a little irrational. Here's another example
where he says that science is a curse that comes from not having a shared
theology: [http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/cancer-of-
epist...](http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/cancer-of-
epistemology.html)

------
jessedhillon
This is so ridiculous I don't even know where to begin. Apparently, and
without any evidence given, humans cannot fly to the moon anymore and that's
why we don't go: we lost the ability to do so and we're ashamed to admit it.
Again, there's no evidence for this, and no attempt to explain how or why we
have advanced so far in so many other areas.

Then, as if this stupid theory wasn't enough to offend the intelligence of the
reader, we get this gem: affirmative action and media whoring committee
members stole our ability to fly to the moon.

Just wow. Why was this posted? As a spot-the-fallacies exercise?

Frankly, this guy seems supremely uninformed.

 _That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme
achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by
humans._

How or why was it the most difficult problem solved? Why was is the supreme
human achievement? We'll never know, because the author is too poor of a
thinker to bother with justifying his assumptions.

It's post-hoc reasoning if I've ever seen it.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc>)

~~~
bermanoid
All I needed to read in order to figure out that this guy is a complete loony:

 _Since the mid-1970s the rate of progress has declined in physics, biology
and the medical sciences – and some of these have arguably gone into reverse,
so that the practice of science in some areas has overall gone backwards,
valid knowledge has been lost and replaced with phony fashionable triviality
and dishonest hype. Some of the biggest areas of science – medical research,
molecular biology, neuroscience, epidemiology, climate research – are almost
wholly trivial or bogus._

If anyone really thinks progress has slowed in either physics, biology, or the
medical sciences since the 70s, I would be happy to debunk those claims, but
I'm not going to even bother up-front, it's so absurdly wrong that I doubt
anyone will even ask for a reference...

------
weavejester
The author's entire argument rests upon this proposition:

 _"That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the
supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever
solved by humans."_

Yet there utterly no justification of this statement.

I would have thought that a professor of theoretical medicine would have some
understanding of the importance of justifying one's arguments with hard
evidence, but apparently not in this case.

------
DanBC
I'd be interested to see comparisons between the engineering of getting humans
to the moon versus keeping the LHC working.

~~~
russell
Apollo was way bigger than the LHC, $200B (today's dollars) vs $7B. The
engineering of the LHC is impressive, but a lot of it is scaling such as
bigger semiconducting magnets. With Apollo everything was unknown, huge
rockets, space suits, life support, space rendezvous, cameras, pens, even
Tang.

~~~
glenra
> With Apollo everything was unknown, huge rockets, space suits, life support,
> space rendezvous, cameras, pens, even Tang.

Tang wasn't invented for the space program, it was merely a commercial food
product they happened to find a use for. The Space Pen was inspired by the
needs of the space program and was used in it, but wasn't a prerequisite for
it.

[http://www.misconceptionjunction.com/index.php/2011/01/tang-...](http://www.misconceptionjunction.com/index.php/2011/01/tang-
was-not-invented-for-the-space-program/)

<http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp>

~~~
russell
Tang was a joke.

I believe the color video camera for was specially made by RCA, but the
workhorse still camera was an off-the-shelf Hasselblad.

I had thought that the Space Pen was an existing commercial product.
Apparently I was only half right. Thanks for the link.

------
marcf
I would argue the issue is more about the priorities of the American
government and also its economic decline. America has fundamental issues that
means it can not longer fund such a mission, but it is likely that other
governments and economies that are healthier and with different priorities
could do manned missions to the moon.

It is important to differentiate between human capacity and the capacity and
priorities of the American government. They are not the same thing, even if
when one lives in the US, it can seem like it.

One could argue (similarly incorrectly) that human capacity in Britain peaked
in the late 1800s, but again that was because that was the peak of the Britian
empire.

