#buranposting

The Buran and the Concorde, and the Tu-144 and the Shuttle. They are all mementos of a stillborn future, a product of unparalleled optimism, of belief that things would be better, that we could do better, that we could improve and learn and better serve ourselves, that we could learn new things, about ourselves, our world, the universe, on ways that now seem long forgotten, corrupted by greed and avarice. Young'uns think Frutiger Aero is about a future that was promised but was stolen from us. That was never the case. 3D rendering packages just got cheap and water simulations were in vogue. The golden age of Space Exploration and Aeronautics truly is about the future we could have had but was robbed from us. One of unparalleled knowledge, of shortening the distances between far away lovers, of visiting other worlds, or looking at them from up close. A true post-scarsity world, which, make no mistake, probably is NOT AT ALL what could have happened had they all not get killed off, and certainly not a future we can not imagine still today and work towards. We do know so much more about the world than when those birds soared the skies, but certainly they were from an era where it somehow felt such a future was much more within grasp. The tail end of the cold war was absolutely miserable, but there was an unrelenting optimism about what could come. These days it just feels like the only actual place you can look is the past, because there will be no future. (This assessment is wrong but let us have this moment ok?) We're going to have to make a tag for these musings so people can filter them out. maybe #concordeposting or #buranposting as to keep things clean elsewhere.