My understanding is that the Artemis 2 launch had 10 million concurrent viewers. I’ll take everyone’s word for it that this is impressive. But that still feels pretty small to me. What does a World Cup final get? Over a billion people I imagine. I shouldn’t look at the past through rose coloured glasses of course. During the Apollo 11 Moon Landing era, there were few channels, presumably leading to a greater feeling of coherence, allowing for those shared national/global broadcasts.
Now we have infinite, well, everything. There is no “default” event anymore.
But I can’t help but be a little sad. And that sadness is starting to turn into irritation, which means I am very close to making an argument.
The conventional excuse runs like this: massive economic pressures, information overload, a media ecosystem locked into crisis cycles. All of it combines to create reduced cognitive bandwidth for distant, long-term projects like space exploration.
Yeah, I get that.
But the same people who are supposedly too overwhelmed to care about a crewed mission to the Moon will spend hours following a niche YouTuber, a mid-tier sports rivalry, or a slow-moving online drama that has no stakes beyond reputation and entertainment.
At some point you have to stop blaming the environment.
We say we value knowledge, discovery, progress. We carry around devices that give us immediate access to the most extraordinary human achievements. And then, when one of those achievements happens, something that would have been unimaginable to most of human history, we shrug and scroll past it.
The convenient story is that modern life has made this inevitable. Too busy, too distracted, too saturated. But that story just doesn’t ring true to me.
We gravitate toward things that require no background knowledge, no patience, no effort to understand why they matter. And over time, that becomes a kind of professional standard. If something does not instantly resolve into entertainment or outrage, we filter it out.
AI sycophancy as digital priesthood · Interface friction and critical thinking · The Fat Jesus Metaphor