Why aren't young people interested in Apollo 11?

[VK3DRB]

My wife mentioned at her work that I had just booked two seats for us to visit the Melbourne IMAX theatre to see the acclaimed Apollo 11 documentary. She works at a major robotics/sensors/controls/power company. Her colleagues, many of them younger engineers and technicians, thought nothing of it and one asked why would anyone bother seeing a documentary on Apollo 11? My wife was somewhat taken back by lack of excitement for man's greatest technical achievement, and possibly the greatest adventure in the history of the human race. She was somewhat surprised and even disappointed, as I was to hear it.

Why the lack of interest? Or have you have found young people are just as enthusiastic in his historic anniversary on Apollo 11?

Maybe a lack of interest is due to:
1. The WOW! factor is gone in many young people because they have been desensitised by the plethora of great innovations in their lifetime.
2. Fewer engineers today have genuine deep interest in technology, over just having a job to pay the bills.
3. They were not alive at the time man landed on the moon, so they do not understand how incredible the achievement was to go to the moon in light of relatively primitive technology. They would not understand what is it like to not have a calculator, let alone a computer.
4. They have never worked with vintage computers and have no experience regarding the difficulty of optimising algorthims and cutting code to fit in tiny program storage.
5. They are more interested in Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, reality TV and cooking shows.
 
My bet is the IMAX will be filled with baby boomers, except for a few from the X generation, very few from the Y generation and almost no post-millennials. I will report what I see. I may be wrong!

I write this as I am spending most of the weekend tuned to this...https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ (Fantastic website).

[Dubbie]

I dunno our young programmer at work is obsessed with rockets like me. We watch most launches and have good understanding of all the tech. I guess that when it comes to technical interest, it was always only a small subset of people.

[lordvader88]

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[wilfred]

What's changed is not "young" people. It is the "young" people who got old that have changed. I firmly believe that any analysis that confirms one generation is fundamentally different to another is wrong.

[lordvader88]

I think Dr. Robert Zubrin, Founder and President of the Mars Society, has some nice ideas for mining the moon, and using it to go to Mars, etc

[schmitt trigger]

Maybe a lack of interest is due to:
1. The WOW! factor is gone in many young people because they have been desensitised by the plethora of great innovations in their lifetime.
2. Fewer engineers today have genuine deep interest in technology, over just having a job to pay the bills.
3. They were not alive at the time man landed on the moon, so they do not understand how incredible the achievement was to go to the moon in light of relatively primitive technology. They would not understand what is it like to not have a calculator, let alone a computer.
4. They have never worked with vintage computers and have no experience regarding the difficulty of optimising algorthims and cutting code to fit in tiny program storage.
5. They are more interested in Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, reality TV and cooking shows.
 

I write this as I am spending most of the weekend tuned to this...https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ (Fantastic website).

All of the above.

I have mentioned previously that after I saw the moon landing, at my tender 13 years of age, I decided to become an engineer.

Nowadays younger people are jaded to technical miracles. The fact that the older Iphone I am holding in my hand is significantly more powerful than Apollo’s AGC and instrumentation panel, simply does not longer register on their brains.

But it is similar to us, when we are told about the great sailors who circumnavigated the unknown earth on wind power alone and the most rudimentary navigation aids. No refrigeration to maintain the food fresh. Unknown and deadly diseases.
We cannot comprehend the magnitude of their achievements when we are flying over the vast oceans at 40,000 ft and 600 mph, and all we do is to complain that the food service was mediocre.

[Dubbie]

Maybe they saw the video of the A11 crew pretending to be 1/2 way to the moon, by placing a thing over the window looking at the Earth, and making it look like the Earth is the size of a marble, and the rest of the window is blacked out.

Like it or not, Bart Sibrel really did release the footage of the A11 crew faking images, so what's NASA'a excuse ?

I really wish people would go walk on the Moon, that would be cool.

I think you are in the wrong forum. I think infowars forum is probably better positioned to cater for your mental disabilities.

[lordvader88]

No I think most people just except what they are told, and don't think enough past that

I wish people were taught science is cool. Instead they are brainwashed by Hollywood into loving 'gangsta rap', so no wonder they don't care about the really cool stuff people have actually done in space, like going to the moon Titan.

[wilfred]

20 years ago Chinese kids were educated science and engineering only because we need engineers to propel our country.

When I was a kid we were taught religious and social science are all bad and only natural science provable by hard cold math is good.

Nowadays we can afford kids to pursue arts, music, esports among many other diversified fields.

The minority engineering bright minds will pop out one way or another, but the others are given more freedom to pursue what they truly love.

So you're actually saying that the subjects kids in China are taught has changed, the wealth of society in China has changed and the freedom to pursue diverse interests has changed. I still maintain stripped of all cultural and societal advancements kids have not changed for, well ever.

When the early Greeks wrote plays about people and relationships and tragedies they wrote about people in their society thousands of years ago. Today we can read and watch those plays and instantly recognise them as applicable just as strongly today. Same goes for Shakespeare. Knowledge, technology, wealth and culture can change but not people. The only thing we can learn from history is that how people reacted to a situation in the past is an accurate indication to how they will react in the future. That is something you can bet on. That's why there was World War 2, a second Gulf war and will soon be a third.

[lordvader88]

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[magic]

They shouldn't have legalized independent thinking

Question everything... except for what we tell you.

Hardly surprising America is the source of all those dumb conspiracy theories.

[techman-001]

My wife mentioned at her work that I had just booked two seats for us to visit the Melbourne IMAX theatre to see the acclaimed Apollo 11 documentary. She works at a major robotics/sensors/controls/power company. Her colleagues, many of them younger engineers and technicians, thought nothing of it and one asked why would anyone bother seeing a documentary on Apollo 11? My wife was somewhat taken back by lack of excitement for man's greatest technical achievement, and possibly the greatest adventure in the history of the human race. She was somewhat surprised and even disappointed, as I was to hear it.

Why the lack of interest? Or have you have found young people are just as enthusiastic in his historic anniversary on Apollo 11?

Maybe a lack of interest is due to:
1. The WOW! factor is gone in many young people because they have been desensitised by the plethora of great innovations in their lifetime.
2. Fewer engineers today have genuine deep interest in technology, over just having a job to pay the bills.
3. They were not alive at the time man landed on the moon, so they do not understand how incredible the achievement was to go to the moon in light of relatively primitive technology. They would not understand what is it like to not have a calculator, let alone a computer.
4. They have never worked with vintage computers and have no experience regarding the difficulty of optimising algorthims and cutting code to fit in tiny program storage.
5. They are more interested in Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, reality TV and cooking shows.
 
My bet is the IMAX will be filled with baby boomers, except for a few from the X generation, very few from the Y generation and almost no post-millennials. I will report what I see. I may be wrong!

I write this as I am spending most of the weekend tuned to this...https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ (Fantastic website).

I watched the Moon landing live at primary school in grade 7, it was awesome and the vibe was electric.

But that was in 1969 and perhaps it's ancient history to kids born after that, something they take for granted ?

I don't remember being excited about Columbus and the new world discoveries, they were ancient history to me as a kid perhaps it's the same for every generation?

Perhaps a better question may be are kids nowadays excited about SpaceX, about a manned Moon or Mars colony ?

[BravoV]

May be its time to discuss with wife to move to different breeding ground ?

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/more-children-dream-of-being-youtubers-than-astronauts-lego-says.html

Children’s top career aspirations in the US and UK
    Vlogger/YouTuber
    Teacher
    Professional athlete
    Musician
    Astronaut

Children’s top career aspirations in China
    Astronaut
    Teacher
    Musician
    Professional athlete
    Vlogger/YouTuber

[windsmurf]

May be its time to discuss with wife to move to different breeding ground ?

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/more-children-dream-of-being-youtubers-than-astronauts-lego-says.html

Children’s top career aspirations in the US and UK
    Vlogger/YouTuber
    Teacher
    Professional athlete
    Musician
    Astronaut

Children’s top career aspirations in China
    Astronaut
    Teacher
    Musician
    Professional athlete
    Vlogger/YouTuber

They should have included more choices... like Electrical Engineer!
They also probably didn't know Race Car Driver fits in under professional athlete...

[soldar]

Every older generation believes the younger generations are no good and have lost values. The baby boomers, of which I am one, were pot-smoking hippies which were going to destroy western civilization. And, in some ways they did but it wasn't all bad.

And while people were getting stoned Bill Gates and his buddies and a few other nerds were developing the next generation of computers. The pot-smoking hippies laughed at the nerds but in the end the nerds were the most influential.

Some things degrade and may self-correct later. If they don't then that culture goes to shit and other cultures take over. No big deal in the grand scheme of things. During my lifetime I have seen great countries go to shit and shitty countries progress at unbelievable rates.

But it is similar to us, when we are told about the great sailors who circumnavigated the unknown earth on wind power alone and the most rudimentary navigation aids. No refrigeration to maintain the food fresh. Unknown and deadly diseases. We cannot comprehend the magnitude of their achievements when we are flying over the vast oceans at 40,000 ft and 600 mph, and all we do is to complain that the food service was mediocre.

Not only that, people of today, young and old alike, will judge past generations with a certainty that only ignorance can breed.  Explorers are condemned as greedy and oppressors. Nobody tries to understand the mentality and conditions of the times. One thing I really dislike about present day politicians and leaders, especially in Spain, is the need to compare themselves with previous generations and show how much better they are. And to do that they have to lie about history. It is pathetic.

I have realized that science and technology advance a lot but socially we are still apes and have not advanced a bit since Roman times. Every generation is starting from scratch.

[coppice]

How much do you know about the details of Marco Polo's exploration? Or Christopher Columbus? Or anyone who explored before you were born?

[Electro Detective]

My two diodes worth:

You don't really expect young people to be that web search challenged to get into a space ship in 2020 made with OneHungTooLo parts,
with chip markings scratched off, NoName Capacitors made from recycled evergy drink and insect spray cans, parked next to heat sinks, 
loosely secured wiring harnesses, 

and welds performed by shorts and flip flop OS OHS approved wearing workers,
using coat hangers as filler material, using welders made from landfill ready car batteries in series ? 

The baby bommers can keep their intergalactic wet dreams, 
young people today have better gigs in mind, like 'Live Long And Prosper' 
and just 'live' period 

Besides, the conspiracy clowns did a stellar job of making a circus of the Apollo thing years ago, creating confusion and doubt, and wasted Youtube bandwidth 
Young people just won't buy into it, it's an embarrassment risk to believe whatever the real deal is either way, and peer shame  .

Can't blame em 

[VK3DRB]

And while people were getting stoned Bill Gates and his buddies and a few other nerds were developing the next generation of computers. The pot-smoking hippies laughed at the nerds but in the end the nerds were the most influential ..

The chicks ignored me at high school mainly because I was a nerd (Australian term was a "dag"), and were more attracted to the less academic cool kids (most of whom never finished high school). I went to a high school reunion to discover the same women think I was now cool and the formerly cool youths did not do very well and looked worse for wear. One of the popular girls said, "If only I had known. Why did you tell me you were interested in me!" I am far from perfect but let me tell you I walked away feeling pretty good about it all .

There are extreme exceptions. One guy, totally non-academic, a barely literate Aborigine was booted out of the school at the end of year 10. He was a trouble maker. Long story cut short: He went on to become the head of department at a major university and an expert on educating indigenous peoples in South East Asia and Africa, ran a mining company in Western Australia and CEO of a prominent business. He got a degree, an MBA, a PhD along the way.

[Whales]

My POV (20-25yo): I've grown up saturated with Apollo stuff.  Many (most?) cartoons have a moon/space episode, many movies have used it as part of their plot and the footage/audio of "one small step" gets shown multiple times every year.  I'm told that it was special, but I have zero chance of ever experiencing it as such.

There was an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp) space special on a year or so back that spanned a few days (a week?), it had a few celebrities and was hyped by the ABC to be something special.  I tried to watch it and found I couldn't stand it:

• One segment was a family buying an expensive star-radio-kit-thing for their kids and getting them to "listen" to the stars.  The kids were going "wow" and "cool" to the camera, it all felt horribly disconnected and fake.  It was a box that played noise, about the least interesting thing I could ever show a kid.
• Another segment did the same thing at a telescope park, minus the kids.  Again fake "wows" and "is that something new we are hearing?".  "No" was the answer.  Felt very weird and uncomfortable to watch.

 

On the other end of the spectrum are the cheap space novels I read.  All sorts of wacky worlds, space-travel interpretations and adventures.  We have space-themed genres of games and movies that reach even further than the books.  Basically all of them describe worlds very different to the Apollo missions.

I particularly like some photos taken from space and stories about experiences in space.  That's about all I can say about it.  I don't think I'll ever be able to get a job in it.  I don't think I'll see much interesting to do with it in my lifetime.  Fundamentally gravity and the atmosphere are a great shield: getting past them requires energy sources big enough to also equivalently be weapons, so if they ever get cheap/simple enough to be  more commonplace or long-range then we will also have to deal with a lot of social change.

I would love for more space stuff to happen.  Alas that's a world of my fiction books and TV, not the world I've grown up in.

[Whales]

Perhaps a better question may be are kids nowadays excited about SpaceX, about a manned Moon or Mars colony ?

To answer this: no. 

Manned moonbases and mars trip ideas have regularly been mentioned in the media over my life, typically followed by "this is not feasible because X,Y,Z".  Our interest has been killed in these areas (beyond fiction movies/books/etc) repeatedly.  Australia  specific: it's not that different to hearing about high-speed rail on the news over and over again.

What we have seen succeeding is mostly rich people doing rich people stuff.  Parabolic-arc temporary zero G videos of entertainers with cameras, expensive cars being sent into orbit, etc.  Nothing that feels like it's going to affect us, just make fancy social media material.

[Domagoj T]

Maybe they saw the video of the A11 crew pretending to be 1/2 way to the moon, by placing a thing over the window looking at the Earth, and making it look like the Earth is the size of a marble, and the rest of the window is blacked out.

Like it or not, Bart Sibrel really did release the footage of the A11 crew faking images, so what's NASA'a excuse ?

Can you link this?

As for the topic, it's not young people issue.  Your wife would find similar disinterest in older folks. She encountered some individuals that are not interested in the subject, but if she were to talk to those guys about their interests, she would soon find out that most of them have hobbies or interests that she herself doesn't find exciting.
There are far too many fields and not nearly enough time to dedicate oneself to every one of them. We all need to budget our time and pick stuff that interests us the most.

[VK3DRB]

May be its time to discuss with wife to move to different breeding ground ?

Where my wife works, most of the engineers are from Asia. So your point based on where they were kids grew up might not be too relevant.

My breeding ground is pretty good. Our three kids are well educated with engineering degrees, masters and PhDs. No astronauts, and no complaints here except the daughter is unlikely ever to live in Australia again as she married a Frenchman, has French citizenship and works for the French government in research. The eldest son is a gen X engineer, but is quite interested in the Apollo program unlike a lot of his peers. So as someone pointed out in this thread, there are exceptions.

Australia is moving towards reigniting our own space program, so who knows what the future holds. The biggest hindrance will be the ongoing lack of technical vision by our succession of politicians most of whom were lawyers.

[A Hellene]

Little children's playing management works flawlessly. Children may not yet have developed any national, religious or political consciousness, but they have an inherent sense of justice: Anyone who will get caught stealing in their games, gets stigmatised, intertwined and eliminated immediately, without any second thoughts... Children do not have any tolerance towards fraud or undue kindness, nor ridiculous 'philanthropy' to those who mock them. The children society, in its relentless simplicity, is spiritually and morally sound as a rock, compared to their 'wiser' older counterparts.

This is a three years old take on that subject matter (by 'Yours truly!')!


-George

[MyHeadHz]

You're all overthinking things way too much.

The vast majority of people like what they like, and dislike what they dislike, because of influence of their peers and society.  They see people who get attention and want to be like them.  It's the same for astronauts or movie stars in previous generations.  Whether they realize it or not, children pay attention to the people they see to notice what is encouraged, and they naturally gravitate towards that.  The media itself is largely irrelevant- print, TV, blogs, video, whatever.  It's just part of our natural instinct to 'belong.'  People usually think they like those things because they just like them.  But they like them because in their life, it those actions have been associated with positive dopamine feedback.  It's really as simple as that.  Well, unless there are other factors like autism involved.  But those are the exception to the rule.

So, unless there is some big government or media push for a new space program glorifying astronauts again, there will be a lower interest.  Musk has a chance to really turn things around though, but that's about it.  Another factor is how often things happen.  With space, it can be years between big events to look forward to.  Those dopamine hits are larger, but they don't happen that often.  There is also a limit to dopamine hits.  Online media like twitter and Instagram have continued to maximize their platforms for this.  Instead of waiting weeks or months for big events, these artificial ones happen all the time.  Dopamine is a huge motivating factor, and kids nowadays are absolutely flooded with it.

So nobody is talking about it, so it isn't reinforced.  Either the government or big celebrities would have to push it for quite a while to change things- it doesn't change overnight.

To add...

It's the media companies and our current profit models that are really driving it.  Social media is driven by ad revenue, which is now driven by interest.  Clickbait and fake hysteria are big business.  The rest f the problems stem from this feedback system.  It's really quite an unfortunate situation.

[vk6zgo]

Maybe they saw the video of the A11 crew pretending to be 1/2 way to the moon, by placing a thing over the window looking at the Earth, and making it look like the Earth is the size of a marble, and the rest of the window is blacked out.

Like it or not, Bart Sibrel really did release the footage of the A11 crew faking images, so what's NASA'a excuse ?

I really wish people would go walk on the Moon, that would be cool.

I really wish lordvader would quit posting crap, but we can't all get our wishes.