The Other Things

John F Kennedy created the idea of a “moonshot goal” when he gave a speech at Rice University in 1962. Here’s the most pertinent line:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

Amazingly enough, human beings did set foot on the Moon just 7 years later, and they returned safely to the Earth.

Back to Kennedy’s words for a sec:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…

Clearly, this is a moment intended to inspire a nation, but what were those other hard things Kennedy was talking about? What sorts of “other things” could be comparable to landing on the Moon?

Let’s think about that today.

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

Kennedy wasn’t thinking small. Here’s another part of his speech (you can read a short transcript here):

But condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of about a half a century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them, advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals and cover them.

This is wrong in literal terms—prehistorical humans were certainly wearing clothing long before this—but the idea of condensing millennia into years so the human mind can grasp the concept is a fantastic way to state this, and the analogy firms up as Kennedy goes on in his speech:

Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago, man learned to write and use a car with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year. And then less than two months ago, during this whole 50 year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month, electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week, we developed penicillin and television and nuclear power. This is a breathtaking pace and such a pace cannot help but create new ails as it dispels old.

Kennedy saw the rapid acceleration in technological change clearly. This must have convinced him that a Moon landing was possible in such a short time frame.

Back over to the original question, now: what were the other hard things Kennedy was referring to, those things that could compare to the Moon landing?

I think it makes sense to talk about hard things from the past—those things Kennedy specifically calls out in his condensed timeline of human history—and things still in the future at the time of the speech.

Kennedy specifically mentions clothing, creating buildings (“other kinds of shelter”), writing, the wheel, organized religion (Christianity in particular), the printing press, the steam engine, our understanding of gravity, electric lighting, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, penicillin, TV, and nuclear power.

Clearly, he was trying to give a sense of possibility, since most of the innovations happened toward the end of the timeline. It’s tough to say which of these Kennedy regarded as among the hardest or most important, but it is clear that he tried to have a wide view of the timeline of human history.

Nuclear power, in particular, must have been on his mind. The Cuban Missile Crisis (I wrote about it a little here) was still a month in the future, but the punctuated end to the biggest war in human history, expedited by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still relatively fresh in everyone’s collective memory.

Not only was a nuclear arms race already well in progress, bringing the nation’s collective anxiety close to the boiling point later that year, but also: nuclear energy held untold promise for the future. Cars would run on little pellets of uranium, and you’d never need to stop for gas. A home would be fueled by a tiny nuclear furnace one day. We had finally figured out how to cheat nature!

Well, not quite. Anxiety around nuclear energy wouldn’t really take off until much later, but technical challenges reared their ugly faces all throughout the development of sustainable nuclear energy development.

It might be fair to say that this is one hard thing we’re still working on.

Kennedy had other incredible challenges he didn’t talk about during this speech, too. Black Americans badly needed protection by way of meaningful civil rights legislation. Nearly a century had passed since the end of slavery, and yet White oppression in the South was not only allowed, but even encouraged by local and state governments.

Kennedy felt a strong obligation to ensure that the world was a safe place. He recognized the enormous obligation the US has in world affairs, and he looked outward to other nations, foreshadowing Presidencies to come.

He was certainly thinking about his own incredible challenges, walking a constant tightrope with Congress to pass meaningful legislation to address some of these issues, but it is noteworthy that Kennedy focused on the much larger human condition when describing his Moonshot goal.

Kennedy didn’t have a crystal ball, so he had no idea that a year before a human being set foot on the moon, the internet was effectively launched at the Mother of All Demos. Perhaps he saw a glimpse of the ways in which we communicate today, but it’s hard to imagine anyone envisioning social media or instant-gratification online shopping.

The internet is surely one of those hard things, though. Ever since we began to unlock the wonder of connectivity, we’ve been dealing with its inevitable fallout. It turns out that the Arab Spring wasn’t quite what we thought it was, and authoritarian governments can use the internet to control their population just as easily as people can become liberated.

AI, on the other hand, was probably already on Kennedy’s mind. Artificial intelligence had been formally become an academic discipline in 1956, and the US government was keenly interested in its potential. Computer science ultimately emerged apart from AI as a distinct field, with software and hardware taking turns trying to keep up with one another.

Ultimately, AI may be our hardest thing. Going to the moon and returning to the earth is an unimaginably incredible feat, but creating a thinking machine that could be vastly more powerful than us, and then continuing to thrive as humans? That’s something many times more challenging.

We’re also an awful lot more connected today. This means ideas are butting right up against one another, like no other time in human history. This creates incredible opportunity for innovation and discovery, but it also creates potential for conflicts we never imagined possible.

Getting along as we get closer is definitely one of those other hard things.

What other existential challenges worth taking on can you think of? What are some of the hard things we need to do?