Is the pandemic history yet?

Since the start of the pandemic lockdowns in Canada, I haven't covered that subject much here. In truth, I don't understand the pandemic. By which I mean I don't have any historical perspective on "the meaning" of it.  I find myself feeling we will have to live through it for a while longer before I have any big ideas about what it means. As to surviving this pandemic, I take a great deal of interest. But, for purposes of this blog, you might say, I don't seem to have a lot of interest in the topic. It's not yet that good for thinking with.

Also I have retained a certain suspicion that when/if it goes away, a lot of people and the institutions they work for will happily abandon working from home, won't they? That is to say, a lot of pre-pandemic normality may return and there will be a lot of forgetting. The flu pandemic of 1918-19 seems to have left limited influence behind it, considering the death tolls. And certain countries seem already to be ignoring the pandemic, even as it is killing their citizens by the tens of thousands.  

Writing at Borealia recently, Jerry Bannister refers us back to Dennis McKim's essay from last April "Canadian History after Covid-19," which argued why one consequence might be a shift away from "globalism" -- and with it the transnational emphasis that typifies a lot of historical practice these days. (The extensive comments attached to McKim's piece are worth reading.)

Bannister now notes how much our attempts to give meaning to the pandemic have been, in effect, attempts to predict the future. Well, we don't do the future here much. 

History of Hockey on Mars

I wish I had a crater I could skate away on.

And this one, recently photographed by the Mars Express orbiter, is 80 km wide and more than a kilometer deep, solid frozen water ice all the way across, all the way down.

Image: The Guardian

The history of the Future is complicated: Apollo 8

Went to see First Man, the kinda meh Neil Armstrong biopic, yesterday, and only today learned that this month is the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 8 -- the Borman-Anders-Lovell mission that went around the moon over Christmas week and sent this photograph above as a Christmas present to the world.  They did not think it would be more than fifty years and no one after the Apollo crews has gone back.

Meanwhile National Geographic has a story exploring the possibility that mammalian reproduction won't work in low gravity.  Not the procreation part -- that'll get figured out the old fashioned way -- but it's not at all certain that embryos will develop as they are supposed to without the proper gravitational cues.   And if kids who don't roll around in earth dirt enough grow up prone to allergies and such, what are the chances for someone reared in low gravity and none of Earth's biota around?

!t's cold and dark out there. (First Man got that part.) Elon Musk can go to Mars if he wants, but we oughta take care of this place.

History of the Boomer Future

A spot-on prediction of the future from 1974:

Forty years from now today’s kids will have become the biggest pain in the ass generation of old people ever. If only because there’s so many of them! Their kids (and grandchildren) will never stop hearing about the good old days, when “we” “stopped the War” and a bunch of other equally preposterous claims. Through sheer demographic force, they’ll probably ensure that some kid born in 1995 can sing along to Beatles and Stones songs.