Joining us today from his attic in New Haven, Connecticut, New York Times columnist and author of The Decident Society, Ross Dowlett.

I'm Peter Robinson. Welcome to another plague time edition of Uncommon Knowledge.

I'm at home in Palo Alto, California.

Ross's book is the Decident Society how we became the victims of our own success.

Ross, welcome back and I should explain, I should apologize to you,

and but explain to viewers that we recorded an interview on your book

almost three months ago to the day,

February 24th as I recall.

And then the coronavirus difficulties started.

And as a result of those difficulties,

there was some staff confused who was in the studio who was and we lost the tape.

On the other hand, it's just as well because the world has changed.

Ross, thank you for, thank you for making your way upstairs to the attic.

It's up many, many flights, Peter, and the truth is that this, that interview will be like, you know, the lost

Gospels or the missing works of Aristotle. You know, people, scholars will be searching

for it, hopefully a millennia hence hence but for the purposes of selling books I think it's it's much

better for us to talk post-pandemic rather than pre-pandemic anyway yes yes, I think so. All right, you argue in the Decident Society that the

Space Age lasted about 30 years from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 to the Challenger

explosion in 1986.

Unmanned flights continued after that, but now I'm going to quote you.

But none of it kindled the popular imagination

as the giant leap for mankind, the moon landing, had done. Humanity had decided that whatever might be up there, it would probably remain indefinitely out of reach.

...