Actually, that delay exists now in space exploration.

For instance, rovers on Mars cannot be controlled real time as if it was some fancy video game. The delay is too great. Each move and event has to be carefully considered and peer reviewed before uploading to the rovers for execution.

You only considered the latency side of the communications problem. The other portion is bandwidth. Until quite recently, one baud in space was considered a big deal. That’s about what the Galileo spacecraft had since the high gain antenna failed during deployment.

Yet, another problem to consider (that you touched on with colonial fashion and news) is that technological advances on earth will travel (for hardware) as fast as a rocket (for now). Think of the compute power of a voyager probe. Your cell phone likely surpasses that by a great deal. There’s no way to update the hardware, there.

Just wanted to show you that the “delay” still exists in today’s world in some form.

Re. John Adams…
Growing up in my education those of the colonial era struck me as having a very peculiar general psyche: harsh, uncompromising, determined, overly-ambitious, idealistic to a fault — yet totally carnal in amusements/obtaining-their-desires (even Adams with his damn gardening). There is a (unfortunately limited) body of colonial era diaries/short-journals that put the psyche of that era’s inhabitants into context for me. These type of documents bring issues to the fore that contemporary American culture tends to neglect in importantance (smallpox, quality of life expectations exponentially diminishing each year, ability to conduct one’s work-trade likewise) making Adams’ world-view a sense-made and sane ideological response to current-events and the possible trajectory of social trends.

There once existed a popular American culture that prided itself upon one’s ability to live ever more frugally, on the ability to make-do, on the skill to solve problems in the face of little with which to work, and on equality amongst citizens as they strive to do so; Adams was one man amongst maybe a hundred or so whose personalities made such things popular, once, in our culture.

rob@egoz.org