July 21 1965 : the closing of the (last) (cosmic) Frontier and the death of Panic Modernity

Many of today's male adults who were small children back in July 1965 have recorded their intense disappointment when they opened their parents' daily paper to gaze upon the first photos from Mariner 4's flypast of Mars, revealing its surface to be as dead as that of the Moon.

They were hardly the only ones to be extremely disappointed, even extremely surprised - most male adults - even male adult scientists - felt much the same.
Earth based scientific research had already confirmed that all the other planets and moons in our own solar system were either far too hot or far too cold to sustain even bacterial life.

Still Mars had seemed a sure scientific bet to most knowledgable scientists to reveal evidence of current (or at least past) plant and microbe life.

Now the next nearest sun (hopefully with a livable planet, though no planets at all had yet been seen) was at least tens of thousands of years of space travel away.

(The top current space travel speeds were simply not available to the huge spaceships needed to provide multi-generational space travel for a breeding population of humans and to take them safely through milleniums of cosmic radiations and storms to that star - and back.)

A hundred years of (semi-realistic) male fantasies about continuing to honing the sharp edge of effeminate white civilization by battling savage space aliens after the last native cum aliens (sic) had been eliminated, suddenly died a premature death.

By 1965 the Slavs and the Chinese, both with nuclear weapons equal to those of America and Europe, were no longer able to be regarded as savages.

Aboriginals in the Americas and Australian had already been beaten to the point of near extinction - nor did Africa's struggling black nations seem a worthy 'savage' rival. (Moslems hadn't yet emerged as a threat but even in 1965, they too hardly seemed a realistic threat as 'savages'.)

Teddy Roosevelt must have rolled over in his grave that July in 1965.

Teddy was convinced that the white race would only remain on top of civilization if its edge was kept in shape by constantly combating savage hordes.

So when the 'Indians' were subdued in the American West in his own lifetime, he sought to invade the Philippines etc overseas instead.

Because after the white male invaders closed the Indians' last western frontier territories, they were honour bound to then invade new continents and even new cosmos, just like the the one that astronomer Lowell first saw on Mars in that same time period.

After Teddy died during WWI, his spiritual children saw fighting off Mars' space aliens as the last Great White Hope for white males to retain their virile edge of civilized violence.

Now all that died, July 21st 1965.

R.I.P. Modernity...