There is nice book about this era: Lord, W., "The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War," (Harper & Bros., 1960)
I quoted from it in one of the papers at LENR-CANR.org: "The spirit of an era can’t be blocked out and measured, but it is there nonetheless. And in these brief, buoyant years it was a spark that somehow gave extra promise to life. By the light of this spark, men and women saw themselves as heroes shaping the world, rather than victims struggling through it. Actually, this was nothing unique. People had seen the spark before, would surely do so again. For it can never die as long as men breathe. But sometimes it burns low, leaving men uncertain in the shadows; other times it glows bright, catching the eye with breath-taking visions of the future." We will never return to the innocence of that era, now that we have been through WWII and we have nuclear weapons. We will never unlearn how to make them. Despite Obama's best hopes, I doubt we will ever be fully free of the damn things. Even if the last one is disassembled, the knowledge of how to make them will be with us always, casting a shadow on events. I was reading essays by Oppenheimer the other day: http://www.amazon.com/Atom-Void-Science-Community-Princeton/dp/0691024340 This was written in the 1950s. He said some striking things that we now take for granted, but which must have seemed unearthly back in then. Such as the fact that the human race now has the ability to destroy all of civilization in a few hours. We have to decide how the world will be run and what the physical shape of the landscape will be, to an unprecedented extent. As they say in the comic book, with great power comes great responsibility and 35% taxes forevermore. High technology and high infrastructure costs are never going away. - Jed
