In July 2011, the Space Shuttle Atlantis landed in Florida for the final time. Back then, the decision to end the shuttle programme was framed as a short-term transition, with a new generation of spacecraft soon taking its place. But for nearly a decade, the US had to rely on Russian Soyuz capsules to send its astronauts to the International Space Station.
That quiet admission of dependence points to something deeper. Knowledge that societies assume they have acquired for good can also disappear. As the US prepares to send astronauts to the Moon once again after several decades with the Artemis programme, the end of the shuttle reminds us that even the most advanced economies can lose capabilities, and that recovering them is harder than we expect.
When I presented my book The Infinite Alphabet in London last year, I was struck by an unexpected reaction. Audiences were less interested in stories about how knowledge grows than in stories about how it fades. They were anxious to hear about the loss of capabilities. Many felt that even in a wealthy and technologically advanced economy such as Britain, tasks once performed routinely — such as home repairs or railway construction — had become slow, expensive and hard to complete.