In the halcyon days of the Greek Epics - when all you had to do to get a flattering and probably somewhat exaggerated picture of your naked body on an urn was to sail from Greece to Turkey and back again - there were adventures for our heroic young men. In the age of sail, great men and their intrepid crews set out to find unknown continents in far off oceans - thousands of miles from help. They lived off the land and, if that failed, off each other. From the time of the Crusades through to about three days into the First World War, there were mighty battles to be fought, spoils to be gained and women to be seriously impressed - and other words rhyming with "essed" - by the manly prowess of their warriors - returning bearing their shields or on them.
Now? Everything has been discovered and 60 Minutes has wrecked the tale Minotaur by exclusively revealing it to have been an encounter with a slightly angry bull after a heavy night on the grappa on Cyprus. These days, we're reduced to retracing the voyages of the great men of the past or trying to be the something-est person so achieve a particular feat. The youngest person ever to sail solo around the world, the fastest person every to summit Everest or the stupidest person ever to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel - that last one is a perpetual dead heat. Glory now comes not from a multi-year voyage around the coastline that you can talk up into a three book epic, but from a precisely measured 0.01second improvement to the 50 metres freestyle record that will last until someone discovers the syringes in your gym bag.
And exploration? James Cook isn't even getting out of Plymouth any more. He has been tied up in paperwork for three years trying to get the risk assessment approved, find an insurance underwriter for the job, and get agreement on the worldwide broadcast rights for the documentary being made by the four man crew he's had to find accommodation for, alongside Joseph Banks and his retinue.
As for war and glory, that's completely out of the question. Following the two world wars there has been a general realisation that old-fashioned, multi-national war is not going to cover our boys in glory, it's going to cover us all in mud, blood, mustard gas blisters and nasty, high-energy stuff that makes you glow in the dark.
So our heroic young are reduced to becoming triathletes - fit for sure but self-absorbed with PBs and protein bars and, ultimately, achieving nothing of lasting significance.
We need Mars.
For the rest of us, past the stage of heroism, foolishness and fitness - what is left? To what do I aspire?
My aspirations, my dreams and the quantum of my worth are measured in pointless but every-renewed consumption. My society and my economy don't need me to be adventurous, brave, daring or visionary - they just need me to spend. A bigger TV on which to watch an ever smaller selection of worthwhile stories, a bigger fridge with internet connectivity to that I can re-order every product I've ever bought without having to think about it and a new phone every two years with an exciting new interface through which I can ... get the same old information; the weather, the news and stock market prices.
By the way, what is it with stock market prices? Is there anyone in the world that actually understands them and/or tracks them day to day using the little widget on their phone or the information on the nightly news? It might be one great big con. Sometimes I think that the stockbrokers only moved to a computerised exchange because people had started to realise that all that Auslan signing on the floor of the pit was just random garbage and none of them actually knew what they were doing.
But it's important that I spend and consume, spend and consume again and don't think too much about it. To be fair there have always been bread and circuses for the masses - the vodka and pornography of Orwell's distopia - but our daily bread is now costing us the earth - literally. Whole new continents are arising from the sea, built on a solid foundation of 1980's CRT monitors, followed by layer upon layer of disused cell phones, old pocket calculators and laptops. Mixed in, for the paleontologists of the future to find, are the fossils of the jobs that each succeeding generation of ICT took away and buried.
We need something great to aspire to, something awe inspiring to wonder at.
NASA - get your act together.
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