(1957 Revisited)—Instead of walking in awe of creation, we began to embrace the darkness with rockets, bombs, chemicals, and machines that think. The irony, of course, is that while we reached for the heavens, we began to poison the very Earth beneath our feet.

Operation Plumbbob was a series of nuclear tests that were conducted between May 28 and October 7, 1957, at the Nevada Test Site.

For Western society, as well as Europe and Asia, the late 1950s were a time of great hope. Society in general was looking ahead to a world without war. The future looked prosperous for all. Wonderful breakthroughs in technology, medicine, transport and other incredible advances had captured the imagination of a society recovering from the horrors of WWII. Politically, however, a dark and sinister alternative was actually being unleashed, unknown to unexpected people. 1957 was probably one of the worst years in human history. Why? Because everything we had always taken for granted suddenly started to disappear. . . At the same time, all the things we had always feared suddenly began to happen!

The heavens literally opened up for a world of peace, or so we thought: Sputnik went up, and mankind touched space — but it wasn’t about exploration, it was about control. The Cold War was lifted above our heads, literally. The sword of fire: Nuclear arsenals multiplied. Humanity gained the power to destroy itself utterly. The poisoned earth: Chemicals and plastics flooded into daily life, invisible at first, but seeding ecological catastrophe. The thinking machine: Artificial Intelligence was conceived, a child of war and mathematics, with seeds of both promise and peril. The distracted soul: Consumer culture accelerated, turning people from seekers of meaning into consumers of images, brands, and things. From a Creator-centred view, 1957 looks like the moment humankind turned its back on humility. Instead of walking in awe of creation, we began to imitate the darkness with rockets, bombs, chemicals, and machines that think. The irony, of course, is that while we reached for the heavens, we began to poison the very Earth beneath our feet. It could be said that 1957 was the moment the “Big Wobble” truly began.

The dawn of the Space Age (Sputnik, 1957) and the link to the Mighty Military-Industrial Complex And The 1957 Connection

The machinery of war had faded after WWII, which is what we had been promised—however, a new threat, far greater than the bullets and bombs of WWII, had been hatched—the birth of something called the military-industrial complex, and it was growing rapidly, wrapping its tentacles around the globe. Its purpose, to fuel an endless churn of conflict, creating wars which have no ending. It was just one of several changes that happened around the late fifties and early sixties that altered the trajectory of the world forever, many of them with troubling long-term consequences we are still trying to deal with today—But the mighty military-industrial complex was the unshakable bedrock foundation our future world would be built from this period.

The then-Senate Majority Leader and leader of the Democratic political opposition to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, made no secret of his desires when he told the New York Times about his ambitions, demanding that the "WHOLE WORLD!" should fall under the United States Military.

"Our very future depended on being the ones who first seized ownership of space." “Control of space means control of the world.”

“From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.

While future President Johnson was demanding world domination, scientists at the time were predicting climate chaos—Harry Wexler, who was later on JFK's team of space race scientists, warned the US government that the increased pollution from "rocket exhausts" was doing “terrible” things to our atmosphere. But as you can imagine, the military was having none of it.

Harry Wexler warned the government that chlorine and bromine, the stuff coming out of rocket exhausts, were destroying the ozone layer and would eventually disrupt the “jet stream”, which in turn would cause worldwide weather chaos.

As you know and have known for a while now, our jet stream is acting extremely erratically and is causing worldwide weather chaos today!

It wasn't just rockets which worried Wexler. According to Wikipedia, in 1958, Harry Wexler voiced his concern regarding atomic bomb testing, claiming the testing would lead to a new ice age by causing a nuclear winter scenario. From 1959 until 1961, he proposed and promoted the idea of a World Weather Watch. In 1961, he served as the lead negotiator for the U.S. in talks with the U.S.S.R. concerning the joint use of meteorological satellites. Wexler died ‘suddenly’ in 1962 of a heart attack before he could release his findings to the public—and of course, the mighty military-industrial complex has been shooting up the atmosphere ever since.

If I were to tell you, there is a graph from NASA showing us the actual date global warming started, you would be shocked to the core, yeah, I know, so was I when I first saw it, but—if I told you that graph shows that global warming started in 1957, you would say the graph ain't real, however; I copied it from their website—the link is below.

Graphic: Temperature vs Solar Activity

NASA boldly claim "Human Activity Is Responsible for Global Warming." How right they are!

It gets more interesting—The graph below is the Briffa tree ring density vs temperature, and was made by SUV. As you can clearly see, it resembles NASA's Temperature vs Solar Activity Graph almost identically. The tree rings appear to have reacted the same way as Solar Activity did after 1957. Annual growth in tree rings became considerably narrower after 1957 and dropped off the cliff, just as Solar Activity did on NASA's graph. But, clearly, global temperature suddenly and unexpectedly began its considerable rise (global warming began) despite being constant with the tree ring widths for the previous 80 years. 

The graph shows twenty-year smoothed plots of averaged ring-width (dashed) and tree-ring density (thick line), averaged across all sites, and shown as standardised anomalies from a common base (1881–1940), and compared with equivalent-area averages of mean April–September temperature anomalies (thin solid line). From SUV, Briffa et al. 1998. . . 

If we were to zoom in with a microscope, 1957 stands out as a hinge-point in modern civilisation. It was a pivotal year and delivered many points of no return events. The dawn of the Space Age, for example (Sputnik, 1957). The launch of Sputnik by the Soviets was a technological marvel, but it also ignited the arms race here and in space and unknowingly launched Global Warming. It also accelerated Cold War tensions. From then on, science and technology were increasingly driven by military competition, surveillance, and control. It marked a shift from human-centred exploration to state-driven power projection. If a scientist or research company required funds, they have to be prepared to become puppets for the Military or Government. 

The spread of nuclear weapons and energy.

The 1950s saw a huge build-up of nuclear arsenals, and by 1957, both superpowers were testing weapons that could destroy our civilisation many times over. For the first time in human history, our planet could be destroyed by us, the people. The world entered a state of permanent existential risk. Civilian nuclear energy also grew out of this, bringing its own problems (waste, accidents, and dependency).

Chemical and industrial acceleration.

The late 1950s were when the “chemical age” really exploded—pesticides like DDT, plastics, and industrial fertilisers began to spread everywhere. They boosted productivity but also set us on the road to ecological collapse, mass pollution, and poisoned food chains. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was a direct response to this moment. 

Cultural and spiritual dislocation.

By the late 1950s, the West was riding the post-war boom: consumerism, television, advertising, and pop culture were cementing themselves. Traditional structures, family, community, faith—began to fray under the weight of a new globalised, technological lifestyle. In some ways, 1957 marks the acceleration of the “modern experiment” in turning humanity into consumers rather than creators.

The medical front.

Antibiotics, vaccines, and modern medicine had begun to extend lifespans — wonderful in one sense—but at the same time set us on a path of overpopulation, industrial farming, and, ironically, weakened immune systems and resistant “superbugs.”

A Global Whisper of Warning.

In early 1957, in the remote hills of Guizhou, China, the H2N2 influenza virus appeared quietly. Within months, the virus, a strain of COVID-19—later named the Asian Flu—had swept across continents. By the year's end, it claimed between one and two million lives globally. It spread not by divine storm or angelic trumpet, but by the marvels of our own making: trains, ships, aeroplanes. In a time of growing confidence in man’s ability to conquer the elements, this virus delivered a divine footnote—In 2019, an invisible but unmistakable voice whispered: “I am still here.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

1957 is also when Artificial Intelligence took its first steps. In 1956, the Dartmouth Conference (often called the “birthplace of AI”) brought together scientists who boldly declared that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” By 1957, the first practical AI programs were being built—notably the perceptron (an early neural network) by Frank Rosenblatt.

So, amazingly, the Space Age, the Nuclear Age, the Chemical Age, and the AI Age all cracked open at virtually the same moment in history. Looking back, it feels almost prophetic—as if humanity rushed through a door it didn’t fully understand, and we’ve been stumbling forward ever since.

So, if we take all that together, 1957 wasn’t “the start of the fall,” that happened almost 6,000 years ago when Adam took a nibble of the forbidden fruit—but it was a threshold year when science, technology, and power truly began to run ahead of wisdom and restraint. But let's not rule out Divine intervention; 1957 coincides with another ambitious human space attempt, and God changed the world forever then, too. 

The Tower of Babel, Genesis 11:1-9:

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 

3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” 

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” 

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

We are told, ad nauseum, by scholars, religious leaders and experts, God's word doesn't alter with time—so, if he didn't want mankind in space 4,000 years ago, he certainly wouldn't want them there now! Was 1957 the year God said enough is enough for mankind?

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