The dream of being an astronaut in adulthood seems to have become extremely old-fashioned: the role of youtuber is much better.
Far from being just a bitter personal reflection, a reflection of my steady entry into the doors, this is the result of a real survey commissioned by Lego and conducted by The Harris Poll.
The questionnaire, administered to over 3000 children from the USA, UK and China asked the offspring to express their preferences towards five different figures.
The result is an alarming sign of how the approach to new technologies has changed (possibly for the worse) over the last few generations.
The priorities change
Going into the details of the results, the British and American children provided the exact same priority scale. "Vlogger / YouTuber" beats (in order) "teacher", "professional athlete", "musician" and "astronaut".
For Chinese children, things went differently. The most desired job was that of astronaut, with 56% of the desired. “Vlogger / YouTuber” only got 16% of the votes.
Far from the spotlight
Despite a growing return to the theme of the space race, Anglo-Saxon children are generically interested in space, but they could be far from the idea of being astronauts due to the little "narrative" appeal of this topic.
After all, it is 50 years since the launch of Apollo 11 that brought humanity to the moon, and the stay of the astronauts in the ISS is no longer news.
In other words, the survey does not investigate the reasons that pushed the children of UK and USA to desire a career in front of the Webcam rather than on a spaceship. But he tells us one thing: certainly being an astronaut for them is no longer so "cool".
Maybe NASA could try to bring the kids closer together by providing them with a new frontier, and the next missions announced could make millions of children and the next generations dream.
