I recently had an incredible experience in London watching The Moonwalkers, an immersive voyage to our beautiful moon, narrated by Tom Hanks. It tells the stories of the Apollo missions between 1968 and 1972 when 12 American astronauts touched down on the surface of the moon. But no one has been back since. This will change in 2026 when the Artemis program plans to send two American astronauts back to the moon.

I had so many thoughts about human endeavour whilst watching The Moonwalkers.

In 1968, we had very little computing power. It's mind-boggling to think that they managed to put a man on the moon with 1/100,000 of the computing power we carry in our pockets today.

Back in 1968, the control room was manned by engineers working with paper charts. We watched them frantically scribbling away during the take-off and landing. There was no computer, just paper and pencil. There were so many places where human error could have caused a catastrophe. One wrong manual calculation could have ended the lives of those men.

The landing craft itself almost looks comical now, as though it was constructed from aluminium foil – like something a child might make for a school project.

That we achieved such a feat before many of us were born restores your faith in humans. I walked out of that hour long experience feeling upbeat, confident, and sure of the fact that we humans, despite what you read, are actually pretty remarkable.

It came as an antidote to the dark swamp of negative news that comes at us in a constant barrage. We have wars, escalations, political divisions, climate change – there is so much to worry about.

One of the most important traits of successful long-term investors is their ability to maintain faith in the future. It’s a constant upstream battle in a world where journalists put a negative spin on nearly everything, subscribing to the old journalistic maxim, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. This is, after all, the best way to get our attention and win the ‘click’.

Whilst there is always an impending crisis, we have an impressive track record of solving them. Whether it’s bank failures, global pandemics or nuclear standoffs, when push comes to shove, we find a way through. I am reminded of
Winston Churchill’s famous quote, ‘You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have
exhausted all the other possibilities.’ That applies to humans, not just Americans.

And it’s not just that we solve crises. It’s that we progress. Look what we have done since that first moon landing.
Whilst those engineers sat with their paper and pencil, plotting on a chart to land a spacecraft on the moon,
we can pull up all the information in the world on any subject in a matter of seconds by just reaching into our pockets.
In 1968, we would have been lost in libraries for weeks looking up the same information. Nuclear physics, penguins, the American Civil War – all this information, at our fingertips, for free.

No one sitting in that control centre in 1968 could have predicted where we would be today. We have seen progress on a scale that was literally inconceivable back then. Human ingenuity is relentless and extraordinary.

It’s worth stopping momentarily and noting how we have achieved this progress and ingenuity. Where has it come from? It has been delivered to us by the great companies of the world. Technology companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Tesla and Nvidia are changing how we interact in and with the world. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are enabling us to live free of disease for longer. Consumer goods companies improve and enhance our day-to-day lives. Industrial companies work in the background, making us safer and enabling our economy to keep functioning by working with other businesses. This innovation has been so rapid that only one of today’s ten biggest companies in the United States existed in 1968.
The other nine have come along since that first moon landing. That one company is, of course, Berkshire Hathaway, the great Warren Buffett conglomerate, which itself says something extraordinary about the enduring power of investing in great businesses.

This is where we must focus as long-term patient investors. We must focus on the ingenuity and innovation of which humans are so incredibly capable. We must understand that this only shows up in the price of companies – it’s why, over time, share prices go up. We must hold onto this when the darkness sets in, when, as investors, we feel consumed by all that is wrong in the world. As Tom Hanks, the narrator of The Moonwalkers, said, if humankind can figure out a way to put twelve of us on the moon and bring them back safely to Earth, we can solve anything. Moonshot thinking got us there, and it will get us there – and further – again. Don’t lose faith in us.