What comes to mind is the expectation we had that various technologies would come together to create a massive new shift in direction for our global society as a whole. For example: Vacation getaways to the moon.
We landed on the moon in 1969. Essentially, in a little over twenty years, we’d gone from this:
To this:
Movies of the day were showing us speculative moon-bases like this:
We just assumed that progress would continue apace and I imagined we’d at least have a permanently-staffed scientific station on the moon by 1980 and a manned Mars mission not long after.
But, we grossly underestimated the difficulty and expense involved. Outer space is an extremely hostile environment and also very, very large; the distances involved in travel are vast. After we’d “beaten the Russians” (our stated goal in the “space race”) our attention turned inward, to the problems on Earth and the money was spent there instead.
We’re now, I hope, at the dawn of a new era, and private money is being spent on a new space-race. Hopefully, this time it will be more about science and expanding the presence of the human race and less so about nationalism.
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