History of a Future That Never Happened... (but still might...)

[Yazata]

It's the future I dreamed of and expected as a boy back when Apollo landed on the Moon. Certainly 30 years later, we would have Moon bases like in the movie 2001. By 2025, we would be spread throughout the Solar System.

Except it never happened. Most of humanity stopped caring, stopped dreaming, stopped striving... instead of expanding to new frontiers, their horizons contracted to the confines of the little screens in the palms of their hands.

Elon shares the vision. I think that for all their differences, Jeff Bezos does too...

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vp7xoPeWzEw

[Yazata]

From the opposite end of the optimism spectrum, here's a video about how AI might escape from human control and make humanity extinct

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/D8RtMHuFsUw

[C C]

It's the future I dreamed of and expected as a boy back when Apollo landed on the Moon. Certainly 30 years later, we would have Moon bases like in the movie 2001. By 2025, we would be spread throughout the Solar System. Except it never happened. [...]

The fate of space dreams being dependent on government funding and direction, rather than private enterprise. Doomed to fade.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were all the welfare, minority groups, and white hippie demonstrations about spending taxpayer money on Earth instead of space (for poverty, pollution rectification, environmental protection, social justice, and later climate change and climate justice). As well as interest in space being depicted as another Western imperialist or oppressive hegemony, colonial endeavor.

And the only reason cousin Marxism initially contrarily cared about conquering space was its rivalry with and fear of the West. Once both sides had missiles, satellites, and the Moon race was over... The Soviet regime lapsed back into the normal anti-capitalist and turtle-pace technological malaise of the left-wing unicorn quest for socioeconomic utopia.

[Magical Realist]

We never rise higher than our most prevalent and lowest common denominator. This is where we were 20 years after the Moon landing---when we all thought we'd have flying cars by then.

https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=835157082548836