I went to the Future and all I got was this lousy Screensaver

So, then, Mr. Reynolds asks “what happened?” when we did not get jetpacks by 1999, and a space mission to Jupiter by 2001. Somehow, I do not think that what happened was a loss of an ethos of foresight that attempted to steer reality toward preferred outcomes— by which, I assume, he means Big Government.

Let me propose three or four possible answers to “what happened”:

1. Unrealistic expectations.
We did not get the future we expected because the expectations were unrealistic: what use is a jetpack? Even the military has no real need for a one-man rocket. Why not take a helicopter? We are not on the moon because there is nothing on the moon to go see: it is the Gobi desert, except without air.

2. Unobservant results.
We got the future we expected, but it merely looks slightly different than we expected, and we tend not to notice the changes. How is a flying car different from a helicopter? Businessmen can be shuttled from airport to skyscraper in record time. We have flying cars, and no one calls them that.

3. Dramatic expectations, realistic results.
The needs of history are different from the needs of drama. It is easy to write a story about Pinocchio or the Tin Woodman (or Martin Luther King), and most robot stories are tales of this kind, yarns about men who are more or less like us, merely made of metal. It is hard to write a story about the Internet. The Net is not trying to take over the world, like Skynet or Colossus; it does not have a personality, except, perhaps, a fetish for selling Viagra. It is not something we can actually jack into with neural implants as in a Gibson story, or fight in gladiatorial games against an evil Master Control Program with our lightcycles, as in a Disney movie.  But the Internet is darned convenient for a darned large number of things—it has revolutionized the way office work is done, the way mail is sent, the way porn is sold, the way English is misspelled.

Who here actually needs or wants an Asimov-style mechanical man? Do you need a butler, really? The military might use an Asimobot, except that bots cannot hurt people. Maybe we could use them in tending nuclear reactors, except that we stopped building reactors. We could use them for deep sea work, if there was any to do, or space exploration, except, again, robotic space exploration is going on at a fine clip. I am not saying I would not like a giant robot, for example, like the one used by Daisaku Kusama to defeat alien invaders or illuminati-like conspiracies: but if I had to chose between a future where we each have a metal manservant and one where we all have the Internet, I chose the information revolution over the robotics revolution.

4. Thwarted Expectations.
One possible answer is one our Mr. Reynolds might not think of, or might not want to think of: what happened was that the men who dreamed those great dreams looked back at the previous fifty years of technological innovation, from 1880 to 1940, and predicted a similar rate of progress.

And the rate of progress lagged, for the postwar generation was a laggard generation.

What happened? Well, look around at the modern thinkers, shakers, movers and doers. Compare them with our fathers and grandfathers. Do you think they have the grit to be pioneers? Do you think this nation has the backbone needed to make the sacrifices an unparalleled human adventure like space colonization calls on us to make?

What happened was the 1960’s and 70’s. What happened was the growth of big government, the loss of entrepreneurial spirit, the slow death of the pioneering ideal, the sloth, narcissism, and cowardice of the baby boomers.

What happened was the loss of the “can-do” Yanks that won WWII. Their children lost the Vietnam War, and lost the economic incentives for space exploration. NASA was not the culmination of the space effort; NASA was the roadblock stopping further growth, the waterworks drying up all the other fountains.

Imagine how many engineering companies, or companies of every kind, might exist now if we had pre-FDR levels of taxation, pre-FDR levels of litigation, bureaucracy, red tape.

I read an article that said employers hiring kids out of school find that if they do not love-bomb them in the same way school does, so that every employee is the employee of the month, everyone is praised every day, and everyone gets an ‘A’, the young employees quit—for they are used to a flood of expectation-free adoration, and feel underpraised and undervalued if they do not get it.

Now picture those same young men aboard the spaceship Comet, or the Rocket Cruiser Polaris, or the Skylark, or the Britannia, or the spacebattleship Yamato, or the Rodger Young. Hard to picture, isn’t it?

The Flower Generation was the one drugged out at Woodstock while their fathers were launching moonshots. They are the generation that lost us the Moon.

If you are the kind of folk who hate Christopher Columbus, and sneer and scoff at pioneers and heroes, you are not the kind of folk among whose number the next Christopher Columbus of Outer Space will be found.