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0 pointschubot3y ago0 comments

It's an age thing - the dreams you had when you were younger didn't turn into reality

This is a tangent, but I've heard that children who grew up in the "space age" after Apollo thought we would be on Mars right now, or colonizing the solar system. It was their childhood dream.

Hence a lot of men (especially rich men) in that era are interested in flying planes and going to space. Bezos was born in 1964 and Musk was born in 1971.

On the other hand my first memory of the space program was literally the Challenger disaster ... that's when the myths started dying down, and when America stopped going to space very much. I never really had that dream, and it feels like many/most people my age and younger don't.

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drblast3y ago

This is so true, at least from my late 70's perspective. Star Wars didn't seem so much like fantasy when I saw it in the theater - it was more like the inevitable conclusion of where tech was going, and probably in my lifetime we'd be a spacefaring species.

Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids.

Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since.

The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.

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