The Past is a Foreign Country (Take Four)

Perhaps it's the death of Ray Bradbury that's occasioned this thought, but, when I think of all the ways that my children's world of the imagination is different than the one of my youth, what stands out most is that they have no expectation that men will one day walk on the surface of Mars or have colonies in space. Growing up in '70s, manned exploration of the solar system -- and beyond -- was an almost unquestioned assumption among not just children but many adults as well. While I don't remember the last Apollo mission in 1972, I do remember vividly the Apollo-Soyuz mission from 1975, not to mention the landing tests of the space shuttle Enterprise in 1977. These were events that profoundly affected me as a young person and no doubt explain why, even today, I still consider myself a "science fiction guy" rather than a fantasy one.

What's funny, though, is that, back then, manned space travel wasn't just the stuff of science fiction; it was real. When I was in school, I think we watched nearly every space shuttle launch between 1981 and 1983, stopping everything and bringing out these old TV sets for the occasion. For my children, though, space travel is almost completely science fictional. It's something that only happens in books and movies and video games, but not in the real world. The Apollo program and the space shuttle mean about as much to them as listening to soap operas on the radio meant to me as a child -- relics of a past they never knew and will never completely understand.

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and saw a not at all implausible projection of what men might be doing in space when I was 32 years old. Yet, here I am, living in The Future my friends and I dreamed about in the '70s and it's not at all like we were promised. I won't go so far as to say it's worse, but it is a different, less romantic future than I had hoped for. Much as it saddens me that my childhood dreams of Moon bases and space stations haven't come to pass by now, I think it saddens me more that, for my children, such ideas are nothing more than dreams and unlikely ones at that.