And yet despite all that, I'm disappointed with the lack of change. Where's my flying car? Where's my jet pack? Why is there no moon base?
The changes you want are impractical and always were. Flying cars and jetpacks have both been invented, but they aren't practically useful. There's no moon base because we don't have much incentive. At the end of the day, the moon isn't that useful to us right now. I support the expansion of civilization, but this just is not happening until we have a reason to make it happen.
9/11 wasn't a big deal and neither was the fall of the Berlin wall.
You crazy. 9/11 was definitely a big deal, perhaps not in the "ultimate tragedy" way it is portrayed as, but definitely as a defining aspect of US activity over the past decade. To say that the Berlin Wall falling wasn't important is just plan ridiculous. That was the death knell of the Soviet Union, the most significant political change in the past 50 years. Eastern Europe went from oppression and want to nearing the quality of Western Europe in 20 years because of that.
A lot of us expected space travel and human genetic engineering and flying cars and terraforming and daily shuttle service to Mars to be commonplace by now.
Then you expected something that real scientists never thought was going to happen.
But no, instead of flying cars we ended up with hybrid "electric" vehicles that still burn gasoline anyway. Instead of people taking the shuttle to Mars we ended up with people playing angry birds on their cellphone. Instead of going to the doctor to engineer your baby to be superstrong and immune to disease we ended up with obesity and AIDS. Nobody had AIDS when I was a kid. "Childhood obesity" wasn't an expression that people used in daily life.
People had AIDS when you were a kid. People had AIDS when your
parents were kids. Nobody talked about it, and that's why it spread so far, and why we have to work so hard now to keep it down. If not for HAART it would be a pandemic by now.
And you neglect that we do have genetic enhancement these days. Gene therapy is a big thing, and it has made medical strides that were impossible before. That it isn't your perfect superpower-endowing fantasy is not the fault of the world.
Childhood obesity may not have been talked about, but it was growing even then. Yours was the age where fast food became a standard of American life.
Sure...there've been improvements. But did we really need AIDS?
We didn't ask for AIDS. HIV mutated all on its own.
Was it really more important to build military bases and spend trillions of dollars killing people in other countries rather than terraform Mars?
We don't have what it takes to terraform Mars yet. That's part of why we're doing all the missions we are. Curiosity, Odyssey, Opportunity, MRO, and Express are all active on Mars at this very moment. Exploration, Colonization, Assimilation. We haven't even finished the first step, so why do you expect the third?
Are we really happier whining and complaining about the "right to work" rather than just having robots do everything?
Robots can't do everything. They can't even do most things.
Yes, there have been changes. But Star Trek was made ten years before I was born and we still don't have orbit-to-ground teleporters.
There were never going to be any teleporters. That is fantasy.
I'm still typing this message by hand rather than dictating it to a sexy interactive female computer persona.
There's speech-to-text software if you really want it. It's pretty good these days, truth be told. Now, if you want to be creepy about it I can't really help you, but that's what the internet is for.
I still can't hop on a shuttle to Mars, or book passage to neighboring star systems.
If you were seriously expecting FTL/near-FTL to be developed and standardized in 30 years, you are totally divorced from reality.
But the nature of life and change feels less grandiose than it used to.
There's more change now than ever. How you perceive it's grandness is a state of mind.
Star Trek was an inspiration to my generation. The current generation is inspired by what? American Idol? Fear Factor?
My parents generation cried when for the first time in recorded history, humans beings set foot on a world besides planet earth. My generation cried when the first shuttle launched and the nations of planet earth that once lived in fear of planetary genocide through mutually assured destruction set side their differences to work together to build an international space station.
The current generation cries when somebody says mean things about Britney Spears.
You are acting like a bigot and I reject how you characterize my generation. This isn't even worth a response. For fucks sake man, you sound like me as a bitter thirteen year old.