Quote:
Originally Posted by zenfrog
Guess it will be a contest to see which we get first - miracle engine versus miracle material.
|
Or something totally unexpected and out of the box.
Note that old SF often used to be fairly realistic about this, in pre-Apollo days. A favorite example of mine was the old movie
Forbidden Planet, in which the introduction says that 'men and women' first reached the Moon in the last decade of the 21C, then interplanetary and interstellar travel followed relatively shortly.
Apollo brought about that event over a century earlier, and for a while led to a wave of SF that assumed large-scale space flight was coming much sooner than used to be the common assumption. But the thinking behind the more pessimistic estimates was actually sound. Absent the special-case politics of Apollo, it's likely that manned travel to the Moon might very well have first come in the mid-21C or later.