I'm in good company when I say that the pace of innovation has accelerated to ludicrous speed. Last week I read about scientists who knocked out a rat cerebellum and replaced it with an artificial one - and it worked. A few weeks ago I read about gamers, over the course of a few weeks with FoldIt, discovering how to fold a protein crucial to AIDS research that had eluded scientists for years.

Like William Gibson said, he now writes novels about the present because the present has caught up in many ways with science fiction. Not that we have flying cars or heroic robots, not that we have the future they predicted, but every week in the New Scientist you can read about stuff that would have been pure sci fi fifty years ago. We are inundated with magic.

I think the space program stood out more because it was channeled through the media that way. Everyone was watching the same thing and the same scientists. Today we have as much science to admire as we have viewing options on the internet.