I remember reading the book You Will Go to the Moon in childhood, just as Virginia Postrel, the author of the essay here, did. She is right that most people in our era were not as excited about the space program as she and I were: "The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on only a small slice of the public. (Nobody else in my kindergarten was grabbing for You Will Go to the Moon.) People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories -- not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories -- that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips."

The older I get, the more I like incremental progress that leads to inventions (like this Internet doohickey that lets you and me have an interesting conversation across barriers of time and place) that hardly anyone thought of in the 1960s, and which have developed from a mixture of government research projects and private investment. I don't really care if not a lot of big-deal things happen in the next thirty years, as long as plenty of little-deal things happen like a continuation of the ongoing increases in healthy life expectancy at all ages.[1]

"Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological progress. It reflects it. Stephenson and Thiel are making a big mistake when they propose a vision of the good future that dismisses the everyday pleasures of ordinary people -- that, in short, leaves out consumers. This perspective is particularly odd coming from a fiction writer and a businessman whose professional work demonstrates a keen sense of what people will buy. People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who won’t directly reap their benefits."

Hear. Hear. Let's keep working away at making our own lives better, and our children's lives better, and as everyone does that, the whole world's lives will be better.

[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...