Where is My Jetpack?

(This post will likely make more sense after you read the next one.)

I am a child of the New Frontier. That was America's outlook in the late Fifties and Sixties, before hippie hedonism won the day. America finally had, with the advent of World War Two, stepped onto the world stage and, like a young man trying on his first business suit, found it empowering. We won the war and the whole world was ours. Nineteenth century Manifest Destiny had gone global in the 20th and we believed it would so go interplanetary before the century was out.

Gleaming cities of millions living in alabaster spires reaching the skies, surrounded by green parklands and connected with ribbons of magnetic trains. Skies criss-crossed by jetpacks, aircars, jet liners and rocket ships. In our night skies, the familiar moving lights of Venus, Mars and Jupiter would be overshadowed by dozens more built by the hand of man -- space stations. Almost everyone could travel there, too, and to the spotless cities of the rest of the bustling, prosperous world.

The New Frontier was vast. The only boundary was a lack of ambition; the only horizon a failure of imagination. We had a wonderful future awaiting and only needed to move forward into it.

When I was a kid, we believed that there would be many orbital space stations, moon bases from several countries, a Mars base, and manned trips to Jupiter and Venus by now, by 2005. I can remember reading countless stories about the "future," about the first years of the 21st century. The part of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 set in the space station and on the Moon always struck me like a travelogue and not science fiction. It was going to happen.

And now here we are. The New Frontier has gone, collapsed into something right at our feet, or something virtual on the Internet. We no longer dream big or admire boundless ambition. Star Trek evolved from big dreamers adventuring among the stars in wonder to a corporate staff meeting in a portable officeship solving the Galaxy's problems to a ship thrown far away and only wanting to get back home.

We no longer look ahead with wonder. We stand around and worry. Our big dreams don't push boundaries and dare the unknown. We dream of self-satisfaction and seek thrills in safety. We don't raise children to be better, but have children and let them deal with it. Our futures aren't filled with the amazing, but are days much like today.

I want my dreams back. I want my jetpack.