In his new book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised,American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis writes about the go-go years of the 1960s: Saturn V rockets were blasting to the moon, atomic power promised to make electricity “too cheap to meter,” and sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek depicted new marvels right around the corner.
Our high-tech future isn’t turning out quite like we expected. It began to go sideways in the 1970s. The “Space Age was suddenly grounded,” Pethokoukis writes, and “the Atomic Age began powering down.” What happened to that boundless 1960s optimism? To be sure, there are aspects of our lives that seem almost science-fictional. Our phones really are miniature miracles, and through them, as we walk down the street, we can access the sum of human knowledge in seconds. But we don’t have Pan Am flights to the moon, as 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted, or underwater hotels like the ones depicted in GM’s Futurama exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair. Our biggest technological advances have been mostly in the soft-touch virtual, rather than the gritty physical, world.
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.
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