Apollo 11

[FreeThinker]

Forty-three years ago tonight, July 20, 1969, an eleven year-old FreeThinker was staying up all Sunday night watching the ghostly TV pictures of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they took humanity's first steps on the moon. How many of us then expected there to be permanent colonies on the moon by now? What happened America?

[dude]

It's called 'dropping the ball.'

[DesDownunder]

I thought it was a Raygun running around for a Bush.

[Paul_and_Paco]

They got the bill in the mail.

[Cole Parker]

I think that's mostly it. Budgets came up against dreams, and budgets almost alway win.

C

[Chris James]

Wars and social programs took all the money that might have gone to NASA.

I know that the American defense industry soaked up billions, the Star Wars program, the bills from Vietnam. And even now I see the rightwingnuts accusing Obama of wasting billions, when we are borrowing money from China to pay those military bills. We didn't need to go into Afghanistan after 9/11, we didn't need to go after Sadaam, we don't need to be in the middle east for any good reason, we should leave now. We will be paying these bills long after I am gone, and we will be stuck on this planet for generations.

[FreeThinker]

Excellent point, Chris! Think of what we could have accomplished with science, education and health care if we had just listened to Eisenhower's warnings about the Military/Industrial Complex!

[Cole Parker]

Man, do I agree with this!

C

[The Pecman]

There's a great book out there called Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived, which essentially asks the question, "why did the future we were expecting in the 1960s and 1970s never happen?" No magnetic air cars, no monorails, no cities on the moon, no space travel to Mars, no moving sidewalks everywhere. Even the easy stuff, like videophones, are still comparatively rare. But we do have wall-sized TV sets, as predicted in Bradbury's Farenheit 451.

An acquaintance of mine, a major technology reporter of the 1970s and 1980s, constantly used to predict that we would someday have "flat-screen TVs that you could roll up like a newspaper." I used to kid him about that in the 1990s, pointing out that they still hadn't happen. He died at the end of the decade... and we still don't have them -- the iPad notwithstanding.

I think Cole has it right (as usual): a lot of it boils down to money. And I also think that technological breakthroughs happen in jerks and spurts. We do see some commonplace miracles, though: who could have predicted that you would someday have most of the power of a 1980s computer in a handheld phone?

[Camy]

An acquaintance of mine, a major technology reporter of the 1970s and 1980s, constantly used to predict that we would someday have "flat-screen TVs that you could roll up like a newspaper." I used to kid him about that in the 1990s, pointing out that they still hadn't happen. He died at the end of the decade... and we still don't have them -- the iPad notwithstanding.

Yes we do!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_organic_light-emitting_diode

http://www.gizmag.com/sony-rollable-otft-driven-oled-display/15226/

[The Pecman]

Not as a mass-market commercial product. Heck, they're having trouble making OLED screens period. The blue layer fades after a couple of years, rendering the display faulty.