The Final Frontier Remains Unexplored

Well, I guess I’m not going to the moon, and certainly not to Mars or any other planet in the Solar System for that matter. And it would appear that traveling to distant stars is not going to happen for me either. But there was a time when I was convinced I’d do all that and more.

Like a lot of kids, while I was growing up I was absolutely enthralled by science fiction. I devoured early authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and continued right on into modern masters like Heinlein and Asimov. And I loved the movies too (as I’ve written before) especially those that featured meeting up with aliens or the exploration of distant worlds.

But it wasn’t just books and movies that fed my imagination. I can remember seeing illustrated articles in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post or Look that depicted how things would be in fifty years. In those articles, people were routinely traveling to space and even had colonies on distant planets. Is it any wonder that kids like me were convinced that we’d be doing some of that exploring ourselves?

Of course, those speculative pieces also showed highways in the sky filled with jet-propelled personal vehicles and that never happened either. (Which is probably a good thing when you consider all the goofy drivers around.)

Oh well. I guess the closest I’ll get to space is contemplating the constantly growing amount of it that rests between my ears.

Carpenters – “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”