The Future In Retrospect

This is a photo of a fictional PAN AM spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I find past views of the future to be some of the most interesting. We look at science fiction from the 60s,70s and 80s and we see something quite different from what we see today. Back then, it was a lot heavier on the science fiction part. Now it has turned into drama like the rest of the shows and books out there. I long for the days of real scifi to come back.

On another note, I find the idea of a space plane to be pretty advanced for 1968. We had barely gotten into the capsules and here came the future (even though it was on a movie screen). You have a delta wing design like the Shuttles and quite a few other design elements that look quite similar to the conceptual Skylon space plane. As my very wise mother always says, "science fiction becomes science fact." She's right. Captain Picard had basically an iPad in the late 80s. We now have things like cell phones, portable computers, house-cleaning robots, and all sorts of other things that only 50 years ago people could only dream about. So, maybe we should get away from this dramatized science fiction, because it might just become a reality.