By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
Similarly, the NYT predicted in 1903 that it would take “one million to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine” (airplane). The wright brothers achieved the first powered airplane flight sixty-nine days later. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly
You might want to think about this.
A technological breakthrough could make Mars colonization feasible. It might even be possible for it to be self-sustaining. Who knows?
But an empire? That’s utterly ridiculous. You might as well say that the thing that the American empire will last eternally unless and until we genetically engineer a race of intelligent dragons who will replace it with a dragon empire, and if anyone expresses skepticism of that fantasy, you could just as easily point to “people didn’t think the Wright Brothers could fly.”
One wrong skeptic a hundred years ago doesn’t mean every fantasy is going to happen. There’s countless predictions that didn’t come true.