How is today's world compared to the 21st century you imagined as a child?

 Showcased at the Lick Observatory is a glass bookcase with Willy Ley books displayed.  Heaven!

This is a map to Mt. Hamilton 50 miles from our house.  It is the home of the famed Lick Observatory. 

Willy Ley was part of the German scientific diaspora around the rise of Nazi fascism.  Some stayed loyal to the Fatherland, but others abhorred it, Ley being one.  In 1944 he became an American citizen.  In 1949 a young American citizen was born in the American heartland and he was introduced to Ley through his books.  A love affair began!

As a child in 3rd or 4th grade, I was fascinated by Golden Books talking of the Solar System and books by Willy Ley!  Ley was not just a writer, he began as a real and renowned scientist in his own right.  Many of his books were written in collaboration with the great Werner Von Braun, the father of NASA rocketry.  Together, they presented a clear vision of the future of space exploration.

So, I was a boy cutting the eye teeth of his imagination in an exciting time.  Right in the midst of my reading of Willy Ley books, the Russians put Sputnik in orbit the day after my eighth birthday!  Can you imagine, in orbit around the Earth.  In orbit, like the moon!

One of Ley's favorite topics was the moon and what the first explorations would be like.  His stories showed how it could have been, the ideal scientific template including the engineering details to make it happen and the scientific background of the purpose of the exploration, what could be expected for the expansion of mankind's knowledge.  He was wrong in exactly the right way!

What he missed was how political processes (those sales jobs that convince people to spend money) would hold sway over mere scientific acquisition of knowledge.  We didn't go to the moon to learn, we went to the moon to claim it before the Russians could.  Enemies are much more potent motivators than knowledge when it comes to directing resources, especially when nuclear annihilation was still such a high probability, nuclear annihilation identified with said enemy.

We didn't establish a colony of 50 scientists with habitation to take excursions on the lunar surface, bringing back samples for immediate analysis in the lunar lab.  No, it was a flag planting photo op!  But, what a glamorous photo op it was and it did return knowledge almost in spite of itself.

Now, over fifty years later, we will return in a more potent exploration with a space station actually orbiting the moon as a staging area for excursions.  We have learned from the days of Willy Ley and this will be different, but actually has the potential to be much better.  It is the perfect example of how future prophecy is almost always wrong, but it is the imaginary, usually proper, scenario that gives birth to the actual events.

The future is never as you imagine it and that is much of the excitement of life.  If you had plucked that boy from his home in 1950's Kansas and given him a day of exploring in our current time, he would have been amazed by many things.  I can only guess, but since he was at one time me, the guesses might not be that bad, so here goes on what I think that boy's impressions might have been:

• He would be stunned to find that everyone could communicate live with one another pretty much wherever they were.  It is in everyone's pockets and is so much better than Dick Tracy's Wrist Radio!  And speaking of which, today's smart watches are actually so much more capable than Dick's radio and yet they are smaller.
• TV pretty much is the same as what he knew.  You just have more options and the TV is bigger.  Cool, but no real stunner there.
• He loves microwave ovens! 
• People on TV "news" don't seem to have the dignity or gravitas of his day.  And news is on all the time!
• Special effects in movies and on TV he would find amazing!  That stuff looks like it is really happening.  And a lot of it is about space and the future from our time.  Wow!  He'd wish he had more time to watch that.
• He'd find it's really easy to buy stuff now.  A lot of stuff is available.  But even a kid can see that it isn't that much better than stuff in the 1950's and seems to be a lot less stylish in general.
• He'd be disappointed to find that cars don't fly.  In fact, all the future look he was expecting really isn't there.  The future is surprisingly like his time.  Boring, really.  And kids don't seem to have as much fun just being kids.
• He wouldn't mourn returning to his time, but would be grateful to get to see the future.
• He'd thank God that we hadn't blown ourselves up yet, but he will really not get a sense of how we may be generating existential problems more subtle and more pervasive.  A day is too little time for his to grasp climate change, for he has always dealt with climate extremes in Kansas.  And that is only the beginning of the real issues that his young mind never grasped in his own time, let alone the future.  He really would be too young to appreciate how adults joust for power and how corrupt (or pure) their motivations might be.  He's just a kid!
• Oh, and one more thing, are their any books he can take back with him about how the lunar exploration is projected to happen in our time?  Especially that space station orbiting the moon, some details on that.  That is the coolest idea!  You could do so much with that.

That's a quick way back trip for this old man to pull forward the child inside.  How would your child do?  All of us are different.  And the future never really holds what we imagine!

Let's see what Chuck and Ramana think at

Ramana
Shackman