"In fact, it's cold as hell..." (thank you, Elton John)

The drive to explore space is grounded in the public imagination, and that's what needs stimulating.

From what Nick and Splinx have said elsewhere in this thread, I'm in the wrong business: former engineer, conversant in a non-mathematical way with most of the branches of science that touch the cosmos, hard-core space program junkie since the day Sputnik I was launched, and published poet (including poems about astrophysics); that is, a geek who can speak ... without a single credential to make my resume attractive (or even noticeable) to anyone looking for science journalists. ~sigh~

On the other hand, the fiction market is wide open to such as I, and the dozens (at least) of good writers who are also geeks. And all of them have, with very few exceptions, cast their stories far in the future or far away, usually both. All kinds of technological wonders are assumed to have been invented, and the general readership is now so familiar with the basic concepts that very little need be explained. Of course, that improves the storytelling over the average of the 1930s and '40s - but it also tends to reinforce the public perception Mary Anne spoke about: complacency, because someday it'll exist; George Lucas says so.

That's what makes Robinson's Mars trilogy so pertinent - sorry I keep harping on it, but it is unique in 'contemporary' science fiction for the simple fact that it's possible. The glitziest tech in it is a Clarkeian space elevator, and some plausible advances in AI and self-assembling machines that build still other machines. The rest of it, very much like Zubrin's A Case for Mars, seems "off the shelf". It's a story full of frontier adventure, danger, political maneuvering, scientific challenge, mysticism, exploration of the unknown, and intimate human interaction - inspiring, I think. However, there's still one very large, very basic problem that lamentably puts it in the same category with Star Trek, Ringworld, and A Fire in the Deep, etc.:

The world is which the story transpires cannot be convincingly extrapolated from the one we live in.

The reason for that is the very thing we're talking about here: lack of motivation. Behind the events of Robinson's first book, Red Mars, is an untold history of billions of dollars' worth of capital and resource investment, which, given the pace such things usually take, ought to be starting now (or have already started) in order to get there, then. In forty years our worldline will have caught up to the dates in the story; will we have as much to show for the elapsed time as the Earth from which Robinson's "First Hundred" were sent?

"Preaching to the choir" - we're here in The Habitable Zone because we keep the flame. The question before us is: how to pass it on? I thought Triana was a good idea, too, for just that reason. I happen to think there should be similar cameras orbiting every planet in the Solar System and their major moons, including Earth's. I think someone ought to start up a "Space Channel" on cable/satellite TV. I think I, and others like me, ought to start thinking about writing stories set in the transition between Here Now and There Then, instead of assuming that the transition somehow will occur.

I think I'm going to post the IM conversation that began this thread in the writer's forums I belong to, and see what they have to say about it.