and it does not work." Walt Kelly's devastating put-down of Lincoln Steffins' gushing admiration for the Soviet worker's paradise is also applicable to the entrepreneurial dystopia that supplanted it. When I was an adolescent, I couldn't wait for the future, now that I'm here, it doesn't look that much different from the past. Sure, I'm more affluent now, but most people are better off at 60 than they were at 20, so what else is new? What I never anticipated was a world where just hanging on to what had taken a lifetime to achieve would still be a full-time job, with no guarantee of success. And what do I get for this insecurity? I can buy a telephone that will fit in my pocket and with which I can talk to anyone on earth, but I don't want one. What I really want is to know I can get my appendix removed if I need to and not be thrown into bankruptcy, something that didn't seem to be a problem when I was working class teenager in high school.

The scientific and engineering accomplishments of our age are remarkeable, even if they weren't exactly what we expected them to be. But life doesn't seem to be any easier. All the power at my fingertips doesn't mean I have to work any less hard. I am expected to maintain productivity at higher and higher levels...well what's the point of being able to do so much more if I can't go home early or take a few days off every now and then, or maybe retire a little early? I consume more wealth, I produce more wealth, but I'm still in debt. Or at least I'm expected to be, that's one trap I've been able to mostly avoid, unlike most of my impoverished and desperate contemporaries. The most enduring value my parents gave me, to always live within my means, doesn't seem to be a very common one today. It's also one I know will not help me very much if my luck turns just a little bit. In spite of a lifetime of successful and productive work in a demanding technical field, I know I am as vulnerable to layoff, outsourcing, downsizing or obsolescence as the next man. And my boss makes it a point to remind me of it every single day.

It's hard to get excited about the promise of space exploration when the daily commute has mutated from a minor inconvenience to a white-knuckle nightmare. The Jetson's glass cities never materialized, I still don't have my flying car, and I don't have a twenty hour work week or the financial freedom to live a life of creativity and self-actualization. Work is still the same colossal pain in the ass it was for my parent's generation, but at least they believed their children would live in a better world. When I bring that up to the people I know with children, they usually try to change the subject.That's the real killer, in spite of all my bitching and whining, I'm still better off and happier than most of the folks I know.
There's a lot of desperation out there, or haven't you noticed? I don't know how most people
cope.

How does this all relate to space exploration? Like I said, the future is here, and it's not that much different from the past. Space was what we were going to do after we took care of business here. Well, we never really got around to it, did we?