We should have had a huge wheeled space station servicing explorers
and colonists from LEO to Mars and maybe even Jupiter.
We should have had permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars by now.
Vacations into space should have been routine by now. Billionaires
paying $20 million for a ride up to the ISS don't really count.
Instead we stopped sending people to the Moon in 1972 and we have
only landed a few probes successfully on Mars, which has shown so
far that if there is life on the Red Planet, it is not exactly waving a flag
to get our attention.
As for the other worlds, trying to determine life from some distant
flybys is only realistic if the lifeforms are huge.
So why are you still surprised that we don't know exactly how life
started here or anywhere else? We have a long way to go and the
old expectations did not take into account the major cultural changes
of the late 1960s that derailed a lot of the straight line progress we
envisioned in earlier generations.
Even if we did have all this, trying to figure out exactly what happened
4 to 5 billion years ago is not an easy thing to do without a time machine.
Space/Science » in reply to How many times did life originate on Earth?
But the space program didn't go the way people thought it would in 1960