For All Mankind. What Should Be.

I've been watching the alternate history of the Space Program...program, For All Mankind.

If you've read what I've written about it, you know I like it and that the whole idea of widening the role of women in the program much earlier than actually happened appeals to my sensibilities.

While the show and its central McGuffin are great, it's what it represents that really endears it to me.

I'm a child of the 70s.  When I was a kid, mankind had very recently been to the Moon.  The year I got my LEGO castle for Christmas, LEGO also put out a hugely popular space set that sold about as well as the classic castle set.  In short, space was a big damned deal when I was a kid.  

Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers ALL spin wildly in my childhood memories alongside the Bionic Man, Knight Rider and a lot of other sci-fi shows and films.

The thing is, we expected that a whole lot this space stuff would be real (if more pedestrian than TV made it out to be) in our lifetimes.  

Not flying cars though.  That's a terrible idea.  Drivers have a LOT of trouble managing not to kill each other in 2 dimensions, every single day.  Letting the average driver loose in 3 dimensions is a recipe for horrible, horrible things to happen.

But I digress...

Sure, space tourism is about to get off the ground (sorry, I couldn't resist) but that's only for the hyper rich and only for the briefest of moments.  We expected to walk on the Moon, ourselves,  one day.  Given the option to lay a wager in 1977 or so, I would have bet heavily that we would have a functional base on Mars by 2025, easily.  We'd just been to and from the Moon several times only a few years earlier.  I knew there was a car and flags up there, so it seemed pretty linearly logical to imagine a base and then a civilian town sooner, rather than later.

For All Mankind puts the future we expected on our televisions.  Like any reality vs. fantasy moment, it's not quite what anyone would have expected, but it lines up better with what I would have anticipated as the march of humanity into the wider solar system than what has actually happened in my lifetime.

There's a decent chance I'll live long enough to see someone walk on Mars.  I doubt I will be around to see more than a minimal human presence on the Moon and I hold zero hope of seeing us plant permanent roots on Mars in my lifetime.  For All Mankind just opens a window into how we've pissed away the opportunity to take humanity's next steps for the last 50 years, deciding instead to concentrate on the space right above our heads rather than hurtle ourselves outward. 

Maybe we needed that time to get good enough technologically, so we would be ready for the next phase.  I'm only a fan of science and exploration, so I guess I can't offer more than my opinion.  I'd bet that a LOT of the astronauts that spent time in low earth orbit in the last 50 years or so would have been more than happy to take the risk to set foot on Mars rather than orbit the earth a few hundred times.  And aren't we at our best when we push the envelope and travel at the very edge of our abilities as a species?

What could have been, eh?