“2001: A Space Odyssey” premiered fifty years ago yesterday. Who could’ve imagined at the time that the projections of a world of giant rotating space stations, space tourism, lunar colonies and manned missions to the outer solar system would have fallen so far short… not only for the year 2001, but 2018?
I’d planned on yammering forth rather more about this, both extolling the virtues of the movie and bemoaning the sad (yet recently somewhat hopeful) reality, but I hadn’t planned on my internet computer going belly up right when it did. At the moment I’m tapping away on the netbook that the now-kaput netbook replaced, and, man, is this this thing archaic. Even so, good thing I didn’t dispose of it but kept it in storage as a backup. Took this antique half an hour to decide to boot up all the way, though. Gettin’ old sucks.
In lieu of the long stream of consciousness I doubtless would have produced, I invite y’all to revist the days of yore, back in the halcyon days of 2013, when I wrote a number of blog posts describing my concept for an alternate history that could have led from the real world of April 2, 1968. The way the blog spits things out is somewhat backwards for this purpose, with more recent posts at the top rather than the bottom (useful for daily reading, a little disjointed for reading old stuff), but start here at the bottom:
http://up-ship.com/blog/?s=1968+to+2001&searchsubmit&paged=2
And continue here: