Sad Reality :(

[Iroscato]

That's a bit short-sighted, innit?  Lots of places here are home remain unexplored, and astronomers (especially the radio types) are exploring the universe - literally - every single day and turning up new wonders at a pace that doesn't half make your head go round.

Boru

Talking about physical exploration. NASA is completely under-funded, when we went to the moon people thought we'd be on mars within 20 years, 50 years later we are only just starting to talk about that. It will be millennium before we develop the technology to explore a significant part of space.

Getting to Mars is an absurdly more challenging affair than getting to the Moon, which was a bastard in its own right. We're not talking days or weeks of weightlessness and exposure to solar radiation, we're talking well over a year. We need to figure out how to keep half a dozen crewmembers alive, fit, fed, hydrated and sane for months on end, with zero chance of extra supplies, a rescue mission or tangible help beyond radio contact, in an environment that our biology is entirely unused to existing within.
None of these challenges are going to be easy, and none of them could be overcome with 80's technology. But things are starting to look up - the SLS is being funded and is under development, SpaceX and Boeing are starting to collaborate and compete, Virgin is seriously looking into space tourism (setbacks aside). We're well past "just talking about it" - it's bloody well happening, my guess by 2030.
The admirable, but ultimately misplaced optimism that hung around in the 60's and 70's was borne from short-sightedness and naiveté as to the reasons we truly made it to the Moon - the US was shit scared of the USSR, and wanted to be the first ones there, no matter the cost. Once the USSR collapsed, the motivation evaporated.
Yet now, this new space race is being created simply from technology catching up to our wild dreams of the 60's, and rich kids who had their formative years in those hazy times now have enough money and influence to start a new drive towards space. Things are starting to come full circle, they just took a little longer than we thought to come around.
Plus if we don't get off our arses, China might be the first to Mars, and we can't have that.


As to exploring deep space...really, I doubt we will ever develop the technology to explore it in manageable timescales for human lifespans. The laws of physics are not known for their laid-back nature, and are likely to take notice if we start fucking around with Alcubiérre drives and the like. But colonising the solar system will most likely be feasible in the next century or so, and that will be enough to sustain our species for hundreds of millions of years, if successful.

So...don't feel frustrated at having been born too late or too early - take pride at having been born when the seeds of interplanetary travel were truly being sown, and the human race as a whole became more and more self-aware, not to mention curious once more.