If you're fixated on airplanes and space flight, no wonder you feel like you're surrounded by the world of the past. You're living in the past! It's true that

If you're fixated on airplanes and space flight, no wonder you feel like you're surrounded by the world of the past. You're living in the past! It's true that aircraft are a stagnant, mature technology and have been for decades. For the airplane nut, that's a terrible thing, but just imagine what the poor railroad fans have gone through, or the nuclear power fans, or the horse-and-buggy fans. I'm a sailor, myself, and sailing tech just hasn't had the same level of excitement since the invention of steam-powered shipping in the mid-19th century. This sentence says it all: the main technological innovation since 1958 has been space flight, and it's daughter technology: microelectronics. Yeah, I guess my iPhone could be considered a daughter technology of the Apollo project... but only in the sense that Microsoft Windows is a daughter technology of the Xerox machine. Which is to say: They had the same parents, and were arguably related at birth, but they haven't spoken in years, and the child has grown and grown while the parents have been retired for years, and now nobody but the grandparents can still see the family resemblance. Meanwhile, although you can plausibly argue that modern computing is a logical extension of the known or anticipated technology of 1958... the same logic can be used to argue that aviation has been stagnant for five hundred years, ever since Leonardo da Vinci first sketched a helicopter. In other words -- with all due respect to McCarthy and Vannevar Bush and the other visionaries of the 1940s and 1950s -- there's a big difference between envisioning the future and actually building it and living in it.