4 ms·

There's a show about that exact scenario! For All Mankind.

• arethuza 3y ago
  I love For All Mankind - largely because it portrays the future I used to think we were going to have when I was a kid in the 1970s.
  • WorldMaker 3y ago
    Season 2 captured so much of my 1980s kid "this is the space future I was promised". At the time my uncle even worked on projects at Nasa and would describe some of the ideals of the space shuttle program in a way that For All Mankind Season 2 captured that boring reality never quite did, especially after the Challenger disaster. (Plus, spoilers: Project Orion in that season! Which is one of the things that I can point to where FAM's timeline is maybe worse than ours, as it is fun to bring up every time people suggest they can't watch FAM because it is too "utopian". Project Orion was in part cancelled because of advances in cancer research, especially with respect to radiation. The FAM timeline seems to be spending so much on aerospace at the expense of cancer research among other things, and things like the 80s and 90s fights against tobacco seem almost non-existent in that timeline. People are still smoking nearly as much in that timeline's 80s as they did in the 50s. There are no signs of the near ubiquitous anti-tobacco PSAs of our timeline's 80s and 90s. I don't know how much the writers are intentionally working in such trade-offs, versus just trying to maintain storylines and aesthetics across its decade jumps, but it makes a ton of sense that there would be such trade-offs. Similarly, there are signs that civil rights are still generally worse in that timeline than ours, especially gay rights and feminism.)