Oh, yeah, interstellar travel in my lifetime would have taken a "Doc" Smith level burst of magic-tech development. :) But I did expect that by ~1990 we'd have a permanent lunar base, a significant human presence in Earth orbit, and perhaps significant progress toward a crewed Mars mission.

And yes, it's astonishing that in just a couple of decades we've gone from not being sure about whether extrasolar planets even exist to knowing about several thousand of them, enough to start making statistical conclusions. We live in a new Age of Discovery; the difference from previous ones is that this one is proceeding via better instruments and robotic proxies, rather than human beings going places.

On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 7:05 PM Vareck Bostrom (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

That was probably never going to happen, no matter how much effort was put into space exploration. At least we know Proxima b exists though, and can say with high confidence that there are planets around other stars. Back in the 1970s, that wasn't a given thing.

On 09Jan2019 1356, Catherine Berry wrote:

> cliffs of Miranda. Or even slide into orbit around Proxima b, and watch an
> alien sun rise over the limb of an entirely new world.

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