Reliving Childhood Space Fantasies

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID, say, around ten or twelve, in the mid nineteen sixties, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about space travel, while watching the original "Star Trek", with Shatner, Nimoy and the crew, what with all their primtiive set design sand spaceships. The transporter and the fazers were super cool, I thought. Watching people vanish into a cloud of molecules and resassemble somewhere else, with Ray gun fazers in hand, perfect science fiction. The version of Star Trek which aired from 1966 to 1968 was really very primitive, set design wise, but it was enough to make me marvel. When the cardboard boulders on the alien planets jiggled, I didn't object to it, my suspension of disbelief was complete. Now, of course, by contemporary standards, those old shows seem technically super primitive, really no different from the old sci fi flicks from the nineteen fifties and before. While devouring every book I could check out from the local library on space travel and rockets, while reading all that science fiction, I tried to imagine what the world would be like in the far off science fiction year of two thousand. I got a bit ahdead of myself. I had people living on the moon in large domed colonies, space stations floating in orbit around earth, and missions to Mars, with colonies there a swll. I was definintely a bit ahead of my time. Looking back on those childhood dreams, interestingly, nothing was negative. I didn't think about over population, world hunger, or warfare in the twenty first century ahead, but only scientific and technological wonders. I simplistically, idealistically, childishly assumed that all those modern mid to late twentieth century global maladies would be long solved, and that the world of the twenty first century would be idyllic. Boy, was I ever wrong. The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" came out in 1969 when I was fourteen years old, still in the throes of my mid sixties space trvel boom. At about that same time Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969, and every clear sumemr night I was out under the stars with m tiny two point four inch refractor, amazng myself further. Obviously we all get jaded and cynical as we age, more "realistic", but for anyone to completely abandon those chidhood dreams and lose that youthful wonder at the world is a fate I would wish upon nobody. The JFK killing when I was eight and a half was shocking for an eight year old, and it doubtless helped awaken me to the true brutality of the world. Of course, a good western movie will have the sema effect. As a child my mind tended to travel to two distinctly different place, eighteen and nineteenth century frontier days America, the wild wild west, and twenty first century America, going into outer space. You couldn't think of any two better places to escape from reality. Reality in the mid to late sixties was race riots and war protests in American streets, political assassinations, and Viet Nam. Outer space was a much more pleasant venue into which to insert one's imagination. My happy family and school life and classmates and friends got me through childhood. Now, I am wondering what's going to get me through adulthood, specifically, old age. AI? I hope not. What I would like are more fanasies about the future, but those don't seem to appear anymore. The future is a murky, uncertain, fearful blur. Then too, I won't be around for much more of it. But a lot of people will be, and I can only hope that children today can and are dreaming dreams as pleasant as I did decades ago, but somehow I am doubtful.