Space to dream

Having seen Gravity — on a gloriously large movie screen in 3D — I can’t help but mentally compare it to the space operas in those sixty-odd year old Sci Fi magazines I bought yesterday. The mid 20th century was a time when space travel was very much a fantasy of the future, one of those ultimate human dreams just tantalizingly beyond reach.

Now we live in a world in which space travel can seem almost quaint. After all, we managed to put people up on the moon well over forty years ago. Yet now, by virtue of a different revolution entirely — enormous advances in computer graphics — we can bring to life the visions of an earlier generation to an extent that would have thrilled and awed the readers of Fantasy and Science Fiction in its golden age.

In another sixty years our collective dreams will have evolved yet again, and the visions that awe us today will seem oddly old fashioned. Meanwhile, we will find a new space to dream. The future equivalent of today’s cutting edge computer graphics will probably be something beyond anything we can today imagine.

In that future era, how we will visualize our collective dreams? And what we will be dreaming about?

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