I remember talking with my great-grandfather about the first Space Shuttle launch. I was 12 years old. He was 83, and sharp as a tack. He talked to me about how much he had seen since being born into a home that still used oil lamps for lighting and a coal stove for heat. They had an outhouse in the back and a water pump in the kitchen. The ice box used actual ice to keep things cold. He learned to hunt with a muzzle loading rifle because that's what the family had. He laughed when he told me that at my age, the world was in awe about the Wright Flier being able to fly relatively short distances, and here we were watching a giant version of that flying machine leave the planet. When he was my age, he had never fathomed the ideas of radios, televisions, computers, space flight, a moon landing, or many other things that we now take for granted. Hell, in 1994, when I graduated from law school, I had no PC, no cell phone, and a television with an antennae.
Who knows what college student out there is on the verge of discovering a method of propulsion that will make interstelar travel a reality? Which grade school student had this silly idea in her head about how to make a space ship that can fly millions of miles without need to refuel? What little boy out there is drawing smoething in crayons that will someday serve in his mind as teh inspiration for artificial gravity?
The future is limited only by the bounds of human creativity and imagination. So long as children can still dream, then we have not yet reached the limit of what is possible.
