The year is 1976 and there is no such thing as a cell phone, the web, DNA testing, or cloned animals: Yet the Viking spacecraft lands on Mars and takes some photos. I'm sorry but thirty years later I'm not going to get excited about the Phoenix landing on Mars. We've been there and done that already. If you want to get me excited then have a team of humans building sandcastles on the Martian surface and then I'll be impressed. The state of NASA is depressing, never mind having a moon base — we can't even find a replacement for the space shuttle. In thirty years we've made so little progress with space exploration it's disheartening.
The only silver lining to these gray clouds is the amazing discoveries made by astronomers of planets outside of our solar system. But how can we even dream of interstellar space travel when a fellow earthling can't take a stroll on Mars? As a kid I grew up watching science fiction TV shows like Space:1999 and Star Trek — as I get old I fear that I was just watching fantasy and didn't know it. As a global civilization humanity is slipping...