Yesterday's vision of tomorrow, from today's perspective

Growing up in the early 1980s, one of my favorite books was The Usborne Book of the Future, an illustrated guide to the glittering world of the 21st and 22nd centuries; moon miners, undersea cities, space elevators, a robot-controlled world, all rendered in bright colors, full of people wearing semi-futuristic versions of mid-1970s street chic. The tone was upbeat with creeping realism－climate and pollution got a mention－but overall, it was less Terminator and more Elysium, at least if that particular vision of the future had extended to the other 99 percent, too.

Perusing it the other day, I was surprised how many of the pictures I still remembered－the fruit of too many hours daydreaming about the gleaming world my generation was poised to inherit－and intrigued by the ways it related to the world we actually inhabit. So no, the 2020 Olympics weren't held on the moon, but our computers are far better.

While there was an attempt, in that 1960s "united world" way of being multicultural, I was struck by how, in 1979(the book's year of publication), space exploration was presented through an almost entirely American lens. While it never suggested the future of space exploration belonged to the United States－we'd all be joining hands and collaborating, after all－there was little indication that anyone else had a space industry, even though the former USSR continued to launch space missions until its collapse in 1991. In fact, just four years before the book's publication, it landed the first probe on Venus.