Converse thread. Before you pass on being the operative assumption.
I keep hoping that someone somewhere will make a viable, profitable SST which has relatively clean emissions. I just love the idea of zipping around the globe at like Mach 3, but nobody has found the magic set of ingredients to make it work (yet). Amazing when you think about it-we’ve had subsonic jetliners with us for 50 years now, yet even the Dreamliner is an evolutionary descendant of its 707 granddaddy, and certainly not revolutionary even given all the little high-tech touches.
I don’t know how old you are, but SpaceX is moving right along and there are a lot of people who thing there’s money to be made dragging space ore back to earth. Someone’s gonna have to run happy hour up there.
I fear I’ll not live to see U.S. public education celebrated and properly funded instead of being the whipping boy it is now. I fear it may be dismantled by the right-wing extremists who have set completely unrealistic expectations for so that they may see its end.
While I don’t “fear” it, I am comfortably aware of the notion that I will never live to see a true cure for spinal-cord injury. This has been something that I have come to terms with long ago in my life and I accept it with no hesitation; I only have one opportunity to live and I can’t really live if my life is always ‘on hold’ waiting for a miracle that’s never going to happen.
A passenger rail system in the US that bears at least a fourth-cousin resemblance to what most of the industrialized world enjoys. I enjoy rail travel immensely (I just got off the Empire Builder in Seattle this morning), but Amtrak, although I believe they’re trying as hard as they can, is but a pale shadow of the European systems.
Alas, apart from the very real logistical challenges, california jobcase’s comments about public education (see post #7) apply here as well.
Ah. That’s a great response. I have no doubt that life exists out there, but I’ll never be made aware of it in my lifetime. Given the enormous distances we probably won’t ever become aware of it before man is extinct.
This is probably my biggest “fear” as well. It bothers me a lot, for some reason.
I also fear that I will never live to see the day where nations like the US and the UK reverse their obesity rates back down to 1950’s levels and prior. It seems like it might be leveling off, but I fear it won’t ever return.
I fear that I won’t live to see the day where every nation on Earth accepts gays for who they are, and grants them full rights and protections. Same goes for women, minorities, etc, across the globe.
I’m afraid I’ll never see another manned flight to the moon. I miss the wonder and the adventure of discovery when I was a kid. I’d be glued to the TV for hours watching LIVE COLOR transmissions from the moon’s surface. It’s been 40 years since Apollo 17. I fear I may not live to see 20 years before we do it again. Russia, the U.S., China, any country. I want to see men walk around on the moon again, damn it!
DNA resurrection of extinct species. I have harboured forever the wish to see a live thylacine, and there was a not completely bonkers proposal some years back to get some DNA from embryonic specimens in jars and get all Jurassic Park on its ass. Ain’t gunna happen.
