Casual space travel

Maybe this is finally the generation that gets the chance--they'll need it.

In the 1960s, with all the Apollo launches going around and to the moon, it was thought that casual space travel was right around corner, much like today where we see travel by jet plane as trivial.  With new advances in quantum computers, and even some big recent strides in fusion energy, maybe this is the generation that finally will see space travel as trivial, such as routes between here and the the moon, or even Mars.

I hope so, for as Stephen Hawking has often said, we need to get off this planet before we destroy ourselves as a species.   I tend to think he's right, since now even minor league, poorer nations can acquire enough technical information to build nuclear weapons, as North Korea has done.  Even if the fast lane extinction plan doesn't come to pass, the slow lane one, global warming, is still a massively under-appreciated threat.

Given all these issues, the next generation definitely needs to underwrite research which would speed the process of the human species leaving the planet.

O.