Humans get bored easily.
They also die easily, Dave.
The word 'visionary' would seem to not exist in their lexicon.
Visions are a dime a dozen.
The problem with all you hubristic techno-extrapolators is that hindsight is 20/20, you think: someone had a vision, it became real! Ignoring entirely the millions of visions that were never viable and simply died. You think that picture is funny? Your 1960s space fantasies will look just as funny and dated to someone in 2060.
Remember fusion power too cheap to meter? Oh my. Remember supersonic passenger transport? Oh my!
Remember the leisure society? Uh oh.
Looks like REALITY is the arbiter of "visions", not how emotionally invested you are in them. You're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. There is no Human Migration To The Stars (tm) (Ad Astra!) in our future. As engineers, you have the knowledge of how seriously limited our technology is, and how seriously large and hostile space is.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2015/09/you-call-this-progress/One glaring flaw I see over and over with the Space Nutter crowd is the following argument they always trot out: "But computers got better!" As if going into space was an
information processing problem!
"Hey I can't breathe but CHECK OUT MY TERABYTE USB KEY!! COUGH COUGH ACK!"The reason our computers got better is that the fundamental unit of information is such a small quantity of energy! It took decades for our manufacturing processes to make parts small enough to scale down to that level!
In the meantime, you'll find no such orders of magnitude leaps in energy use, material strength, propulsion technologies (real ones, not imaginary 1970s LSD visions).
You can't breathe bytes. You can't eat gigahertz.
It's pretty much game over for all those grandiose 1960s space dreams. I know it looks cool, I had my walls plastered with NASA posters, I built the Saturn V kit, I had the Space Shuttle on my nightstand, I collected astronaut bios and stories... And one day, I just saw it for the useless theater it all is. No one gets excited by the 1960s
Sealab... Why not? The same ideas of "exploration" and tourism apply here too!
Hell we know less about the structure of our own planet than we do about Jupiter's magnetic field. Why is that? There are bacteria deep underground! You wanted alien life, THERE IT IS! It's RIGHT HERE!!!!
The fact that this DOESN'T excite you means you don't care about knowledge or exploration, you just care about the emotional symbolism of the whole space narrative. It's garbage.