Their decision to trap the physical hardware in the 1980s is very evocative.

The whole setting feels like a crystalized moment in US history.

Star Wars whole worlds are destroyed

Sure. But that happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

Folks make it sound like it was some kind of analogy to Vietnam, with the Vietcong being the good guys. Which is just absurd. Get your politics out of my SciFi!

I would love to live in a world where every Hummer H2 was replaced by a Segway.

In fairness to the Sci-Fi writers, we’ve launched so many probes into deep space since then.

We’ve sent satellites to Jupiter and diving bells below the clouds of Venus. We’ve retrieved soil from Mars and sent signals from beyond the Ort Cloud. We’ve recorded Gravity Waves and captured light off the edge of Black Holes and recorded the touch of Neutrinos.

We don’t have six guys drinking coffee and staring out a window overlooking the moon of Titan. But that is largely because our signaling and robotics has made automated exploration more practical than manned missions.

And also because SciFi writers of the 1950s didn’t understand how much radiation humans would need to shield themselves against once they left the Earth’s magnetosphere.