I'm reminded of all those people in the 1890s who insisted that heavier-than-air flight would never be achieved in their lifetimes. Or the people who assumed that Kennedy's 1961 pledge to reach the Moon in ten years was impossible to achieve.
Besides, timetables are irrelevant to the topic of this thread. It's about the tendency for science fiction to anticipate real scientific and technological progress. And that happens all the time. The timetable predictions of SF are usually inaccurate, but sometimes things happen much later than the stories assume while at other times they arrive much sooner. Like all the stories asserting that we'd have a moonbase and men on Mars by the year 2000 but that computers would still be giant centralized boxes with millions of vacuum tubes and women would still be limited to domestic roles. Any conjectures we make about when an advance will happen are unreliable. But that doesn't matter, because for the topic under discussion, it's a question of whether.
Besides, timetables are irrelevant to the topic of this thread. It's about the tendency for science fiction to anticipate real scientific and technological progress. And that happens all the time. The timetable predictions of SF are usually inaccurate, but sometimes things happen much later than the stories assume while at other times they arrive much sooner. Like all the stories asserting that we'd have a moonbase and men on Mars by the year 2000 but that computers would still be giant centralized boxes with millions of vacuum tubes and women would still be limited to domestic roles. Any conjectures we make about when an advance will happen are unreliable. But that doesn't matter, because for the topic under discussion, it's a question of whether.
