The future is here now - and it looks pretty good

It has been 40 years since the last astronauts left the moon. That anniversary, which passed last week, has put some prominent technologists in a funk.

"You promised me Mars colonies. Instead, I got Facebook," reads the cover of MIT Technology Review. In an essay titled "Why We Can't Solve Big Problems", editor Jason Pontin considers "why there are no disruptive innovations" today.

Technology Review's headline, running below the face of Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, now 82, is a play on another slogan: "We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters." That one comes from the manifesto of Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm started by PayPal founders Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery to invest in "transformational technologies and companies". (Among their investments is Space X, the launch-system business founded by Elon Musk.)

In speeches, interviews and articles, Thiel decries what he sees as the country's lack of significant innovations. "When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains," he wrote last year in National Review. "Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster."

Such warnings serve a useful purpose. Political barriers have made it harder to innovate with atoms than with bits. New technologies as diverse as hydraulic fracturing and direct-to-consumer genetic testing (neither mentioned by Thiel) attract instant and predictable opposition. As Thiel writes, "Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare."

But the current funk says less about economic or technological reality than it does about the power of a certain 20th-century technological glamour: all those images of space flight, elevated highways and flying cars, with their promise of escape from mundane existence into a better, more exciting place called The Future.