In the future, people will use electronic "credits" to pay for everything and cash will be long forgotten. Or at least that's the way commerce has often been portrayed in sci-fi stories. At first glance this might seem like just another one of those futuristic clichés that never happened. If you look around, though, you might be surprised to find just how close we are to such a scenario. Economist Robert Samuelson says in a recent column, A Quiet Revolution In Money:

The long-predicted "cashless society" has quietly arrived, or nearly so; currency, coins and checks are receding as ways of doing everyday business; we've become Plastic Nation.

This got me to thinking about how common it is that the big technological advancements in our lives develop so incrementally that they are usually taken completely for granted by the time they are fully realized.

I still have a Pulsar LCD watch given to me by my father around 1974 and I recall talk then of flat LCD TVs just around the corner. Well, the corner turned out to be several more blocks and three decades away. The LCD TV came slowly via many small incremental steps forward in better displays for watches, instrument panels, and computer screens before finally reaching the family room wall.

Eureka moments certainly still occur but usually a big new idea must be combined with several other big ideas and technologies to create something that is actually practical, useful and popular. Furthermore, all this requires time to build up a critical mass of infrastructure before the new technology becomes part of our everyday lives.

Timothy Berners-Lee, for example, deserves great credit for inventing the World Wide Web. However, he would be the first to admit that he didn't invent it from scratch. Instead, he combined inventions of others - hyperlinks, markup languages, and Internet communications - to create something brand new. In turn, Marc Andreessen and his collaborators combined the WWW with graphical displays to create the Mosaic web browser. And, of course, these tools rode atop the wave of rapidly growing networking technologies and low-cost mass market computing. All of these things together led eventually to the "overnight" web revolution of the 1990s.

The road to a new technology also involves, of course, many detours, failures, and disappointments. The Altair home computer, Osborne portable PC, the Newton PDA, etc., etc. were either minor financial successes or outright failures but each made crucial contributions towards their area of technology.

A fundamental premise of this blog and web site is that space development is now in a similar sort of long term, incremental process in which steady progress is being made towards eventual large scale human activity in space. For many this can seem a frustrating and agonizingly slow process but I find it exhilarating because for the first time there really is a clear path towards such a goal.
* From Pixel to Falcon 1 to Genesis 1 there is real hardware flying and there is real money going towards building bigger and better hardware.
* There is tremendous vigor and depth to the process with many firms and organizations involved.
* Space tourism offers a solid money making market. The arguments now are just over how big the market is.
* The bootstrapping challenge of simultaneously developing both transport and destination is finally being overcome with large scale angel investment in lower cost space transport and in large and sophisticated space habitats.
* The suborbital spaceflight projects are developing the RLV technologies and operational techniques required for really low cost space transport.
* There will be many failures, many companies will come and go, but the process has enough strength and momentum to carry on regardless.

I could easily imagine in the 2015-2020 time frame that at least several dozen people will be visiting two or three Bigelow habitats in orbit at any given time. Meanwhile, everyday there will be a flight to suborbital space with ticketed passengers. I could also imagine Samuelson writing a column around that time with the title, A Quiet Revolution In Space, on the topic of large scale space development and how hardly anyone was noticing how far it had progressed.