Prometheus at Starbase: Why Europe stopped looking up, and how to start again

I remember the awe. I was 12; it was 1990, and the future arrived in a children’s magazine—advertised in Mickey Mouse, ordered as a mail-in for 29,95 DM: a Dick Tracy watch. It was a plastic replica with a fake leather band. The watch might even have worked, and it looked like the real one. Pressing the button made Dick Tracy speak. You couldn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t care. I wore it like a key to another world, because I saw a glimpse of the future in it: a world where you could talk to anyone, anywhere, from your wrist. This was long before mobile phones. Then came the books. I read Isaac Asimov’s robot and empire novels from I, Robot to Foundation and Earth. I followed R. Daneel Olivaw, the robot who outlives empires and guides humanity through millennia, and I believed—the way only a child can believe—that I would live to see machines that think, ships that land on their tails, and cars that talk back. I was right. The promise was kept, item by item, on schedule. And almost…