Well I agree that there have been great advances in materials. But nothing like sci-fi materials like "plasteel" or dilithium or various magical materials.

The periodic table of elements is it. There's nothing else. Electromagnetic forces and electron orbitals. That's it.

For example, re-reading some Larry Niven ARM stories, one of the police officers works in the asteroid belt in some hollowed out large asteroid. Various magical technologies like fusion drives are just assumed to be simple and easy, and there are so many people mining asteroids they're starting their own civilization.

In the meantime there's one computer handling the police files and it's in the basement, as the police talk to each other on analog radios I guess.

In the rah-rah 1960s Space Age, it was assumed that the whole horse->car->airplane->rocket->Moon chain of events that had just happened was going to keep going. Instead it very much stopped and something else kept getting better.

Why? It's quite simple, it's about energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

In other words, we can't keep going up on the energy scale. It stopped with kerosene in jet engines and uranium in nuclear reactors.

Information, however, requires a trivial amount of energy to manipulate, and our entire progress in the last 50 years was about going DOWN on the energy scale by shrinking transistors by factors of millions.

And of course, the math that goes with being able to make sense of the structures that you can make with millions and billions of transistors on a single chip.

In conclusion, no one is going anywhere, and space is a dead, radiation-blasted hell with nothing in it. No space colonies, no Moon bases, no asteroid mining. The future is here, on this planet.

Thank you for your attention to this vital topic.