Commentary
We wanted flying cars and colonies on Mars but instead we got 140 characters. That line, and different variations of it, is commonly used to express frustration at how scientific progress has in some ways stalled in the past few decades.
Its first usage is generally attributed to tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who regularly laments that while we’ve done a great job in the gadgetry side of things (creating the iPhone and making apps like Twitter), we haven’t actually advanced to the degree we’d previously predicted on things like space travel and cancer care.
The leading outlier is Thiel’s former business partner at PayPal, Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX essentially took the reins on space exploration away from the public sector and made it something the private sector can get behind….