“There was a time when the average human never traveled more than a few tens of miles from their birthplace in their entire lives.”
...When my Grandma was a girl, at the start of the last century - even in the most advanced country in the world. It still took a war to get most folks to move much further than that.
I think we are stuck in a rut. Airliners have gotten more reliable, more fuel efficient, have less engines to service, are in some cases made of composite materials, but they don’t go any faster.
We haven’t been back to the moon for 50 years. There have been hundreds of manned orbital flights, but none above 500 miles since the moon landings.
Something needs to break the log jam. Will it be Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos?
When my paternal grandfather moved the family from Memphis to Los Angeles during WWII, that branch of the family hadn’t been beyond the borders of Tennessee since the Civil War.
Nowadays, we hop in our cars and drive three states away just for fun. Imagine how arduous traveling that sort of distance was, before the advent of modern highways and the automobile.