thinking about System Shock. I love the era of sci-fi space station designs that just have... impractical amounts and types of stuff on them. I love spaceships with biodomes because 30 years ago people thought you'd go insane in space without like... a full-ass park.
It's only just now dawning on me, that the ISS and its long-term experiments in human space habitation, have... all taken place within my lifetime. Those guys first went in that thing in 2000. By the time I learned about it as a kid, everyone just treated it as like. A matter of fact. Yeah, that thing exists, isn't it neat?
But pretty much until that point, we didn't really have the modern, practical idea of what a space station would look like, in our culture, it feels like. We figured it'd have to be a lot more like earth. 2001 A Space Odyssey was cleaner, Cyberpunk stuff was more dirty & industrial.
The future that is the sleek, mundane mixture of cleanliness and practicality, the idea that the future would be this homogenous but largely unobjectionable slop... hadn't fully formed yet. Before my lifetime, that wasn't real, in the way it was today. Wild.
