There's really some spectacularly interesting work going on, but it's very difficult to communicate to the man on the street, or even other scientists. Something science fiction is good at is communicating some of the excitement of science, and some of the thoughts that really interesting and great things might happen in the future. There's a lot of science fiction out there now. It saturates our culture. The problem with Star Trek and Star Wars is, they tell us it's easy, and it's not easy.
Rockets blow up.
On Star Trek and Star Wars , they just get into their ships, go into hyperspace, and they're half-way across the galaxy. So they almost do us a disservice by showing it as easy. They make people impatient, and they say, 'Oh, this didn't work. It raises expectations and makes people disappointed with the reality. ''I was looking at a list of predictions from the 1890s. They were very strong on pneumatic communications, saying that you'd be able to pop your little message into a pneumatic tube and it would get shot across the city within minutes.