Yes, well, that's the trouble with analogies - they are misleading. "After all, we broke the sound barrier, so breaking the light barrier is only a few years away!" I'm sure people made that argument. Just as they made the same false-generalizing in the early days of X-rays - imagining Vita-rays and superpower rays and so on.

You can do the same thing with digging. Well, we can dig 10m down, why not 100m? Why not 10000m? Why not all the way through? I mean it's easy physics to show you can move between any two points on a planet through an evacuated tunnel with no energy price, so why don't we do it? Is it because the downers like me don't think we have the materials to actually build the tunnels, and that we'd have to spend a great deal of energy to cool them because the Earth's core is really hot, and if only we'd shut our cynical traps the dreamers would get 'er done?

I blame science-fiction for really and truly warping our intuition of what is physically possible. A small moon base is certainly possible, but does that mean a sun base is possible? No. Cars revolutionized transportation, and phones communication. Does that mean teleportation is possible? No. Do insights about spacetime make time-travel possible? Except in the Ted Chaing sense (where time-travel has a lovely, inevitable symmetry to it), no. Chemistry - so we can create matter from nothing? No. Theoretical physicists play games with math - so free energy from vacuum? No.

But nanotechnology? Yes. AI? Yes. Full control over the genome? Yes. It's not that I think history is over, it's just that our stories are misleading about which branches of history we can travel. No ancient thinking person really ever doubted the earth was round (because there are easy experiments anyone can do), and they didn't think that heavier-than-air flight was impossible (because birds). It's true a few believed faster-than-sound travel was impossible, but I don't think that was ever a majority view (could be wrong on that, though).

Back to space. Space sucks. I don't want to live there. The Expanse was/is a great show, and it's certainly more realistic than most space-faring SF -- but it is still deep fantasy. The impact of living outside of gravity and outside of the magnetosphere is enormous and even with perfect medicine it would be uncomfortable because of the atmospheric constraints. The Epstein drive is fantasy. It is admittedly more plausible than most SF drives, but still non-physical. Of course, the alien stuff is pure fantasy.

Places like Mars suck even more than space, IMHO. Mars is a lifeless, cold rock without atmosphere or light, or proper gravity. I mean, Mars right now is still infinitely worse off for supporting life than Earth in the worst case, struck by a 20km asteroid. Or post-Yellowstone caldera. Another way to put it, Mars could take 100 meteor strikes like that and be no worse off. That's how bad it is. (There wouldn't even be much of a nuclear winter since there's no atmosphere to keep ejecta suspended. Although maybe if you strike it just right and with the right rocks you could give it an atmosphere of sorts?)

So, there is hope for exotic effects! Quantum phenomena at scale is basically magic. Black holes are quite mysterious! So is the origin of the universe - and I believe, contrary to most, that cosmological questions could very well have practical applications. "Metamaterials" (a kind of cousin to nanotech) can open up a lot of cool options for building things. And so on.

But yeah I wish people would give up the childish Star Trek/Star Wars fantasies about the possibilities of technology and embrace the reality of what we know. I too want FTL, teleportation and sexy humanoid aliens to seduce as much as the next guy, but despite the aesthetics its fantasy. And while shows like The Expanse seem more real, they still sneak in enough fantasy to invalidate it. (I do appreciate them not abandoning kinetic energy weapons for the massless junk in other SF, though!)