As I was growing up in postwar Belgrade, much of the youthful energy of my generation was spent on endless debates in the booming city’s many watering holes. As 1968 came and went, some of us realized that debating was an end in itself. No matter how lively, it rarely led even to a meaningful piece of writing, let alone to action worthy of that name. Actually, it often exhausted the very need to do anything at all. It made it, as it were, superfluous.

Back then I was into space colonization. Which is largely why I went to America in 1970, where I hoped that something or other could actually be done about it. After many a twist and turn in my academic career, I did manage to do a little on this subject while teaching at MIT, but not much. The Institute-wide workshop I initiated in 1986 vanished as soon as I left my teaching post in 1990. Science fiction has blossomed in the meanwhile. And this is where space colonization has ended up. Even in this case, few meaningful pieces of writing in this genre still survive serious scrutiny.

The curse of science fiction, which soon turned to innumerable movies and television series, is that all debates about what to do and how to do it have actually ended. Just like the endless debates in Belgrade’s watering holes of my youth, they have led precisely nowhere. By now, space colonization is dead as a doornail. In retrospect, this is a general human tendency that stands in the way of change. Any change. Sadly, there is little that can be done about it. Writing about the demise of space colonization at this juncture will not resurrect it, either.