Neil stepped on a rock. We’re surfing an interstellar wave 9,000 light years long. Go us

Opinion  Fifty-five years after Neil Armstrong’s one small step, and the future it promised has not come to pass. Nobody has gone back to the Moon since the end of the Apollo program, let alone out to Mars. As for Clarke and Kubrick’s oh-so-plausible 2001 trip to Jupiter with a hallucinating AI, well, one out of two isn’t bad. But while those futures didn’t happen, what we have instead is unimaginably better.…