IN MY CHILDHOOD IN THE 1960S AND ’70S, I remember confident predictions of what life was going to be like in the 21st century: flying cars, sprawling bases on the moon, rocket planes flying from American airports up to wheeling space stations in low orbit, super-intelligent computers, mass production by robots enabling more leisure time for the American workforce, and much more.

One particular work of art from my childhood made very specific predictions about what the world would look like in this century, and was even specific about the year: Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The first few minutes of the film are set in the early dawn of the hominid species in the rugged East African plains, showing our distant ancestors’ rudimentary use of tools made from rock, wood and bone. The film then abruptly flashes forward several million years to 2001, and we meet a Dr. Heywood Floyd on a Pan Am (remember them?) space plane headed to a space station.

The station is shaped like a wheel, and it spins so that centrifugal force imparts a kind of artificial gravity to the occupants inside. While waiting for a connecting flight to the moon, Dr. Floyd engages in some plot-advancing dialogue with a group of Russian scientists who are just coming from the moon and waiting to catch a flight home. From the dialogue, you get the sense that space travel has become more or less routine, and Dr. Floyd seems rather bored with the transportation part of his trip. Once he arrives on the bustling and extensive base on the moon we find it has an array of hangars, several varieties of transportation vehicles, construction equipment and personnel, and other vaguely industrial-looking settings and activities.

As it turned out, of course, very few of the predictions Kubrick made in “2001” came about. Space travel is still difficult and expensive, and while the International Space Station is a fairly extensive facility, it is nowhere near as enormous and sophisticated as predicted in the mid-1960s. There is no moon base, there are no plans for one, and the last human visited our companion satellite in December 1972, barely four years after the release of Kubrick’s film. Crewed missions to Mars or the outer solar system are decades away, at a minimum.

Before we get too smug and dismissive of the technological optimism that obtained 50 years ago, I think it’s only fair that we try to see the world from their eyes, and through the lens of their experience at that historical moment.

Kubrick began work on his film in 1965, consulting with aeronautical engineers and other technologists to try to predict how technology would develop in the ensuing decades. It was natural to look at the preceding decades of technological development, and try to find repeating patterns that might reasonably be expected to continue.

In the 1920s, air travel barely existed for ordinary mortals. The first practical airliner, the Ford Tri-Motor, debuted in 1925, and the plane was unpressurized, noisy and could accommodate 10 passengers (who were presumably very well off, given that ticket prices in 2014 dollars ran to more than $4,000). Its cruising speed was 90 mph, slower than the top speed of my humble 4-cylinder Toyota Corolla.

Within a decade, though, air travel had become cheaper and more routine, and planes got faster and better. And it was the Douglas DC-3 that began air travel’s transition from elite to mass phenomenon.

A decade later, in the waning days of the Second World War, the first jet planes were produced. Again they began as tools of elites — highly trained military pilots and engineers working in secrecy. But within a decade those exotic technologies became accessible to everyday citizens with the first jet-powered airliners, and within a decade after that, as Kubrick planned his space odyssey, most long-distance air travel was by jet.

This pattern of exotic technology becoming commonplace and accessible happened not just in aviation; it was characteristic of the first decades of the 20th century in many innovations: Radio, television, microwave ovens, telephones and other communications, computers, and so on all fit the pattern.

So to Kubrick, there was no reason not to expect that pattern to continue in the then-exotic technology of space travel: At first, like jet power, it would happen mostly as a result of expensive government research, but within a decade or two it would become a cheap and routine activity.

Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick got certain things (sort of) right — the space shuttles were an approximation of the space plane in “2001”; there were devices called “TelePads” that, in function and capability, can be considered an uncanny prediction of the Apple iPad; we have computers that talk; and we do have a space station that is more or less permanently inhabited. What Kubrick got wrong was that space travel would be the invention that broke the pattern of previous transportation innovations. He also failed to anticipate the socially isolating and corrosive effects of technology in our present day. More on that next week.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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