Once the worlds rich are able to pop to space as once they popped to the south of France and a plethora of independent photo's start to circulate showing the true shape of earth I think it will heed an interesting time for this site and the others like it.
The problem with that is that we've been presented with these beautiful promises for nearly a decade now. "Wow, look, this guy is doing stuff in space! As soon as he's done, wowie, that'll be great!" - followed by a few days of casual discussion and then... silence!
Will this time be different? Perhaps. But maybe we should wait for it to be different first.
When I were a lad there was talk about moon bases and such and it all sounded very exciting. Hasn't happened. Nor has flying cars.
But other areas of technology around IT - iPhones, the internet etc - are unrecognisable since I was young.
The fundamental problem, it seems, is that some problems are easier to solve than others.
Why aren't we all zipping around in air-planes at Mach 5? We had Concorde in the 60s and if anything we've got backwards, certainly in terms of speed.
But where air travel has got much better is comfort, in flight entertainment. Which links to the above - IT and technology has come on leaps and bounds.
My take on why this has happened is that progress in IT is not hindered by any physical laws - there will come a time when it may in terms of how tightly transistors can be packed, but right now if we can make things smaller then it all still works and makes things quicker. But Concorde was inefficient, basically because:
F = ma.
To generate a lot of 'a' you need a lot of 'F'. And we don't have a cheap, efficient way of doing this. Rockets powerful enough to launch stuff into orbit take a LOT of fuel and fuel is very heavy, which burns as they use it but only lasts a certain time. The reason "it's not rocket science" is a phrase is that rocket science is complicated. I understand it at a very high level - about as high as I outlined.
Point being there are physical laws which make it very expensive to go into space which is why space tourism has only been restricted, so far, to a handful of multi-millionaires. But the fact that it has happened should be proof enough that the earth is round, unless they're all "in on it" too, or have been fooled in some way.