The very term "Space Age" seems antique
http://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-frozen-frontier.html
Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting to be born.Today that confidence has vanished. Our Mars rovers are impressive and our billionaires keep pouring money into private spaceflight, but neither project captures the public’s imagination, and the very term “Space Age” seems antique.
... because we know that spaceflight isn’t going to get us to another world anytime soon.
Maybe it's just realism but it's a realism that we haven't properly internalised yet. Space is very, very big. It's very, very hostile to anything we would recognise as life. And getting substantial quantities of stuff up the gravity well is very, very hard.
Which all means that the Earth is probably all we've got to work with for the foreseeable future. So perhaps it's time to start acting as if that's true rather than as if we'll be able to just walk away from our problems some time in the near future as if it's a rented flat we're living in at University. Who cares about looking after it when we'll be leaving in a few years? And as always, it's worse than that. Imagine for a moment that mankind as a whole actually manages to build a sustainable, self contained environment on Mars. Do you really think you are going to be one of the handful of people involved? How about your descendants? Unless you are very, very unusual, you're going to be one of those that stay behind, not one of those that leaves. So you'll need to keep Spaceship Earth viable, right; because it's all the spaceship you've got.
Don't look up, look out. You don't need a space ship because you're already living in one.