[api]

It’s the hype. We could invent warp drive but if it was hyped as the cure for cancer, poverty, war, and the gateway to untold riches and immortality while simultaneously being the most dangerous invention in history destined to completely destroy humanity people would be “oh ho hum we made it to Centauri in a week” pretty fast.

Add some obnoxious pseudo-intellectual windbags building a cult around it and people would be down right turned off.

Hype is also taken as a strong contrarian indicator by most scientific and engineering types. A lot of hype means it’s snake oil. This heuristic is actually correct more often than it’s not, but it is occasionally wrong.