[IndianAstronaut]

>At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1]

Wow, I never knew they were so pessimistic about that. I thought the science for visualizing extrasolar planets had always been there, they just needed the equipment built.

Now I wonder what ideas today's pessimists have that will be disproven. Maybe Interstellar travel is really possible?

[pharke]

You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, some people are just out for their own crazy agendas.

You're correct that the science has been there for quite some time and astronomers have been lobbying and popularizing the idea of building the necessary detection equipment for quite a while. There was even quite a good book written on the topic in 1966, a collaboration between a young American astronomer and an accomplished Soviet astronomer/astrophysicist [1]. It's a very interesting read, especially today now that we have accomplished some of the things they theorized about on the planets in our solar system and through observations of our stellar neighbourhood. I highly recommend it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-life-universe-I-Shklovskii...

[randallsquared]

Well, in this case, though, the OP is right about extrasolar planet detection, at least as regards science teachers and popsci articles. I remember the general (popsci) consensus of the time being that there was no practical way to image planets of other stars because you'd need incredibly large telescopes in space, and by the time we could build optical space telescopes with mirrors that were hundreds of meters across, we'd have a generally spacefaring civilization that would likely have already started launching probes to the nearest candidates.

Also, the feeling of inevitable doom from resource depletion, pollution, technological stagnation, and political dystopia was quite palpable to many of us growing up in the time. By the mid-80s when I was a teen, it seemed like the way to bet was that no human would leave LEO for many decades, if ever.