I love wondering if and how this kind of "Wild West frontier" in technology and communication and social interaction will ever come again:

Say we colonize Mars. Streaming anything from Earth takes hours (well 3-22 light minutes). Martians may invent their own planetary social network and share their own weird Martian memes for a while.

Or interstellar colony ships traveling for decades between the stars, and then practically cut off from Earth at whatever new exoplanet we land on.

There will definitely be lots of "golden eras of creativity" still to come, if we survive that long.

Mars' gravity is only 38% of Earth so I think quite a few would be crazy feats of strength or odd trajectories of objects. At least they would be if I were making them.

Any time someone carves out a new space online, the same sort of thing happens. Pioneers create infrastructure. Early adopters rush to explore the new medium. New possibilities or new constraints spur creativity. Then, usually one of two things happens: the new space was a brief fad, and it dies away; or the masses arrive and it undergoes an eternal September, standardization, commercialization, enshittification, drama… in other words, becomes integrated into the wider net. Those fed up leave and begin to carve out a new space…

Some initiatives (like the Gemini Protocol) remain (for now) in a tenuous niche where mass adoption seems impossible and yet they also don’t seem to be going away.