Not unfounded hopes.

The foundations of zero inertia propulsion were being made into working prototypes attached to hot air balloons in the mid 1800s. Decades before the wright brother’s first aeroplane flight.

And we never needed rockets.

The bell (“die glocke” in german), presumed a failure, was not the pinnacle of human innovation in this area. Someone had the “foo fighters” in WW2.

Given following the tech arc from Michael Faraday through to Nikola Tesla, I suspect humans.

T Townsend Brown, too, not the grand pinnacle.

But even at the level of “die glocke”, and Townsend Brown, the sci-fi of the 1950’s, the hopes, were well founded expectations.

Agnotology’s quite a vast industry. Perhaps the biggest industry. But as it’s doing its job so well, we’d not know.

At energy conferences sometime between 2000 and 2005 (I forget when), patent office whistle blower Tom Valone revealed that (something to the effect of) “by the year 2000 there had already been over 3000 free energy device patents secreted”.

We have so much headroom without the crooks thieving a century or two of progress from us.

… Not just free energy, and zero inertia propulsion, but also energy-matter transfer (e.g. can “print” gold from “nothing”), and more.