It's funny how the past almost sounds like the future.
"When I was a little kid people used to fly to the moon and walk around, and you could catch a supersonic flight from London to New York that would get you there in 3 hours".
Also remember that a lot of people thought that WW3 and global destruction was inevitable. So it could have been much worse.
You mention IT. In 1969 we had no idea that computers would ever get as powerful as they are now. I remember when I started working as a software developer in 1984, and hearing about Moore's Law.
Moore's Law. (n.) Moore's Law is the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future.
And how, even in 1984, people were saying that it was incredible that Moore's Law had stayed relevant for as long as it had, but that it would soon cease to work because otherwise everyone would end up walking around with a supercomputer in their pocket, and you would be able to buy the equivalent of a building full of disk storage for a few dollars. And how ridiculous would that be, ha ha.
I guess if someone, in 1984, had shown most IT people two visions of 35 years into the future. One of which involved the IT tech that most of us carry around in our pockets, and one of which involved colonies on Mars and the early stages of interstellar travel. Most would choose the latter as more believable.