Our recent scientific advancements can seem scary. A map of the human genome, animal cloning and genetically modified food are just the beginning. Our advances in the field of genetics are sure to completely revolutionize our day-to-day lives in the years to come.

Or will they? Though we’re inching closer and closer to cloning humans, and we have a vague map of the human genome, there’s no guarantee our lives will be noticeably different because of it.

The space race of the 1960s had scientists and science-fiction writers alike imagining moon colonies and commonplace interplanetary travel. Today America is, if anything, further from those ideas becoming a reality, since we now lack the enthusiasm.

Unlike in the ’60s, when patriotism was at its highest and getting people into space was the biggest goal for both the United States and the U.S.S.R., today NASA is strapped for cash, and Russia can’t even afford its Mir space station.

Mir is supposed to come crashing into the South Pacific this morning. A whopping 15 people protested the decision to terminate Mir outside mission control in Russia on Thursday.

Conspiracy theorists say man never even walked on the moon. A Fox special Wednesday night tried to expose the moonwalks as movies orchestrated by the government to beat the Soviet Union in the space race.

NASA is fighting an uphill public relations battle, trying to reignite citizens’ passion for its programs by sending ’60s hero John Glenn back into space and giving Martian rocks cute cartoon names like “Scooby Doo” and “Yogi Bear.”

Despite NASA’s desperate pleas for popularity, however, its programs are widely viewed as a waste of money, especially with NASA’s habit of “losing” expensive equipment, such as last year’s $165 million Mars Polar Lander debacle.

Space exploration just isn’t exciting anymore.

There is no competition – America and Russia now work together on the International Space Station.

There are no heroes – can anyone name a more recent astronaut than teacher Christa McAuliffe, who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion?

There are firsts, but instead of the excitement of “First American in space” or “First man to land on the moon,” we have last month’s NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft making the first-ever landing of a robot ship on an asteroid.

Remember in 2000, at the supposed beginning of the third millennium, when we opened time capsules and read people’s predictions for the future? Everyone from scientists to academics to public officials predicted we’d be much further along technologically than we are.

Their projections were straight out of “The Jetsons,” with flying cars, interstellar travel and robotic servants. But today we’re much closer to the world in 1968 than to the world in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Year2000world.com reports that only about 20 percent of experts’ predictions about technology in the year 2000 came true.

Any meteorologist will tell you it’s impossible to predict the future. Who knows if cloning people will ever become commonplace; scientists aren’t sure it’s even possible.

Cloning definitely has a market. From parents with a dead child to egomaniacs who feel that one of themselves just isn’t enough, there are millions of people personally interested in cloning.

Scientists from the United States, Italy and Israel announced this month they were banding together to create the first human clone within the next year or two. Their goal is to find a solution for infertile couples who want a kid with genetic links to one or both parents.

Another group trying to be the first to clone a human is the genetics-obsessed Raelian Movement, which believes “that life on earth was created scientifically in laboratories by extraterrestrials whose name (ELOHIM) is found in the Hebrew Bible and was mistranslated by the word `God,’ and which also claims that Jesus’ resurrection was, in fact, a cloning performed by the ELOHIM,” according to the group’s Web site, Clonaid.com.

Like the scientists of the ’60s, who imagined a world where the average person was just as likely to board a spaceship to Mars as an airplane to Chicago, scientists have many predictions for the future of cloning and genetic engineering.

Eugenics, the selective breeding of humans to get favored genetic results, is one scary possibility.

Some also imagine the government having a copy of each of our gene maps, which they could use to discriminate against us.

One of the creepiest possibilities is human-like organisms being cloned for use as organ farms.

Watch the sci-fi movies. It’s all there. But so is the interplanetary travel we thought the space program would’ve advanced to by now.

Sometimes we expect too much of the future. The only thing we can do now is outlaw through Congressional legislation the undesirable possibilities our genetics advances, and hope for the best.

Jocelyn Marcus is a junior in English from Ames. She is opinion editor of the Daily.