In the early 1960s, a generation raised on Sputnik saw the future "in the stars." But many of today's 20-somethings, traumatized by the space Challenger disaster, have found surrogates for outer space in cyberspace and "the person sitting next to you." PNS commentator Pat Macias, is a staff writer for YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about Bay Area young people published by Pacific News Service.

The Hubble Space Telescope's images of black holes, new planets, infant stars, remind me of the opening line of "The Stars My Destination," Alfred Bester's classic science fiction novel. "This was a Golden Age ... ." Bester wrote, "but nobody thought so."

Indeed, the Hubble's dazzling revelations have made less of an impact on the youth culture than the announcement that a new Star Wars movie was about to go into production. "Why watch a story on channel 2 about the Hubble if you can watch Klingons getting roasted on channel 44?" a friend asked, defining the situation.

How come young people are so disinterested in the reality of outer space?

We grew up, after all, thinking that space was going to be our destination -- a kind of generational imperative. Images of interstellar travel and exploration were beamed to us from countless movies, television shows, comic books, and video games. We figured making extraterrestrial contact, like in Close Encounters and E.T., was inevitable in our lifetimes.

Then the space shuttle Challenger blew up, taking with it school teacher Christa McAuliffe. We'd followed the mission -- like we'd followed all the early space shuttle missions -- in our classrooms; Christa McAuliffe was part of our curriculum. "Seeing the craft explode was devastating, partly because we'd learned so much about Christa and the whole crew," another friend, who was eight at the time, recalls.

In the ten years since those events, NASA's budgets have shrunk and space has been given over to unmanned probes and satellites. We got the message. Machines were going to inherit space, not astronauts, not people, not us.

Since then, we've been content to look for substitutes for the once-promised universe.

Some choose to dream, patiently awaiting each new entry in the Star Wars saga, reading Star Trek technical manuals, getting drunk on the pleasures of science fiction. Identifying with characters like Luke Skywalker and the crew of the Starship Enterprise offers us a less intimidating way to explore the universe than peering through the cold mechanical eye of the Hubble telescope. In fantasy, we finally encounter the alien, conquer the stars and planets, turn space into the celestial extension of our own backyard.

Then, too, there is the magic of technology. Once the sole property of institutions like NASA, pagers, cellular phones, Walkmans, and portable CD players are now essential parts of a young person's lanscape. Denied NASA's rocket ships, perhaps we decided to master the tools at hand. TV and video games paved the way for our infatuation with computers and the internet. Unlike in outer space, in cyberspace anyone can be an astronaut, free to navigate a man-made universe of zeroes and ones.

Finally, convinced that mystery still abides somewhere, many of us have turned our search from outer space to our own inner lives. Our faith is evident in the overwhelming popularity of TV shows like The X-Files. Set in a twilight zone of psychic energies, alien conspiracies and the occult, the show is a celebration of the implausible, offering mysteries impenetrable to science and space telescopes. The clairvoyant abilities of the show's hero, Mulder, an empath, are much admired by those who believe that the final frontier is the human mind; that the unexplored universe is the person sitting next to you.

But the real reason why so many young people have lost interest in the once-promised universe is the era we live in -- the end of the 20th century. The ticking of the millenial time clock has made us radically present-oriented -- stuck in the moment, living day-to-day. Bombarded with doomsday predictions -- World War III, a killer plague, Judgement Day -- we ache only for some assurance we will live and grow old on the other side of 1999. Notions of the future and outer space may even seem anachronistic.

In the end, the Hubble telescope reminds us that space is filled with miracles which remain beyond our reach. Our self-constructed frontiers of fiction, technology and inner space are ideal surrogates for a space we will never know first-hand.