Space travel would not be like Carmel-by-the-Sea, but Cachagua. It would take a lot of Jensen Camps and Jamesburg Earth Stations to make anything as grand as a space colony work. The area above the Earth might be known as the heavens, but there would be no escaping being human. No matter how glorious the triumph, humans have to grind through all of it, scheduling meetings and making coffee, documenting and processing, trimming and forgetting. No technology stands outside society, and no society exists without the people who build it.
In our technological narratives, progress advances like the tide, lifting up everyone and everything. But we rarely look closely to see the unevenness of the diffusion of our inventions. In a poor valley somewhere a few miles from Carmel, a satellite receiver took in pictures from the moon during a time when locals still rode horses to the camp saloon. Technology may move onward and upward, but everything retains its links to the old and weird and human.