I know this is how people in the 80s and 90 imagined the future and a lot of concepts were probably too far fetched for them.
BUT... why arent they using drones to explore planets? why are there not more drone-spaceships? why does enterprise need a crew to begin with? Why is there so little automation? Why so few uses of AI in general?
I am saying this as a star trek the next generation person. I'd also expect them to have full video and sensory streams of any surface mission teams.
No human being alive in the 1960s could have survived the amount of drugs they would have needed to ingest to create Rick and Morty in the 1960s.
I feel like if you built a time machine and took Rick and Morty back to the 1960s, it would have just looked like flashing images on a screen or a nightmare straight out of hell to them, their minds would have not been able to process what was going on not because there's any real depth to the series but just because we have so much exposure to the topic content that we are able to process it where is the closest person in the 1960s would have had is a few episodes of the black and white Lost in space or a little bit of Twilight zone maybe.
Exactly, media moves so much faster now, so they literally had a smaller frame of reference and were exposed to far fewer of these ideas than modern audiences. We take it for granted now, but it used to be difficult to get your hands on media that was more obtuse or complicated, because often they didn't have copies at your local library, and as such, audiences back then just wouldn't have the frames of reference that we do in allowing us to understand the concepts and references to other existing media.
Ask me how I know you're not into foreign and independent film of that time period, nor from the several decades preceding it.
Well I think it's fair to say I've not been exposed to much pre 1960s foreign and independent film, although I do feel there might have been a nicer way to broach the topic what would you recommend to get me familiar with it?
Specifically anything that would prepare my imaginary 1959 brain for the horrors of Rick and Morty would be most appreciated.
The obvious answer would be any Buñuel film, Un Chien Andalou was released in 1929 and is appreciably more viscerally intense than pretty much anything on TV today. Far from the only example. Don't fall into the trap of thinking our modern ideas are new, they aren't, everything new you will ever see was previously thought of, tried out, and discarded by past people whose culture didn't have a use for it at the time. Everything. It's incredibly misguided to think a modern cartoon would be overwhelmingly intense to a supposed primitive of the 1960s, only perceived as colors and motion. It's a form of teleological presentism that perpetuates the fiction that we're somehow more intellectually developed than people who came before us. That happens a lot. It makes us uncomfortable to admit that a paleolithic man could function as well in a modern office as any of us, so we invent feel-good myths about how we're more intellectually sophisticated than every past generation, but we aren't. Not socially, not biologically, not at all. It isn't surprising that people still believe in pop-pseudohistory like the so-called Dark Ages, a Renaissance fiction.