Probably not is the short answer.

Those who are still with us would have seen the news this week that Stephen Hawking is masterminding a push to send miniature spaceships across the gulfs of interstellar space to search for life on worlds orbiting other suns.

Eighty and 90 years ago this would have been the stuff of the most far-fetched science fiction. Flight was still a novelty, the most common dunny was a "thunderbox", many smaller towns were still without electricity or telephone services and the rail network ran on steam and coal.

Daily milk and bread deliveries were mostly done by horse and cart; the majority of people worked in manufacturing and agriculture and private cars, like access to university education, were still the preserve of the affluent.

There was widespread sectarian religious rivalry, most often between Catholics and Protestants, and Australia was almost heterogeneously white with the "white Australia policy" zealously enforced.

The Bulletin, then one of the nation's most popular magazines, proclaimed "Australia for the white man" on its cover until 1961.

As L.P. Hartley so famously observed; "the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

The big changes of the past 80 years didn't just happen. The best of them were brought about by a generation who, having risked everything for national survival, wanted a better, fairer and more inclusive society than the one they had grown up in.

We owe them much.