It's worse than that, really, because there was at least a fairly obvious _path_ there, even if the economics were, to say the least, shaky. For AGI... not so much.
Yeah, if energy continued to get exponentially more plentiful like it used to then a casual trip to the moon or flying cars today wouldn't have been out of the question.
People imagined a future where everyone had their own personal fusion reactor to power their devices with infinite energy, that world didn't happen but the exponential rate energy technologies used to develop in made that seem feasible.
It's not an energy question, for the moon it's a "why the fuck would we even do this" question and for flying car it's a thing about bald monkeys being on average quite stupid and not responsible.
