As the early utopian, Francis Godwin, wrote in the time of Galileo,

"You shal then see men to flie from place to place in the ayre; you shall be able, (without moving or travailing of any creature,) to send messages in an instant many Miles off, and receive answer againe immediately you shall bee able to declare your minde presently unto your friend, being in some private and remote place of a populous Citie, with a number of such like things… you shall have notices of a new World… that all the Philosophers of former ages could never so much as dreame of."

And of an imagined flight to the moon,

"… the farther we went, the lesser the globe of the Earth appeared to us; whereas still on the contrary side the Moon shewed her self more & more monstrously huge. . . .

"Now for my self, I was so fast knit unto my Engin, as I durst commit my selfe to slumbring enough to serve my turne, which I took with as great ease (although I am loath to speake it, because it may seeme incredible) as if I had been in the best Bed of down in all Antwerp."

At which point the naysayers doubtless said it would never happen, admitted with better reason in those horse-and-cart days than the naysayers of today.

(it is also interesting to note that the improbability of such things, at the time, is one of the things that made the word utopia become synonynous with something that would never happen.)