It was not the most eloquent line uttered in movie history, and it may have been one of the silliest: “Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”

But the sentiment, as intoned by the celebrity psychic Criswell at the beginning of the 1959 astro-disaster “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” was a perfect way to explain the influence that the space race, then in its infancy, was already beginning to exercise on American popular culture and art, from movies and television to architecture and design.

An effect was much more than simply a spillover from the silvery streamlining of the space program. It was an increasing preoccupation with the future and technology that helped change not only the country’s look in the 1950s and ’60s, but also, in some ways, its very conception of itself, as if seen anew from space.

The architect Buckminster Fuller, one of the space age’s most ardent proselytizers, put it much more coherently in his book “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”: “We are all astronauts.”