Dude, where's my jetpack?

[bosssmiley]

• You have a combined telephone/camera/computer/GPS sensor/inertial motion tracker/media player in your pocket with more power than a desktop PC had a few years ago, or than the entire Apollo space programme did!
• A team of scientists recently worked out how to foam titanium so that bone, if broken, will grow over and meld with the titanium as it heals.
• The guys are CERN are reheating the LHC for great fundamental physics justice.
• We (finally) have aircraft capable of VTOL and supersonic vectored thrust flight, about 40 years after the Brits canned the original project.
• NASA just tried to launch the rocket that replaces the Space Shuttle.
• You can buy an electric car, or vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, or by biofuels.
• The Japanese unveiled a humanoid robot in 2000.
• We have put men on the moon and probes on Mars.
• Russia is a democracy, China has a capitalist economy, and India has a space programme!
• Genetic and stem cell research are a generation away from curing many of our inherited ills.
• We are two months away from entering the year 2010!

Read some mid-century sci-fi (Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, etc.): we are living in the future! The problem with 'the future' is that it's a state of mind; not the world you and I live in today.