It’s really cool to see things that are happening in the world today. Sure, it’s not the world of meals in a pill, personal helicopters, and having information deposited directly into the brain that I remember reading in the books from the 50s and 60s, but it’s still pretty neat. We have robots that can run, can see awsome pictures from mars, an orbiting space station. An orbiting space station! How cool is that? Sure, it’s not used for much that affects the common man… it’s not a jumping off point for the moon, but still, it’s a space station. 10 years ago that was the sort of thing that was pie in the sky future. “Sure, in the future we’ll have a space station, we’ll go to it weekly for work on the moon after we drive around in our personal hovercraft.” I have 1000x the power of the computers that put man on the moon sitting on my lap, and I can talk to any other computer connected to the net through the air (well, if I had an airport card that is) and I can carry around 10,000 songs in something smaller than a pack of cards.
It’s just really neat to look at the world today in a slightly detached way and see just how many really cool things that are going on in the world.