Why I’m Scared We’ll Never Reach 2099…

If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into home all over the world from sattelites in the sky; that bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; that antibiotics would abolish infectious disease but that disease would fight back; that women would have the vote, and pills to control reproduction; that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; that you could cross the Atlantic at two thousand miles an hour; that humankind would travel to the moon, then lose interest; that microscopes would be able to see individual atoms; that people would carry telephones weighing a few ounces, and speak anywhere in the world without wires; or that most of these miracles depend on devices the size of a postage stamp, which utilized a new theory called quantum mechanics — if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly pronouce you mad.

Most of these developments could not have been predicted in 1899, because prevailing scientific theory siad they were impossible. And for the few developments that were not impossible, such as airplanes, the sheer scale of their eventual use would have defied comprehension. One might have imagined an airplane — but ten thousand airplanes in the air at the same time would have been beyond imagining. 

So it is fair to say that even the most informed scientists, standing on the threshold of the twentieth century, had no idea what was to come.

- Michael Crichton in Science at the End of the Century

9 years in, and we already would have to explain that books now require electricity , mankind has arbitrarily limited communication to 140 characters, and it is cheaper to send your luggage in a separate plane rather than check it on your next flight. Man, we are fucked.