It's strange, entering the new millenium, and leaving behind the jetsons future we were all expecting 30 years ago...

The Concorde is grounded until Spring, and possibly forever, while no viable alternative for supersonic civilian transport exists. The closest thing, the HYPR X-34 is at the same stage in development that the National Aerospace Plane (NASP X-30) was ten years ago, before the program was scrapped (or classified).

Bullet trains, finally making their way to the US, are slow in coming, and fraught with problems. The replacement for the Space Shuttle might never get off the ground. The world's largest hovercraft (and still the fastest way to cross the English Channel) is being taken out of service, and nobody's buying.

Multi-billion dollar sat-phone systems bite the dust as unprofitable, and are scrapped. Men on Mars get further away every year, and we couldn't make it to the Moon again within this decade if we had to. The workhorse of civil aviation is a model that hasn't changed fundamentally in 31 years. Airlines and Air Traffic controlers are both telling Congress that we'll have twice as many people in the air in 2010 and there's no place for them to land.

Cars have reached the balancing point between convenient and useless in San Francisco (and other areas), but viable alternatives aren't always that viable. Each year in SF the average commute distance gets longer, and the commute time gets longer still. The farther we're capable of traveling the more we want to bunch together in as small areas as possible.

I don't know, but I have the feeling that it's not too long before people realize they can do their job just as well (or better) 100 miles away from their client's offices, live in Davis (or anywhere else outside the urban sprawl), get the house of their dreams for less than they're paying in rent right now, have a place to park, a place to drive, and a place to raise a family, and they might not need jetpacks or personal helicopters to do it.

Could it be that telepresence will take the place of teleportation in our realization of the future? Maybe the true Star Trek takeaway is the holodeck, and not the transporter... If it's just the same as being there, why fling your atoms around at all?