One of my favorite things to do in the UC Berkeley library was to go to the archives of Scientific American and read issues that were sixty or even a hundred years old, seeing the fantastic tales of future technology like single-passenger helicopters that everyone will use for personal transport by 1950, or 'personal telegraphs' in everyone's home in our lifetime.

Along that vein, I present a thoroughly awful article on CNN today: "Antimatter could fuel rockets, heal patients."

It's not that the ideas presented are completely farfetched, it's that they don't give any premise for how it could happen. Sure, we can make a little antimatter, and now pundits are writing about how interstellar travel is 50 years away, while omitting the small problem of how an antimatter interstellar engine would work. It's as if the author suddenly stumbled on to antimatter and said "eureka!"

It reminds me of the South Park episode featuring the Underpants Gnomes, and their plan for world domination:

1. Steal Underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!

I'm sure the people working on the problem are a little more serious, but I'm just thinking about the kid digging through internet archives 100 years from now who sees this article and just giggles and turns the e-page.