I am composing this message on a laptop via my Verizon 4G data connection in an airport over 800 miles away from my home less than two hours after we left that home.

We live in the future. Imagine trying to explain that sentence to someone 150 years ago – or, parts of it, even 50 years ago – and you’ll see what I mean.

Let’s break that first statement down a bit and you’ll see what I mean. Unlike the tools available to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived, I am writing on a computing device that is capable of performing over 4 billion computations every second. It is connected to the internet – a vast connection of these computers capable of sharing data at enormous speeds and now responsible for the creation of more data every day than existed in recorded form in all human history prior to its invention. This connection happens via radio signals propagating through the air to my cell phone – a device capable of transmitting my voice as well as videos, pictures, and text almost instantaneously to any point in the world, and another computing device of comparable processing (within the same order of magnitude; it’s close enough), which can fit in my pocket. These words will reach you via that same medium, faster than they could have with any previously devised form of communication.

Add to this that I took a photograph using that phone while 30,000 feet in the air – a vantage point that, 100 years ago, no human had ever seen. It has now been posted to a variety of social networks that link me over that same internet to almost every person I have known since high school; they can now see that picture and enjoy the view despite in every case being separated from me by tens, hundreds, or even thousands of miles, with no delay. Both the phone and the computer are operating without access to any external power source.

I could, if I so desired, make a video call – yes, just like in the Jetsons – from either the laptop or the cell phone, and have a real-time conversation with a friend or family member anywhere in the world, able to enjoy facial expressions and gestures along with sound. Increasingly, I could do so in visual quality rivaling real life.

This is, simply put, amazing. If you look at science fiction of the past fifty years, we have already achieved many of the predictions offered. Space travel remains uncommon (though that is changing as privatization occurs), and jetpacks and flying cars are rare and expensive. AI remains improbably at best. But we have achieved an awful lot. It’s hard to imagine what the next hundred might hold.