Alan Boyle has the story.

Cassini has been delivering spectacular results, and we can continue to look forward to much more (barring technical disaster, or a collision with a ring particle). I remember when I was in college, and we were just starting to anticipate the pictures that would be coming in from Voyager in a few years. Today, I suspect that most young people take this kind of imagery for granted. It's just part of the background tapestry of twenty-first century life, like powerful desktop computers, iPods, and affordable air fares.

I remember when Jupiter had 12 moons, Saturn had 9 and was the only planet with rings, Titan was the largest moon in the solar system, and about the only thing we knew about it was that it had an atmosphere. Then the solar system started changing in waves, with astronomy texts becoming obsolete overnight as the probes reached their targets. What we know now is absolutely astonishing compared to what we know when I was a kid.

I realized it really was the 21st century a few months while, um, well...sitting in a bathroom stall, downloading fresh pictures from Mars rovers on my PDA.

Not exactly a "Star Trek" vision, but there ya go...

Only because Star Trek never showed bathrooms.

A couple of years ago on the Fourth of July, while waiting for it to get dark enough for the fireworks show, I read an ebook on my pda. Someone walked past, laughed and said "That's great, but where's your Starfleet uniform?"

Oh, yeah. We don't have flying cars, but we have some things that we didn't think we would have yet too.