When 2013 feels like the future

Although 2013 lacks flying cars and space colonies, it does offer some occasional glimpses of what the future was supposed to be. For example, this week the Cassini probe team published their successfully photographing of meteors as they crashed through Saturn’s rings.

What an extraordinary thing, these glimpses of hurtling rocks passing through the solar system’s most glorious planetary rings.  Traces of quick violence, captured by an atomic-powered robot probe, then hurled hundreds of millions of miles to an Earth where we share them with pocket computers and networked strangers?  Yes, sometimes it feels like we are indeed living in science fiction.