It is now 2009. We have come so far in the past eight years that – even if you pay really close attention – the speed with which we have grown as a species in knowledge and capability is so ferociously fast as to be virtually invisible.
In 2009 you can buy a 1 Terabyte disk drive for your computer for $95 (this much storage would have cost you $4,000 in 2001).
Between 2001 and 2009 – following the old saw about “Human Knowledge doubling ever year” – we as a species had acquired 256 times as much knowledge about the world around us than we did between the dawn of humanity and 2001 (when we already thought we were pretty bright, and we were).