The future, probably without the flying cars, the one you see in the movies with holograms, with instant and ubiquitous informational access and unbelievable computer processing capabilities, isn't too far off. It won't be built on the current Internet, though. The Internet is totally 20th Century. The red button on the Grid will be pushed this summer, and will change everything—again.
Times Online explains the Grid in a way your mother can understand. Cern, the Switzerland-based quantum physicists that brought us the World Wide Web at the end of the last century discovered there wasn't enough capacity in the whole Internet to compute the complicated math needed to pursue theoretically existent subatomic particles. A standard Internet-connected PC would take centuries to analyze the data.
So they developed the Grid, which is 10,000 times faster than the Internet we know, connected via fiber-optic routing systems worldwide, eleven in the U.S. They'll turn it on this summer, accessible by the academics at first, and within two years the 55,000 servers currently in place will increase to 200,000 as the aforementioned prospectors stake their claims.
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