Every once in a while I have conversations with friends about the lack of futuristic things in our every day lives. By conversations, I mean rants – “Where’s my flying car? Where’s my robot? Where’s my [science fiction staple]?” The kind of thing that the “Damn Scientists” t-shirt at Threadless covers.

I know other people get these frustrations. You know what though? Every once in a while something comes around which makes you take a step back and realise that we are in the future. Right now, I’m thinking of the miners in Chile. The mine collapses, and 33 men are trapped 700ft underground without anyone knowing they’re alive. Main shaft’s blocked, and that’s where the story could end horrifically. Left alone in the dark, trapped, and with no means of contacting the outside world. Slowly starving to death. That’s what could have happened. Instead we’re seeing the men raised to the surface today in the Phoenix capsules 70 days after they were trapped.For a sense of scale, the Gherkin in London is just under 600ft high.

Think about what’s had to happen to make this possible. This roughly 2ft hole’s had to be drilled to hit an exact space 700ft below the surface, tiny errors at the start and they could have missed. The capsule’s got to run smoothly up and down this hole, and the men have had to be kept alive and healthy throughout this time. The mining expert went down just before 4am UK time this morning, and we had live video of him arriving at the bottom.

Think about this – we can reach people 700ft underground in time to save them, and we can beam pictures halfway around the world as it happens from both ends of the rescue.

Take a step back, look at what’s around and think about how it would appear to a classic sci-fi writer in the 60s or 70s. There’s elements we have now that are a step change from what was around then. The obvious one’s computing power and availability, but think around the implications in automation as well. We have technology building technology, with people only providing the guidance. I might not have a flying car or a jetpack, but I think there’s definitely elements of the classic sci-fi in my every day life and in the world at large.