When I was growing up, I used to love poring over the pages of Popular Science. The covers would always get me with provocative headlines: “Flying Cars in Your Lifetime” or “Humans Living on Moon by Year 2000.”

The articles themselves always quoted experts who assured me that the technology was already in place to make any predictions come true. There were even cool illustrations showing prototypes of the flying car or homes on the moon. I couldn’t wait for the future.

My dad had a slightly more jaded view. Every time I waved one of my future-predicting articles in front of him or showed him one of the amazing illustrations of a future-mobile, he just waved me off with a warning. He’d read the same exact articles when he was a kid. He was going to be living on the moon and driving a flying car, too. Well, guess what? Cars still had tires and people could barely live on Earth, let alone the moon.

Bottom line: I shouldn’t believe everything I read.

Now I’m about the same age as my dad when he gave me that advice, and I still drive a car with wheels and the moon is just something in the sky. So why am I not as jaded as my dad about future predictions? Why the Popular Science-style cover of a futuristic pool?

I may not be living the life of the “Jetsons,” but if anyone had told me as a kid that I’d have a device the size of a deck of cards in my pocket that could give me directions anywhere I wanted; let me communicate with others whenever and wherever I needed; and could give me info on weather, movies and even stock options, I would have been less likely to believe that than a flying car. But my cell phone puts Captain Kirk’s communicator to shame.

The rapid pace of technology is changing everyone’s life. And if it seems like it’s accelerating, that’s because it is. The phenomenon is called Moore’s Law and it states that the number of transistors which can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years since 1965, according to Wikipedia (a futuristic marvel in its own right). What that means to you and me is that every year we get smaller, more powerful computers, cell phones and gadgets.

That same advancement is affecting the aquatics industry. You have the choice of either getting on board and learning the new technology or being left behind. For aquatics professionals, the imperative is stronger today than at almost any other time. Technology can or will make operations more efficient. That, in turn, will save money — and very well could save your facility from the budgetary chopping block. It is another way to Reinvent Aquatics. (Register for our virtual conference at aquaticsvirtualconf.com.)

Technologies such as RFID, underwater surveillance, remote monitoring and biofiltration aren’t the stuff of sci-fi. They’re here. Now. I hope you’ll read more about them in this issue and discover how they can help you today.

Whatever you believe about the future, there’s one thing no one can deny: You can’t stop it from arriving. It’s already here.