I used to understand the future. It used to involve lots of space travel, personal jet packs, probable encounters with space aliens and hero astronauts. Now it doesn't seem to involve any of that.

Instead, we are socially networked. We are a hive mind. We don't want to go to the moon; we want to burrow more deeply into the electronic universe. I live in that future. I spend too much time on the Internet. I watch too much television. That's my current reality.

I write this today, and you read it some other day, so basically I am communicating with people from the future. It's the wonder of a written language; it binds us to time; it creates history. We know what happened because we hear voices from the past.

I am the voice from earlier this week. Marvel at all I do not know.

There are still artifacts from the old future floating around. Space flight hasn't been completely eliminated. But our dreams of understanding the universe have taken a hit. Understanding the universe does not appear anywhere on the road to making money. It's a hobbyist kind of thing, confined to the academies.

Mostly. One notable exception is the Rosetta spacecraft, still wiping the dried tears out of its eyes as it wakes up from a three-year sleep. Monday the spacecraft radioed a "hello" message to Earth, causing scientists to cheer in that way that scientists do.

Rosetta is currently 500 million miles from Earth. That's your first gee-whiz fact. The second is this: Rosetta was awakened because it has a rendezvous with a comet. The comet is called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta is going to circle the dirty snowball at the comet's head, taking mineral surveys and other useful measurements.

Then it will attempt to land on 67P's surface and, if possible, dig up samples and analyze them. Finding what minerals are present will go some way toward revealing the origins of our little neighborhood of space we call the solar system.

I do think that's almost unbearably cool. This thing has been out there for 10 years, the last three of them asleep, and someone pings it from Earth and Rosetta is all, "No problem, ready to go, let me just check the instruments." Machines are so satisfying when they work.

Rosetta is, of course, named for the Rosetta stone, the unprepossessing hunk of flat rock that held the key to translating Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus enabling us to see further back in time. It's that written-language thing again; leave enough of it lying around and people will begin to learn.

The Rosetta stone itself is unique no longer. Other tablets have been discovered that predate it and also provide keys to translating Egyptian hieroglyphics.

With those translations in hand, experts were able to reconstruct more details about Egyptian court practices and daily life. There was an effort in Europe, particularly in the 19th century - the Rosetta stone was first translated in 1822 - to link current European civilization with the classic ages, Rome and Greece as well the splendors of the pharaohs.

The text on the stone was nothing special, a decree issued by King Ptolemy V to the citizens of his kingdom. The scholars were not that interested in the contents; it was the three versions that appear on the stone that riveted them - Egyptian hieroglyphics, a demotic script and an ancient Greek text. Since ancient Greek was known, scholars could work their way back to the hieroglyphics.

The idea is that Rosetta the spacecraft will do what Rosetta the stone did, provide a window into the past - in this case, the origins of the solar system. There will, of course, be a lot of interpretation of data, for which you'll need people schooled in that sort of thing. Assuming that science interprets the data right, we'll know more about the stuff that made the stuff we find on Earth.

Like gold and air.

It will be fun to know that, but it will have limited commercial application. There's a lot of research around these days, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, but not a lot of it is directed toward stuff that would help complete our picture of how the solar system came to be.

Perhaps that knowledge will help bind us closer to the planet. It seems to me that the Earth could use a little help from us right now; nature is really trying pretty hard, considering that it doesn't have to; maybe a deeper interest in origins and causes might make us all better stewards. Can't hurt, anyway.

I am still waiting to see my first space alien. I disbelieve current reports of sightings.
