I'm from a different generation than Neal Stephenson. I grew up inspired by my parents' old IBM XT. The Apple II at school. My TI-83 programmable graphing calculator. Not space flight. I continue to be inspired every year by the innovations in tech startups, and that's just the field I happen to live and work in - the biomedical field in the last 10 years has made orders of magnitude of progress understanding the human genome in ways that I can barely understand (despite having a college degree in Quantitative and Computational Biology).

Without Facebook I wouldn't have seen or spoken to lots of old friends until our 25th high school or college reunion.

Without Twitter I wouldn't have learned from and made connections with influential people in the tech world.

Without Google or Wikipedia or StackOverflow I would have to go to a library to learn anything new.

Without GitHub I would have to write my own software from scratch and spend a lot of time managing collaboration workflows.

Without AWS, Heroku, Ruby, Rails et al. I wouldn't have been able to launch my own startup without outside funding.

Without Zappos I wouldn't be able to buy size 15 shoes in whatever style or fit I want. I ordered shoes last week at 7pm and they arrived at 9:30am the next day. Seriously.

Without Kindle and my iPad I wouldn't be able to get any book in the world in 5 seconds for $10.

AirBNB, ZipCar, Apple, Dropbox, the list goes on, and this is in my (our) industry alone.

Neal Stephenson might not be able to fly to Mars in his lifetime, but I'm pretty excited about the innovations that will happen in the next 10 years; if they're half as good as the last 10, us geeks will be pretty satisfied.