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Of all the things you mention, I think only Google, the Human Genome Project, and maybe Wikipedia belong on a list next to the great achievements Neal is talking about (human spaceflight, the invention of the computer, nuclear power). Most of those other things we spend so much time talking about make things more convenient, or less boring, or more efficient and are the results of innovation in business process or good product design rather than technology.

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The gigabytes of wiki meta stuff will be fascinating for the future people. "Ghod almighty," they will say, "look at the hours and hours they spent talking about absolute nonsense!". Personally I'd put particle physics (esp LHC) in the list in place of wikipedia. Lists of fictional ducks and every Essex bus timetable for the last three years isn't that inspiring to me.

A library of everything about everything available to anyone has been one of the human dreams, from the Library of Alexandria to the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

A library of everything about everything available to anyone

But that's not Wikipedia, nor, given its deletion policy, ever likely to be.

There are more lenient wiki providers out there, like Wikia. Whether these services will be around for the duration remains to be seen.

I forgot XBox Kinect - that's straight out of science fiction.

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