It’s basically already 2010. Take a moment to absorb that fact. The 20th century isn’t just over, it’s well and truly done.

For those who believe Hollywood, we already should have moon bases and be busy sending our second manned expedition to Jupiter — homicidal computer optional.

Yet here we are, stuck on Earth, living with the mundane. We’re still arguing about how we’re going to put man back on the moon, much less reach another world. We haven’t even reached the semi-crummy future that we saw in works such as “Neuromancer” and “Blade Runner.”

Mankind has long dreamed of the future. It’s the heart of science fiction. But the future is now. We’re living it, and it doesn’t look like the picture on the box.

The first decade of the 21st century is over, and what do we have to show for it? The iPod? Facebook? Twitter? They’re nice, but not exactly what I was expecting when I was a kid.

As we approach the end of the year, it seems the perfect time to reflect on where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going.

For all my complaints, we certainly are nowhere near where we were when we rang in the year 2000. Between the economic collapse, the rise of social media and, most notably, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it’s a vastly different world.

Frankly, the Internet itself is such a crazy idea when you take a step back and really look at it, it can be argued that we’re already living the future. I guarantee if you went back and talked to a person in the mid-1980s and tried to explain to them just how much of the world is driven by even just the Web, much less the entire Internet, they’d look at you like you just grew a third eye.

If you think about it, really we’re not that far from having a chip implanted in your hand that could work as a near-universal form of identification. There are people who already have RFID chips in them. They might not be serving any useful function, but they’re there.

There are those who will point to these advances and claim that the classic vision of the future never had a chance to happen. It easily can be argued that people’s takes on the future always said much more about the present than about the future itself.

Look at the aforementioned “Back to the Future” and tell me that the Hill Valley of 2015 doesn’t just scream the ’80s. Likewise, look at “2001: A Space Odyssey.” That film has more in common with “Mad Men” than it does the modern world.

It’s a dangerous thing to forecast the road ahead based on what we know now. The biggest changes in society generally come from out of nowhere. Even a tool as useful as the personal computer was ridiculed as useless and unwanted, and it ushered in the largest societal change since the Industrial Revolution.

But there is value in the prediction. It forces us to reexamine the present and make judgments on what areas of society have value and what don’t. Companies are forced to make these predictions every day and government must, for the good of the people, constantly be charting a course for the nation.

Don’t ask me to guess the future, though. I’m not stupid enough to allow it to see print. Any prediction I make will be just as silly as any of the numerous predictions proven catastrophically wrong that litter history — think “We’ll be greeted as liberators,” or even the classic 1889 quotation, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Instead, all I can do is sit and pine for a future that I’ll never see, and I’m OK with that. I’m sure that the future, whatever it ends up being, will be spectacular in its own way. I love my iPod and I’m as addicted to the Web as any person.

However, that still doesn’t mean I don’t want the damn flying car.

James Harrison is the State News opinion editor. Reach him at harri310@msu.edu.