When you're talking on the phone to someone in the service department about getting your tech problem solved, you have to wonder where the person you're speaking with is physically located on the planet. Most of us have to laugh about the horrible connection, inability to understand what the person is saying with their heavy accent, and in some cases, the swishing, bath-tub or ocean wave sounds in the background. Who knows-maybe the tech support operates without boundaries or physical office space. Maybe the person you're talking to is sitting on some beach!

When portable word processors came into existence, photographers for newspapers used to snap images of maybe a student sitting at a beach with his big wordprocessor on his lap, typing out some assignment. Of course there was no connectivity to this stand-alone machine. That was no more than 15 years ago.

As our technology allows us to work any time, any place, you have to wonder what's next-and where it will be. Will we leave this planet, this beach and ocean, and be out in space living, traveling and working with other civilizations with their own realities and paradises?

This week in Orange County, California, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) hosts its annual symposium in Irvine and asks not if THEY are out there, but what it means. With the conference title, ET Contact: The Implications for Science and Society, the group delves into implications for the future as we explore space. Will man survive ET contact? What will become of our world religions? Will contact be friendly or openly hostile? How will our government react? What about our military? Event is July 29-31, 2011, see: 2011mufonsymposium.com

Whether this is all a fantasy and humans remain stuck on our "mud hole" as some call planet Earth, one thing is certain-it's going to be a wild ride into the future with new technologies and realities coming our way!