While troops on foreign shores find themselves retiring back to their home places, although home will never be the same again, let us pause for a moment.

Isn’t it time we see what this century looks like 1000 years from now, all the gadgets for home automation examined again — no longer servo mechanisms, X10 controllers, serial ports or Zigbee radios — to determine the worth of automating that which has little utility served by joining the Internet of Things?

When do solutions chase problems that barely existed, if ever?

What is the value of remotely-controlled lights in a house when no one is home?

How many people find an Internet-connected refrigerator useful?

Haven’t we chased and captured these dreams over and over, from one generation to the next, at World’s Fairs/Expositions, EPCOT, and similar exhibits of an always-on future?

What are we really gaining here other than diminishing returns on markets with high margins but little interest?

In other words, we seven billion people are here together — shouldn’t we focus on…well, what should we focus on?

We sought peace in the midst of waging war “over there” and now that peace is nearly at hand, what are we going after next?

What do you want for your children and yourselves?

We shall move into the future and look back at the answers to some of these questions, tossing out the paranoia of uninformed/fearful citizens and showing you the positive aspects of a population that makes its own destiny rather than waiting to be told what its citizens should want, love, hate and fear.

In other words, we’ll let you own your guns and ammunition as long as you let us compete against you for the same manufacturing resources that can be used for guns, missiles or rockets in order to explore the cosmos.