For those of you who might have not been watching, SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- celebrated its 50th birthday on 19 Sept 09. Fifty years and a month or so ago Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published Searching for Interstellar Communication in Nature. 
How far have we gone in those fifty plus years?
Excellent question that. When Susan and I sit on our backporch we can hear both the sounds of the forest behind our house and the sounds of industry on the other side of that forest. We say "It's almost 2010," and ask, "Where's my flying car? Where's my vacation on Mars? Why isn't teleportation here yet?"
The answer is pretty simple regardless of your area of expertise. Economic: if teleportation was easily available and inexpensive, automotive, energy, construction and infrastructure industries would go bankrupt overnight. Political: any one country demonstrating that kind of logistic advantage would immediately open itself to attack. Social: people haven't yet demonstrated their ability to behave responsibly to mass communication and you want to give them mass movement?
Similar arguments can be made for all truly futuristic technologies.
People also have a cognitive challenge moving from communicating "earthwise" to communicating "starwise". Sure, your cellphone can immediately contact someone on the other side of the globe but the distances are "zero" as far as the electromagnetic spectrum goes. It takes most people longer to push the number of the person they want to reach than it takes cellular networks to locate the phone they're calling and ring it.
But another planet? Once you get beyond Earth's moon immediate communication ends. It would take over six minutes to get an "immediate" response from someone on Mars using current technologies.
Ah, current technologies. Immediate communication with our nearest stellar neighbor would take over eight years. Don't bother asking what they want for lunch. And if you could send a message, would you remember what you asked when you got your answer?
It took people about eight months to travel across North America back in the 1840s, about 3-4 days in the 1870s and mainly because technology changed. The horse-and-wagon gave way to the train for mass transportation. My grandmother said it took her two months to travel from Italy to America when she came here (1900s) and eight hours to fly back (1960s). Again, mass transportation technologies changed.
Current technologies may indicate that there's intelligences out there. Other technologies will let us communicate to them and get immediate responses.
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