Our ability to look into the deep past has never been greater:

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope may have detected the infrared glow from the very first generation of stars, a new study reports. If confirmed, the work would reveal the structure of the universe a few hundred million years after the big bang, when the galaxies that exist today were just beginning to take shape.

Is it ironic or somehow symmetrical and appropriate that the wave of technological advances which enable us to see so far into the past also make it next to impossible even to imagine -- much less predict -- what kinds of changes will be occuring over the next century or so?