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10 Ways the World has Changed Since "Firefly" First Aired

By Patrick J. Kiger
Editor Amanda Arnold

It's been just nine years since the visionary, sci-fi western, TV mash-up "Firefly" initially aired on the FOX network in 2002. That really isn't such a long time, but in the rear-view mirror of rapidly accelerating technological, social and geopolitical change, in some ways, it already seems like the distant past.

To give you a few examples, in those days, people still used fax machines and cathode-ray tube TV sets. Computer memory was still measured in megabytes, and a Palm Pilot attached to one's belt was a sign you were a cutting-edge technophile. Blogging was still in its infancy, and Americans were more worried about terrorism than the economy. The human genome was still unmapped, and drivers still scrawled directions on pieces of paper. Pluto was still considered a full-fledged planet, and the Space Shuttle program was going great guns. A lot of things that are now ubiquitous, globally-influential phenomena, like Twitter and Facebook, hadn't even been invented yet.

Here's a list of important developments since 2002 that might have seemed like far-out science fiction to Firefly's original viewers.