Without a target you'll miss it every time. - Peter Diamandis

FQ — the frictionless quotient — in our frictionless shopping adventure.

Boston Dynamics, for another, now makes robots that can climb, crawl, jump, and hop, and all while carrying heavy loads (some bots can manage over a hundred kilograms of weight). These “Sherpa-bots” can traverse boulder-strewn hillsides, balance on sheets of ice, and even jump from the ground to a rooftop three stories up.

It is important to remember that in 1953 none of the technology for these futuristic journeys existed. No one knew how to go that fast and survive. Even the most optimistic die-hard visionaries did not expect a lunar landing any sooner than the proverbial "Year 2000." The only voice telling them they could do it was a curve on a piece of paper. But the curve was right. Just not politically correct. In 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, right on schedule. Then US rockets zipped to the Moon 12 years later. As [Damien] Broderick notes, humans arrived on the Moon "close to a third of century sooner than loony space travel buffs like Arthur C. Clarke had expected it to occur."