I don't mean to sound ungrateful about this week's landing on Mars of Nasa's Phoenix probe, but... is that it? Is that as big a leap as they can manage, these scientists (motto: “We may not be sure whether black holes produce thermal radiation, or be able to teach Hillary Clinton election arithmetic, but we guarantee that every week we will come up with an exciting enhancement to your dishwasher tablet that will leave even the toughest dishes cleaner, smear-free and smelling lemony-fresh!”)?

Far from showing how swiftly the world is advancing, the Phoenix mission is another dispiriting reminder of how the pace of change in the world is regressing.

It's 2008, for Pete's sake. Weren't we supposed to be taking holidays on Mars by 2008? When we watched Star Trek as children, didn't we assume that by the 21st century we'd be in silver one-piece suits, visiting galaxies, meeting aliens with eyeballs the size of watermelons and nostril foliage like an upturned version of Don King's hairdo? In fact, we can barely travel across London without havoc (what happened to those personal jetpacks we were promised?). Japan's Bullet Train is almost half a century old and we still haven't built anything that matches it for grace and punctuality. Concorde, far from being a first step to being able to fly to Sydney in an hour, has died. Supersonic travel died with it.

Just like Al Gore used to be the next president of the United States, the future used to be the next phase awaiting mankind. That's how the future is supposed to work, isn't it? But all around us lies spooky evidence that the world may actually be moving in reverse.

The prices of houses are now retreating to what they were back in 1956. Far from finding a substitute for our reliance on fossil fuels by cleverly recycling, say, old staples, our demand for oil has climbed so high that Colombian drug cartels are moving into petroleum. Forget that we were supposed, by now, to be getting our nutrition in a handy daily pill. But given all the technological advances in food production, shouldn't the world have cracked how to feed itself? Yet instead of harnessing the bounty of high-tech disease-free, weed-resistant crops, the West has turned instead to medieval organic farming practices that involve persuading your pets to poop more so that you'll have something nourishing to sprinkle on your allotment.

Art? Banksy's artworks, daubed on walls, are closer to prehistoric cave paintings than to Picasso. Writing implements have become more unreliable since we “progressed” from the pencil (Pencil user: “Hello? Is that the Pencil helpline? My pencil's stopped working. Just like that! Yes, I tried sharpening it. Any tips?” Pencil premium-rate helpline: “Have you tried putting it back in your pencil case and taking it out again?”).

On the bright side, as long as science never sleeps we know there'll always be one thing we can confidently say about the future. It will be cleaner, smear-free and smell lemony-fresh.

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