The year is 2017, and though we don’t have flying cars or tiny pills that microwave into a fresh turkey dinner, we as a species have managed to acquire a wealth of knowledge and useful information and wired the planet so we can all share it. Well, most of us can share it.

The truth is that only about 40% of the world’s population currently has access to the Internet. (You can visit www.internetlivestats.com to see a live and current tally of how many people are online). So what about the remaining 60% that live in rural or sparsely populated areas that have no telecommunications infrastructure in place?

Google, through a new project simply called “X”, has found a beautifully simple, yet elegant solution. Balloons. Giant helium balloons that act as floating cell towers. Each balloon measures almost 50 feet in diameter, and can float at an altitude of 12 miles over the surface of the earth. There, in the earth’s stratosphere, the balloons can safely float twice as high as commercial airplanes.

There are already hundreds of active “Loon Balloons” bringing Internet to isolated parts of South America and Australia, and we can expect to see an entire fleet launching in the next few years. We can’t wait to see what the other half of the world has to share, and we hope they too have cats wearing funny hats. 🙂

Visit httpss://x.company/loon/ to read more about Project Loon and the technology that makes it possible.