Every time a science fiction writer spins her or his latest fable, every time a Sir Ridley Scott or a James Cameron or a Steven Spielberg blasts off on their latest filmic voyage to the stars, what these people are actually doing is taking their guess at what June 12th 3034 will look like.

I picked that date, one embedded suitably deep in the future, at random. Science fiction oevres have a randomness about them too.

Although there seems to be a relatively constant holy trinity of content

Travel nearly always features in imagined futures — all manner of craft, usually interplanetary, with various propulsion systems; the ‘usual suspect’ civilian vehicles — flying cars, jet boots, floating skateboards.

These modes of transport hold sci-fi’s center stage alongside aliens of all shapes, sizes and degrees of friendliness or enmity.

And then there’s the general new technology: how will we communicate in the future? How will we cook? Sleep? Exercise? What will our living quarters be like? How about gadgets? And prisons?

Despite these seemingly endless examinations of our tomorrows, there always seems to be… something missing. Some kind of… I dunno… glue holding everything together. Some common societal element sine qua non — like steam or electricity or oil; some organic leap (let’s face it, nuclear is a nightmarish bust) that will characterize our future.

Well, as my spoiler headline suggests, most of the world’s important scientific minds believe the element that will form the foundation of our future has been unearthed.

It’s data.

There are all kinds of gob-smacking statistics about the recent worldwide surge of data thanks to data-creating and data-receiving sensors passing a tipping point.

It seems that just about everything in existence has been instrumentalized. From car engines that self-diagnose, through clothes with sensors telling stories about their color, size and availability or (in the case of running shoes) their owner’s running regimens, to sensors in trucks checking drivers’ sleeping habits — to name but a tiny fraction of the one trillion sensors currently believed to be sending and gathering data around the world.

And that’s just ‘structured’ data, data in a form that computers can understand.

There’s also almost infinite ‘unstructured’ data: texts, emails, tweets, likes, blogs, posts, Vines, photos, movies, security footage.

The next generation of ‘cognitive computers’ led by IBM’s Watson can ingest data in any form — at around 60 million pages a second — and learn.

Today’s world is creating more data in weeks than in all of human history through 2003. So cognitive computing urgently needs to step up to the plate; how will humanity stand any chance at all of harvesting and harnessing the data deluge otherwise?

Impressive though they are, the numbers scientists use to quantify Big Data don’t really hook human fascination.

It’s like the Internet, the ‘engine’ of the previous decades. Nobody really predicted the Internet’s all-pervasive importance-to-be. One day it just suddenly… was. Everywhere. For everything.

This brings me to an IQ problem you may be familiar with.

Q: you’re standing at one side of the Grand Canyon. The other side is barely visible in the far off distance. Beneath your feet, the seemingly infinite drop makes your head spin. Using nothing but rope, how do you get to the other side?

Very very few people solve this very very simple problem (simple once you have the answer, that is).

A: you fill the Grand Canyon with rope and walk along the top of the rope to the other side.

I’m told that this problem is a test of the part of the intellect that deals with openness and generosity.

This part of the intellect is precisely what people need to engage to envisage and appreciate the sheer mega-hyper-tsunamis of data that are cascading across our world per millisecond.

Here’s another mind-bender: data scientists dealing with astronomy are examining the beginning of the universe itself, the so-called Big Bang.

Simply put, these scientists are using radio telescopes attached to such magnitudes of computing power that I won’t even bother trying to encapsulate it with words. They’re using radio telescopes (I’m no scientist so bear with me and fill in the gaps if you possibly can) because the Big Bang was a physical event, an explosion of sorts, that happened in the distant past. That distant past still exists along a linear time continuum; so these telescopes are moving back along that continuum, listening.

I said I wouldn’t even attempt to describe these radio telescopes computing power. I lied: they sift through two internets’ worth of data every day — yes, that’s all the data created in the internet since the day it began. Times two. Every single day.

Suddenly, the idea of filling the Grand Canyon with rope seems minuscule potatoes.

But Big Data isn’t just a size issue. It’s also a speed issue. A project such as the Big Bang project above relies not just on covering a lot of ground, but also on covering it real fast (before the Big Bang disappears off into the mists of time once and for all.)

In the area of marketing, the existence of ever bigger data — and the ability to analyze it in real time — means what we call ‘the end of average’. Traditionally, advertisers would communicate with consumers in large groups — single moms, for instance — with an ideal of the average single mom as their guide. But Big Data analyzed in real time allows retailers to know precisely who they are talking to, understand their precise idiosyncracies and deliver precisely the right message every single time.

(Yes, there are considerable privacy issues attached to all of this. I’ll let others pick the bones out of that.)

The point is that Big Data is the first grappling hook strong enough to snag the future and pull it toward us (to paraphrase a young scientist).

Tsunami is an emotive and, to many, upsetting word, but it seems to me to be the word that best captures the drama, scale, velocity and transcendent power of the changes that Big Data is set to bring about in the world.

One can only imagine what went through the minds and hearts of the first oilmen witnessing their first gushers.

Yet data is gushing throughout our world with an effect so unimaginably all-embracing that it makes history’s biggest oil-fields look as potent and abundant as chihuahua breast milk.

Big data is creating the circuitry of a new global nervous system that will link us all in real time, educate us, cure us, feed us, protect us, and make us all friends.