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Enduring the 16-hour, 7,923-mile flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne, Australia, requires a certain traveler's fortitude.

Perhaps one day, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic will quicken the trip to a few hours via extraterrestrial space flights from our Spaceport America.

Or, maybe there will be other ways of traveling now being explored by our far fringes of genius.

Making the trip recently, I contemplated the progress in speed and comfort of travel in the past centuries while I performed body-origami in passenger-class seating.

I imagined the past hazards and seasick weariness of sailing for several months to arrive in Port Phillip, Melbourne harbor. Indeed, I would have likely arrived there with a different grade of grumpiness and in need of far more than a shower and shave.

About 100 years ago - one very long lifetime - Orville and Wilbur Wright brought humanity into the aviation age.

In 1970, within 70 years of Kitty Hawk - one normal lifetime - Boeing released the first of its signature 524-passenger 747 jumbo jets. My plane was only one of the 1,387 747s built to date.

Where the first mechanized Wright flyer flew 120 feet for 12 seconds or 6.8 mph at 10 feet in the air, the latest 747-400 has a range of 8,355 miles at the near-Mach top speed of 567 mph.

Oh, how quickly we adapt to progress, airplane-seat complaints and all.

Somewhere south of Honolulu, I compared "real time" air travel to the virtual experience moving my avatar, Zeek Infinity, around in SecondLife.com, the online virtual-world Web site.

In Second Life, you can fly your avatar virtually between islands or teleport to new locales à la "Star Trek"-like choices. In my brief adventures, I have met avatars/people from all corners of the world.

While there is nothing sci-fi or virtual about flying across the Pacific Ocean in our current contexts, the future holds many marvelous, if still sci-fi, realities indeed.

I traveled to Australia to attend the Micro and Nanotechnology Commercialization Education Foundation annual conference, COMS 2007.

MANCEF.org is headquartered in Albuquerque but holds its conferences in cities around the globe to engage the greatest audience active in micro- and nanotech research and development and commerce.

Steve Walsh, professor in the Management of Technology program at the University of New Mexico's Anderson Graduate School of Management, is the founding chairman of MANCEF.

Walsh led the New Mexico delegation in Melbourne, along with Gil Herrera, director of manufacturing, science and technology at Sandia National Laboratories, and Scott Byrant, executive director of MANCEF.

Micro- and nanotechnologies are measured in the very small physical ends of human comprehension - a nanometer is a billionth of a meter in length. Microscale is slightly larger.

One far-out travel application is the "space elevator" using nearly weightless carbon nanotubes strung together to transport you elevator-style up to a space station or perhaps to the moon. Far-fetched idea? No doubt. Impossible? People are working on it.

Micro- and nanoapplications are also much closer and practical than you might know. A microdevice activates the air bag in your car, for instance, saving thousands of lives each year and perhaps even yours. Protective sunscreens and paints also employ nanosciences to better safeguard your assets.

Touring the Australian Stem Cell Centre, we saw researchers using nanoprocesses to revolutionize the development of new healthy blood cells for treatment of blood-based diseases and clean universal transfusion needs.

Randal Cannady, a recent MBA graduate of the UNM Anderson School, won the COMS 2007 commercialization competition. Cannady presented vaccine development technologies currently being researched at the UNM Health Sciences Center.

While much is still left to the imagination, one thing is certain about the micro- and nanofuture. New Mexico's scientists and entrepreneurs will be involved.

For now, can we talk macro with United Airlines about its nanoscale seat spacing?

Burge is president of the New Mexico IT & Software Association and principal at Proactive Teams.