SETI@Home
A few bloggers have pointed out this article. It is very good.
"In practice, writing programs in an imaginary hundred-year language will work to varying degrees depending on how close you are to the core. Sort routines you can write now. But it would be hard to predict now what kinds of libraries might be needed in a hundred years. Presumably many libraries will be for domains that don't even exist yet. If SETI@home works, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens. Unless of course they are sufficiently advanced that they already communicate in XML."
[The Hundred Year Language]