Today, as an experiment, people using the Twitter micro-blogging service were asked to add the hashtag #beatcancer to their messages, and that each time it got used, if all went as planned, 1 cent would be donated towards cancer research.
I made messages, some silly ("Use cancer like a drum and #beatcancer!"), some serious, using that hashtag. I wrote one of the serious messages because I know, sometimes cancer can be beat, sometimes it can only be maintained. It can be a fact of life, not a death sentence. So I wrote "Cancer. Living with it is better than dying from it. #beatcancer"
And apparently someone liked that comment enough to quote it. And if that's a real person's account, the account of a person living in Sao Paolo, Brazil, then...my words have demonstrably traveled halfway across the world.
The future remains impressive.
(Though my words have traveled similar distances before! Two of my profiles for Film Score Monthly got translated into Swedish and republished in a Swedish film music magazine.)