What's Green, exciting, and then (hopefully) unnoticed?

In science fiction, we've long assumed that distance would disappear.  We do it with FTL travel so we can take our characters between planets the way we now travel between cities, we do it with instant communication devices, and we use teleportation.  We wave our science fictional hands at the challenges of communicating over great distances so regularly it's a standard trope, and no longer needs to be explained.

Well, it's also becoming more real.  Ever since a breakfast conversation I had...