In September, a few students at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, got to see the future of food delivery: A drone flying above campus dropped packages of Chipotle burritos onto a grassy field for them to grab and eat. It was all part of an experiment by X (formerly Google X) to test the feasibility of delivering food by air. Drones are often associated with warfare because the U.S. and other nations use them to target enemies with surgical precision, but all kinds of industries are using drones. NASA sends them into Earth’s stratosphere to monitor climate change, real estate firms use them to take aerial shots of properties, and companies like Amazon have tested them as a way to get goods to people quicker. So far, federal law requires a commercial drone operator to always have the machine within sight, so it may be a while before drone deliveries are a reality. But Gregory McNeal, a drone expert and professor at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California, says it’s only a matter of time: “We’re going to get to a future where we have millions of drones operating billions of flights.”