To Infinity and Beyond!
I was listening to a couple of my co-workers chat the other day. It went something like this:
"That presentation could be adapted for a mobile app."
"Now that they've opened up the API."
"Working Java ME, right?"
"Right, and we have to keep the file size under 1 meg if it's going to run on iPhones."
Or, something like that, anyway.
And it dawned on me that ten years ago, even five years ago, this conversation would not, could not, have been held.
I know that it's been said so often that it's become a cliche from which I want to run screaming, but "the world is moving faster and faster."
If you think about it, the Industrial Revolution lasted about one hundred - one hundred - years, roughly the entire 19th century. There were sweeping changes, to be sure. Mankind moved from the country to the cities, from an agrarian lifestyle to the factories and offices of the towns and cities. Goods became cheaper and more readily available. Machines did the heavy lifting, enabling more work to be done by fewer hands, and freeing up time so that people could do other things, like get an education. And this, of course, put more brain power to work on the problems of everyday life, leading to further breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, and science in general.
Still, it took about one hundred years for the full scope of this "revolution" to be realized.
Now comes the what, electronic revolution? The technology revolution.
Leading the way were things like photography, movies, radio, telephones, and television. Heck, modern plumbing! Miniaturization. Computerization. Vaccinations, the elimination of many diseases, and anesthesiology. Space travel, the splitting of the atom, the mapping of the human genome, and the Internet (thanks, Al!). Of course, this has taken place over roughly the last century, as well. But if the changes in the previous century were massive, those in the 20th century were monumental.
We can now communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere - including visuals. A computer can guide us from point A to point B as we drive our cars. We can access more information more quickly than ever in the history of mankind - and more quickly than any human will ever be able to fully appreciate. Computers themselves have gone from enormous, room-sized glorified abaci to tiny etched silicon chips that can, after a fashion, reproduce themselves, only better.
I have often reflected that people born in the middle of the last century were brought up under a whole new set of rules: radio, television, and movies gave unprecedented access to developing young minds; plenty of inexpensive food and superb public education meant strong bodies and developed minds; cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other labor-saving devices meant these people were never slaves to manual labor.
If all that resulted in a brave new world in the second half of that century, how much more so will children raised in this first half of the twenty-first century change the world they inhabit as adults? I watched a little three year old flipping through photos on an iPhone recently, and could only marvel at what the tools at her disposal would mean in terms of her ability to move the world forward.
If there is a reason to live forever, it's simply this: to see what the world looks like in 2050, and 3000, and beyond.
"That presentation could be adapted for a mobile app."
"Now that they've opened up the API."
"Working Java ME, right?"
"Right, and we have to keep the file size under 1 meg if it's going to run on iPhones."
Or, something like that, anyway.
And it dawned on me that ten years ago, even five years ago, this conversation would not, could not, have been held.
I know that it's been said so often that it's become a cliche from which I want to run screaming, but "the world is moving faster and faster."
If you think about it, the Industrial Revolution lasted about one hundred - one hundred - years, roughly the entire 19th century. There were sweeping changes, to be sure. Mankind moved from the country to the cities, from an agrarian lifestyle to the factories and offices of the towns and cities. Goods became cheaper and more readily available. Machines did the heavy lifting, enabling more work to be done by fewer hands, and freeing up time so that people could do other things, like get an education. And this, of course, put more brain power to work on the problems of everyday life, leading to further breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, and science in general.
Still, it took about one hundred years for the full scope of this "revolution" to be realized.
Now comes the what, electronic revolution? The technology revolution.
Leading the way were things like photography, movies, radio, telephones, and television. Heck, modern plumbing! Miniaturization. Computerization. Vaccinations, the elimination of many diseases, and anesthesiology. Space travel, the splitting of the atom, the mapping of the human genome, and the Internet (thanks, Al!). Of course, this has taken place over roughly the last century, as well. But if the changes in the previous century were massive, those in the 20th century were monumental.
We can now communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere - including visuals. A computer can guide us from point A to point B as we drive our cars. We can access more information more quickly than ever in the history of mankind - and more quickly than any human will ever be able to fully appreciate. Computers themselves have gone from enormous, room-sized glorified abaci to tiny etched silicon chips that can, after a fashion, reproduce themselves, only better.
I have often reflected that people born in the middle of the last century were brought up under a whole new set of rules: radio, television, and movies gave unprecedented access to developing young minds; plenty of inexpensive food and superb public education meant strong bodies and developed minds; cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other labor-saving devices meant these people were never slaves to manual labor.
If all that resulted in a brave new world in the second half of that century, how much more so will children raised in this first half of the twenty-first century change the world they inhabit as adults? I watched a little three year old flipping through photos on an iPhone recently, and could only marvel at what the tools at her disposal would mean in terms of her ability to move the world forward.
If there is a reason to live forever, it's simply this: to see what the world looks like in 2050, and 3000, and beyond.
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