In case you haven't guessed from the title, this post is about technology and my opinions on it. Some of these are pretty subjective, but such is the nature of opinion.
We've come a long way in a short time. My grandmother was born just seven years after the Wright brothers flew their clumsy, underpowered aeroplane on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, and she died having seen men use what was learned on those dunes to circumnavigate the Earth, fight several wars, unleash the fiery power of the atom, travel into space and to the moon, and launch satellites that allow us to communicate as we do here now, and to perform a myriad of other useful tasks. I'm not particularly old but I'm already seeing what was the science fiction of my childhood become the reality I live in.
A man can lose an arm and have it put back on again, or, should it be lost or damaged beyond repair, he can be fitted with a replacement that can take signals from his nerves and even give him feedback like his natural limb did, all while being insensitive to discomfort and untiring. My nation's Navy recently deployed laser weapons to defend against missiles -laser weapons! This does the heart of the Sci-Fi fan good. While these are minority cases, they show just how far we have come, and let us wonder wide-eyed how far we will go.
Will the latest "Flying Car", newly approved, finally give us what so many of us, numb to the tiny portable phones that let us call anyone on the planet and the massive, Gibsonian computer network we use right now, what has always seemed the symbol of "The Future"? Or perhaps will they simply prove an amusing novelty for the few who can truly use them, and peter out after a few hundred are made, just like all the previous attempts at blending the automobile and the aeroplane? We shall see.
No comments:
Post a Comment