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I am in awe. completely, and unforgettably in awe. You see, we live in a time when there is something miraculous every day of the week, even faster. We have our heads filled with so many new things, new technology, new gizmos, new ideas that it becomes next to impossible to remember it all.
But somehow we do manage, because it becomes urgent at some point to keep up the pace, and accept the changes as philosophically as we can.
I wonder....what people would have thought a hundred years ago if even a minute portion of what we take for granted today was present then.
Jack the Ripper--foiled through forensic science; The miracle of space flight in a time dominated by dirigibles and hot air ballooning; Deep sea divers--more real than the stories of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; Instantaneous communication across the world, regardless of your original location; Digital photography, quicker, easier and less bogged down with camera equipment; Modern medicine--a doctor back then would have scoffed at heart transplants, operating rooms, sterile conditions; Personal computers--whoa: that one will cause the "vapors" in anyone!
I have in my iGoogle page a gadget for looking at webcams around the world. Many of the images seem to emanate from Europe, and seeing as it's night here, it's only natural to remember that most of Europe is also dark for the same reason. And then a brightly lit-up image is sent from Italy--an image that appears to be of traffic. Marina di Torre Vado in Puglia--Torre Vado, Italy is certainly not dark!
And then it strikes me, as it has done so for quite a few years now, that the world is never far away anymore. How in times gone by, letters and packaging, and other very slow forms of communications could delay "news" for months and more. How even the most patient person could go stark raving mad without hearing from someone.
We have grown accustomed to the frenzy of lives in the beginning of the new millennia. We have, sometimes, become slaves to the newest technologies, but only until we have mastered them. And mastering them means having enough knowledge to understand their basic design, and implementing that knowledge. I'm old enough to remember the absolute fear that computers wrought in the middle of the 20th century: how people were going to lose their jobs to computers, how computers could and world replace people in every facet of their lives, and how non-personal life was going to get. But it didn't happen. People instead found the opposite true--with microchips, the computers didn't need to fill a whole room, or weigh a ton. Instead, computers became personal, and became assets for both work and home computing, and brought people from all over the world together in ways that still can cause jaws to drop and realize all over again that we live in an amazing world.
What will it be like a hundred years from now? Do we even dare to consider how far ahead we will be by then? Someone I knew once said that we are progressing exponentially in technology--every twenty-five years, our knowledge doubles, he said. And I have to give him that, because even though he's not with us here now, he would likely have just nodded and smiled.
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