I remember as a child talking to my great-grandfather, who was born in 1898. He used to talk about the greatness of mankind, looking at the progress that had been made in his lifetime. He was born into a time when travel was still predominately horse, train, and boat. He watched as cars not only became available, but essential. He saw the invention of the aircraft, built them during WWI for the Navy, and watched as the ranges increased, jet engines were developed, and space travel became a reality. The adding machine on his desk he used to run his contracting business became smaller and electric, then smaller still. Telephones in every household, without an operator. Large radios became smaller transistor radios, and huge televisions with tiny black-and-white screens became smaller consoles with bigger screens, and actually had color. I can't help but to think how he'd be absolutely blown away if he could just see what I wear on my belt every day, the cell phone, the data organizer, the plastic gun in the plastic holster.
And, while it may be less obvious to us, stop and look at the developments in the last few years. My wife and I got a P.C. for our home back in 1998. It was amazing, with 8 gigs of hard drive space, and we knew we'd never fill it up, but it was nice to have. We marveled at how fast our dial-up internet service was. We hoped to save up money for a digital camera. Here we are seven years later. Our current home P.C. has 80 gigs of hard drive space, the wife's work laptop a mere 20 gigs. I have a thumb drive in my pocket with 512 megs of space, which replaced the 3.5 inch discs I used to use to haul 1.4 megs of data back and forth from home to work. Our dial-up service drives us crazy, because we're both used to T-1 internet access at work. And, we turned down free digital cameras with credit card offers and such on a frequent basis. Think of the batteries. Back in 1194, when I started work, I kept a Mini-Mag light in my briefcase for use at crime scenes. Now, I've got an even brighter LED on my keychain I use instead. Mankind is experiancing technological leaps all around us, and we barely notice what's going on.
The future of mankind depends on a few things, though.
1. Interspace travel. We need to get off of this rock and see what else is out there. Forget Star Trek, aliens and such. I mean resources, materials for use in manufacture and possibly even hospitable environmenst in which to work/live.
2. Medicine. Yes, humans are living far longer than ever before in history. However, things like AIDS, the Avian Flu, SARs, and unknown Ebola type viruses have the potential to bring humankind to its knees if a pandemeic incident were to occur.
3. Peace. I know that war has spurred on great leaps in technology, but unless resources are devoted to peaceful developments, these leaps in technology will be stalled, if not outright killed by the need for better weapons. Another full World War could set progress back greatly.
4. Freedom. Government funding may have helped many advances, but government controll hasn't. It's the free man (or woman) working in freedom, without concerns of goals, deadlines, and such that make the greatest discoveries. And that only happens in a free world.
