ThirdOfFive |
11-22-2023 04:27 PM |
I was watching a rather grainy YouTube video last night on how to use the latest in cutting-edge technology--the dial telephone! I still remember what the dial phone replaced: the old wooden box on the wall with a black horn that you spoke into, while listening with the receiver held to your ear, and you rang people up with a little hand-crank: longs and shorts. Calling anyone not on our "party line" meant ringing up "central", with the worker (Audrey, in our case) physically connected your line with the line of the person you were calling. Audrey only worked 40 hours a week though, so you had to plan your calls accordingly. Stone-age technology, relatively speaking, when compared to sending information 10 million miles on a beam of light. But those old phones themselves were cutting-age technology mere decades before dial phones came available.
Just checked my wrist: the watch I'm wearing is a computer multiples upon multiples more powerful than what took the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon and back. Heck, my watch CHARGER is more powerful.
Knowledge begets knowledge. Today's miracles are only destined to be tomorrow's antique curiosities. I have no doubt that in the lifetimes of my grandchildren we will have the capability (whether or not we have the will is another question) not only for interplanetary but for interstellar travel. No doubt an antique curiosity from our age, Voyager 1, will one day grace the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Remember we couldn't fly--until we did.
"There is no "never". Only "not yet". Words I recall seeing on an old German silent-film - era science fiction movie. Less than a hundred years ago--do you think they really had any inkling, compared to today, just how prophetic those words were?
|