On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 12:13:28PM -0500, Darren Addy wrote: > On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Walter Hamler <hamlerwal...@gmail.com> wrote: > >?I find it amazing that within my lifetime I have seen us > > go from barely flying jets and knowing nothing about the solar system > > other than rudimentary knowledge, to cataloging thousands of planets > > around other stars in our galactic neighborhood. > > Very true. My great-grandfather's and grandfather's (now 97) > generations were perhaps the greatest changes in a single lifetime. > They went from an age when (from time immemorial) farmers broke ground > with oxen or horses to the mechanical age to landing a man on the moon > (in my great-grandfather's case). That is an incredible explosion of > technology. If you were graphing it it would be astounding how much it > has spiked.
That's the nature of exponential growth. James Burke had a popular TV series called "The Day the Universe Changed" showing how some technologies totally disrupted the society of their time. Apart from the change we see today (based on the internal combustion engine at the start of the century, and computers about half as long ago), there is also the advance in medical technology - spare part surgery is so common that people rarely even think about it. And radio, and the atom bomb, and ... But there was just as much of an upheaval two centuries earlier, with the coming of the industrial age, and the move from the country to cities. Before that there was Gutenberg, who created the first information age. And so backwards through the ages to the introduction of various metals, agriculture, timekeeping, navigation, etc. I'm sure every age feels that theirs is the culmination of human advancement. I just wonder what our grandchildren (if we have any) will consider to be the defining technology of their time. It's probably surfaced by now, but hasn't yet progressed much beyond the laboratory. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
