More Musings on the City of the Future

[mbarrick]

Here I sit, on a fully-automated robot train, typing a message that I will trnasmit by radio to in-turn be relayed by wire and light to San Francisco where it will be automatically published. The message will be read on cathode ray tubes and liquid crystal displays across the continent from Vancouver to Los Angeles to Miami to New York. It will be read at opposite ends of the earth, from Europe to Australia. And this is all a routine part of my Monday morning commute.

A century ago I would be lucky to get a letter to Australia inside of three months. The area that I am travelling over was wilderness. Central Africa was less well known than the surface of Titan now; "Tarzan" was brand-new science-fiction. A century ago people believed there were men on Mars, today, right now, there are robots exploring Mars.

Sometimes you have to stop and remember how amazing our "ordinary" really is.

Comments

[tnkgrl.livejournal.com]

I try to explain this to people... But then they just look at me weird!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Yup. It requiures an ability to step out of context and imagine the world from another point of view, to take a second to not take for granted what one always has taken for granted. A world without cell-phones and computers is a foreign concept for anyone under 25 now, let alone a world without television, radio, reliable telephones, aeroplanes, inter-state/trans-continental highways, satellites, etc.