Where we are going

Over the past few days I've done quite about of speculating as to why humanity seems so much less optimistic than we once were. My OAC English Teacher, Mr. Coombs once told us that the defining event of the 20'th Century was World War I, prior to that horror humanity, generally, had faith in our own abilities to shape and control our destiny. When it became apparent after the outbreak of war that not only could we not control the natural or accidental (see my comments on the sinking of the RMS Titanic) but on some occasions our plans could run so far out of control, like the Von Schlieffen Plan, that we are left fighting from the trenches machine gunning our former friends at the rate of hundreds of thousands a day. World War I represents the industrial revolutions true arrival into the field of battle, we had industrialised killing people.

Today however I would like to consider some reasons to hope. Right now attached to my laptop is a USB hard drive that I am formatting, it warehouses not billions but hundreds of billions of characters of information. My laptop is old, it is only running at just over one and a half billion instructions per second with a billion characters of memory. Combined weight of the two devices? Under 5kg. Now here's an entertaining comparison, anyone old enough no doubt remembers Neil Armstong's famous One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind remark from the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969. It was a remarkable achievement, the computer used by Armstong and Aldrin to actually land on the moon? The Apollo Guidance Computer or AGC, weighed in at 30kg, had 74 thousand characters of storage of which about 4 thousand characters were memory. It cost one hundred fifty thousand dollars at time when the average American was paid under $5 thousand per year. Perhaps a more portable option for Armstong and Aldrin would be my Blackberry, I don't even know what kind of processor is in it, I know older models used to have a Pentium chip, my unit has about 60 million characters of memory and the battery will not last from a journey from the Earth to the Moon and back, but with one recharge on route (or an extra charged batter left to float around somewhere) and it should be good to go. An added bonus, my Blackberry has a nice colour screen, so when the astronauts are bored, they can look at some nice high resolution images of their destination.

What about average Americans? In the 1960s an American could expect to live to about 65 or 70, in other words there was a very reasonable chance that an average American would die before retiring. Now Americans can expect to live upwards of 70 to 75 years.

In the 1960s vast numbers of people around the world went hungry every day, although still true, thanks to the green revolution it is possible - if distribution systems were improved - to feed every human being on Earth the UN standard of 2500 calories of food energy a day.

We live in a world of new vaccines and new antibiotics, we live in a world of new understandings and new communications.

The World we live in is by no means perfect but there is reason to hope, if nothing else, we are an inventive species good at finding new ways out of old problems.