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Some
tidbits to consider…
Don Surles
Do you remember My Weekly Reader and
stories of the USA's efforts to be the biggest, the best, the strongest,
and the smartest nation on Earth? Do you remember the scientific
and technological breakthroughs that seemed to appear regularly in our
lives?
Looking back, and compressing more
than thirty five…well, a lot of years, into just a memory, the wonders
delivered by mankind during my lifetime add up to be a phenomenon that
I certainly hope the next generations can sustain and maybe, just maybe,
improve.
Sometime ago when my Dad was ill,
I thought of how the world changed during his lifetime. He saw the
world move from real one horse-power power to landing a man on the moon
with a billion horsepower rocket. He lived through two world wars,
the Great Depression, the electrification of the country, the telephone,
the development of atomic and nuclear power, automobiles, airplanes - from
biplanes to sound-barrier breaking jets, and improvements in human comfort
ranging from penicillin to air conditioning. I remember his stories
of the flu epidemic of 1917 and his comparison of his boyhood dirt roads
to the building of I-95. Reflecting on the changes during his lifetime
I wonder how he managed to successfully meet the challenges created by
those improvements.
Fast forward a generation…now I am
contemplating the significant changes that have taken place during my lifetime.
The breakthroughs in medicine, information processing, communication, industrial
production, human comforts…all have been superb. Today's world of
iPods, cell phones, LCD screens, miracle surgeries and medicines, and GPS's,
combined with ABUNDANCE in all areas, is truly amazing. If only we
could be as successful in international relations…
Will the pace of innovation increase
or decrease? Who knows? My guess is that it will increase because
of human nature's built-in inquisitiveness. The billions of people
in our world have been led through several generations of technology triumphs
by a small percentage of the population - mainly the USA. Stand back
and watch what happens when those billions become fully involved in bettering
the condition of mankind on this planet. Be prepared to cope with
change at a much faster pace.
Zooming in on astronomy and the exploration
of space, it has been twenty years since Challenger exploded January 28,
1986, and it has been than thirty six years since the first Apollo mission
to the moon. We are still fiddling with a crippled space program
and less than one hundred percent devotion to space exploration.
We have seen Faster, Better, Cheaper fail so many times. Today there
is not much incentive for risk taking in the space program. Lets
hope that commercialization of space exploration will be more productive
than we have been in the last twenty or |
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