Scientists who study such things tell us the present — the here and now — exists in a timeframe that stretches somewhere between 2.5 seconds to as much as 15 seconds. That’s not long.
In fact, it’s so not long that I can hold my breath through the entire present and into the future. Of course, in the future awaits another present. One that is almost indistinguishable from this one except in that present I may be out of breath and turning blue.
The scientific perspective is that we all live in the present very briefly. Our lives are actually made up of the past and our anticipation of the future. That may seem weird to you, but it is true. Or at least, it’s a perspective on truth that is intellectually fun to kick around now and then.
So, we’re really left with the past and the future. The first line you read of this column is already in the past. The last line is still waiting to be discovered in your future. Cool, right?
The past is the past. It is fixed in time. Whatever happened, happened. We can remember it. We can study it. We can glean information and understanding from what has come before with the intention of applying that new knowledge in the future.
That sounds like a reasonable path to progress. It’s logical. It makes perfect sense.
If occurrence A led to occurrence B on Mott Street in 1917 there’s no reason that a similar occurrence A shouldn’t lead to a new but very familiar B on any street in 2024. Except it won’t.
Put another way, the mathematical certainty of what’s around the corner in our future is based on our understanding of the past. And our understanding is imperfect. It is incorrect. The calculus of life just doesn’t work out that way.
This is both good news and less than good news. It means the future is an absolute blank slate. There is no way to know what will come our way next month, next year, next century. All we know for sure is that the future will be different from the past and the present. A basic truth that spells opportunity for those of us who are inclined to color outside the lines now and then.
Just as Orville and Wilbur on their best day couldn’t foresee the advent of ailerons, metal skins, or jet engines, others could and did. Hence, all those marvelous technological leaps exist today.
Neil Armstrong and his peers were smart, brave, bold men who were willing to sit atop a massive rocket in the hopes that everything would work well enough to get them into Earth orbit and bring them home safely again. They could imagine a moon landing as their ultimate goal. Although no one man or woman had the insight to know how that would work exactly. Not in 1963 anyway. It took a cast of thousands quite some time to put all the pieces together.
Fifty years ago there wasn’t a single person at NASA, Boeing, or Lockheed who could even imagine the possibility of firing a rocket the size of a Saturn V into space only to bring the first stage booster back to the pad and land it. That was such a laughable idea that it was made into a comedy adventure series by the good folks at ABC in 1979. The series starred Andy Griffith, formerly of Mayberry, as a junk man who built a landable rocket with a three-person crew. Their mission was to recover space junk. Hijinks ensued, of course.
The series ran for just one season. The idea was too ridiculous to consider plausible.
The present we live in today was literally unbelievable to the men and women who populated our grandparent’s generation. Many of them were born into a society without electricity or paved roads. Even in the largest, most populated cities in the world, the horse and carriage was the primary means of moving freight locally.
That was normal to them. It’s quaint to us.
As I wander out onto the ramp at my local airport, I see a Cirrus SR22 and a Van’s RV-12 — two opposite ends of the general aviation spectrum that were entirely missing from the menu of options not that long ago. Composite structures, light, efficient engines that run unleaded fuel and boast glass panels. Those were all as fanciful as Dick Tracy’s wrist radio in the old days.
I wear an Apple Watch. Perhaps you do too. Chester Gould (Dick Tracy’s creator) would be amazed.
What piques my interest is the line service kids who are fueling the airplanes, driving the tug, and staffing the front desk. What will aviation look like for them in the distant future? Can we even imagine what they’re going to be flying 50 years from now when they’re my age?
I don’t think so.
In 1914 my great uncle Edward stood on the shore as some guy named Tony Jannus fired up a one-of-a-kind flying machine to carry Abram C. Pheil across Tampa Bay. The first scheduled airline in human history was born. It lasted three months.
I’m confident Edward had no idea that his yet-to-be-born nephew would one day pilot Boeing 747s around the world, moving from continent to continent in air-conditioned comfort while chowing down on first class vittles. He’d fly over the north and south poles on a trip that circumnavigated the entire globe in just two days.
Fifty years of technological advancement will result in a world you and I won’t recognize. Our children and grandchildren will believe that relocating to Mars is a viable option. They’ll ride in autonomous cars to a place where an autonomous aircraft will transport them to the launch facility — a scenario we could easily disregard as being ridiculous.
As ridiculous as great uncle Edward turning to the person next to him to postulate, “I’ll bet these airplanes will carry our children along with hundreds of people at a time across the whole country in one day.”
And yet, that’s exactly what happened.
Like in the movie ‘Forest Gump’….life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’ll get.
I’ve seen a lot of technology changes in my 77 years. So, I’ll wait and see, while I’m still here…!
I see that G100UL is now available at Reid-Hillview, the county had eliminated 100LL a while ago. So, we;ll see how that goes with local pilots.?
“Our children and grandchildren will believe that relocating to Mars is a viable option. They’ll ride in autonomous cars to a place where an autonomous aircraft will transport them to the launch facility — a scenario we could easily disregard as being ridiculous.” Don’t bet on it. Mars is very far away and is desolate. No young adult is going to give up all the luxuries on Earth for that. The true Grand Challenges these days are surviving our crushing national debt of $36T, rampant inflation, out-of-control violence in our major cities (like Seattle), millions of boys growing up without fathers at home, and spiraling costs of aviation. Autonomous cars? Like the Tesla that ran under a truck and killed its inhabitants? No thank you.
And since that Tesla fatal accident, how many humans have caused fatal accidents in non-autonomous cars? Over 100 per day on average. Anecdotal Tesla accidents mean nothing statistically. I only care about the *fatalities per mile driven* for Tesla on full autopilot vs the average human driven car. In fact, we already have information on like this from Waymo’s autonomous taxis: “(Waymo has) an 85% reduction or 6.8 times lower crash rate involving any injury, from minor to severe and fatal cases (0.41 incidence per million miles for the Waymo Driver vs 2.78 for the human benchmark).”
I can totally understand your concern about the out-of-control violence. Yet there are 1/2 the number of murders per day/year as there are fatal car accidents. If you care about saving lives, you should be very much in favor of autonomous cars, which even at this early stage could save more lives per year than all those lost by violence.
There was a Star Trek episode called Assignment Earth (starring Teri Garr) in which an alien comes to 1968 Earth. One of the alien’s devices is a typewriter that types whatever you say into it. It was literally science fiction when the show aired, but today we speak to our phones and TV remotes they (mostly) understand what we say.
At least that technology was foreshadowed in science fiction. I don’t know of any stories that posited that someday everyone would take their family photos with their phones.