35 Years From the Moon

Today marks 35 years since humankind first walked on the moon. It is one of those things that I wish I had been born early enough to witness, not so much for the political triumph and national pride that it likely held for so many Americans, but from a point of scientific discovery. I hope that I live long enough to witness the first human footsteps on Mars, that is in the event we don't find life, intelligent or non-intelligent there, as I think we have enough issues on our own planet that it would be unfair for us to go claim another organism's planet just on the premise that we can, and they are too simple to do anything about it. Think about the similar situation of early simple organisms on Earth, and the possible "butterfly effect" implications it would have on our evolution if some advanced being came and disturbed things. Not only that, but the threat could exist that an organism from Mars inadvertently brought to Earth on a return mission could have adverse effects here. And now of the Trekkie tangent, I will restate that I would love to be alive to witness the first human steps on the moon, to be part of the first generation to have visited another planet, like the people alive in 1969 who came to recognize Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (with unfortunate lack of recognition, myself guilty as well, of the relatively few further astronauts that have been to the moon), who will go down in history with the likes of explorers like Magellan and Christopher Columbus. The accomplishments of Armstrong and Aldrin of course will be more much better documented, and will not be open to the debate that always goes with the name Christopher Columbus. Such is one of the features of a steadily advancing civilization.

Thoughts about something relevant to my lifetime, relevant in the way that the first steps on the moon were anyways, also got me thinking about important inventions through time, and I came to the realization, that while many people agree that the most important inventions to the human race came with the developments of the radio, telephone, automobile, and most importantly flight, and space flight, I also feel that some of the proliferations of my time will have, or already have had a significant impact on the human race. The most obvious, and undeniable of these has to be the personal computer and subsequently the internet. Granted the personal computer existed in some forms before 1983, but certainly was not a household name, let alone a household occurrence as it is today. Early public bulletin boards, to the best of my knowledge first came into existence in the early to mid 80's, and I think the world wide web after that point was an inevitability, and one that today gives everyone, at least in the first world, almost instantaneous access to almost anything. World news, local news, sports news, radio and TV broadcasts digitally sampled for computers, friends, entertainment and so on are just a few of the broad classes of information, communication and entertainment available at a few keystrokes. It really has tied the world, or again, at least the first world, together, and I can only assume that the same will follow for the countries currently struggling right now to achieve the idyllic first world status. I won't use this as a venue for the whole discussion of international relations for now, but nonetheless, I think it is inevitable that the entire population of the world will one day turn to the internet as a major (but necessarily not the only) tool for communication, entertainment, and information, as the first world already has in my lifetime.