The Breathtaking Magnitude of Our Technology

People make fun of me all the time when I stop in the middle of what I (or we) am doing and say, "Holy cow man, look at what we CAN do! Look at what we ARE doing!" Dreams of 10 years ago became realities yesterday.

We have the ability to see things that are so small, you wouldn't even know they were there otherwise. We can compute Pi to millions (billions!) of digits before I can even say the first 4 out loud. [Mentioned in article] I live video chat with a friend in China, which is on the other side of the planet, thousands of KM and miles away. Millions (billions!) of people can all access information from their homes or their phones, in the middle of no where. We are communicating with a man made object that is over 20 BILLION kilometers away from us. We can store thousands (millions!) of books in a device no larger than a human finger. We can move several times faster than the speed of sound. We can...

Simply amazing. It is humbling to be able to work with technology every day and see what we can do. It is truly a blessing to know that even 5 years from now we, the human race, will be doing things that people are only beginning to imagine now. Here is to you technology, you make my pants shrink.

The only commercial supersonic jet no longer flies. The Space Shuttle is being retired without a replacement. It has taken months to stop the spill in the Gulf. Billions of dollars spent and we can't cure cancer. We can't even cure the common cold. Only a small fraction of the world even contributes to progress. Most people live on a few dollars a day and are just trying to survive.

In short, we have a long way to go, and there's a lot of work to do.