I was torn between writing about two different topics this time. I almost wrote about great movie and tv mistakes, but I decided to save that one. That is the problem when you write articles on this type of site, since anything goes, there are so many topics out there that I am interested in.

Technology has a very strange side to it. Unlike other areas of human endeavor, technology feeds off of itself. You may be wondering what I mean by this? It is quite simple really, as technology progresses, it spawns more technology. Look at it this way, progress in farming can be measured in years. We can safely say that we have advanced 50 years in farming techniques in the last 50 years. This would be a linier progression and it is quite normal. But this doesn't always hold true for technology. In the same 50 years, technology may have advanced 1,000 years. Have I flipped my lid, gone bonkers or what? I hope not. I am talking about an accepted principle. Since technology breeds new technology it can not be measured by the same linear yardstick that we use to measure other things.

If we believe that there are other civilizations out there in far off space and if one or more were to send a vehicle to Earth for a visit, we would say that they must be more advanced than us. That is more technologically advanced. Depending on what the ship they sent is capable of doing, we would get some measure of how much more advanced they are than us. Lets say that the ship does things that we have only dreamed about. For the sake of argument, lets say it is like the Enterprise from Star Trek. Not the series with William Shatner but the one where Patrick Steward is the captain. We might say in that instance, that these aliens are about 600 years ahead of us, but would this be true? At first glance it would seem so, but when you look at the difference in our technology in the past 100 years you begin to realize that progress is accelerating in this area.

We went from computers that would fill a couple of rooms and ran on vacuum tubes to whole computers on a chip. This, in itself, allowed us to put computers into other devices which in turn allowed us to monitor them which in turn gave them a certain amount of intelligence. It is a cascade effect. We have robots, that are really computers that have moving parts, that can build robots. Will the robots that are built by robots get advances built into them that will surprise us someday? Will this cascade of technological advancement someday cause our devices to begin to advance on their own?

The point that I am trying to make is this, we might reach the plateau that we believed was 600 years ahead of us in much less time. In another two hundred years we may be so far advanced from a technological point of view that it could be the equivalent of what we thought would take thousands of years. For example, look at the new space ship engine that is being developed by the European Space Agency. It is so fast that it makes flying anywhere in the solar system a practical matter, and this is only the first version of the new engine. You can read about it on this site under Air Space Craft. I am sure that by the time it is ready to go it will even be a lot faster.

Many people may not realize it, but the day is coming when machines will be smarter than us. We might not even be able to tell if we are talking to one or not on the phone. The simple messages and instructions that computers leave us when we get an automated answering service will seem like something out of the stone age. Once machines surpass our intelligence level than will our devices take a quantum leap forward? This could happen, the computers could redesign everything we use making them more efficient and maybe even cheaper. This could open up the way for travel between stars, feeding the hungry of the world and maybe even the curing of all diseases. Maybe humankind will reach this plateau before the computers get that intelligent and they will be called upon for even more fantastic advances.

We could reach a point by the end of this century, if we aren't destroyed by then, where we have advanced the equivalent of 10,000 years according to some scientists. As we advance faster and faster we have to think of where it will all end. It seems to me that there has to be some point where advancement will stop or at least slow to a crawl. Will humans become so advanced that if we encounter others they will think of us as gods? I hope not, but this is always a possibility. A funny thing is that as the progress of technology increases, we as humans, seem to adapt to the pace. Because we do adapt, we hardly notice how much faster things are progressing. Just look at the progress we have made since World War II ended. This is just no denying it, change is upon us and it is traveling a faster course every day

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Road To Progress