My writings are always from a
technological/scientific perspective. So my understanding and comments on human
lifestyle and civilization or on anything for that matter have NOTHING to do
with philosophical, literary, societal, religious, poetic, political and
economic changes that have happened to human civilization. It’s all about how
science & technology changes our lives. As a matter of fact, science &
technology bring change to societal, political, economic, literary, poetic,
religious and philosophical ways of our lives, and not the other way round.
Challenge me with data, statistics, logical analyses and concrete examples if I
need to be proven wrong.
As
I had written in my preceding blog, there’s only one human civilization on this
planet (as far as history goes) and so there’s only a singular path of progress
from its dawn till 2012 AD. Put it simply, human species have evolved in only
one way, and there’s only one known planet which is earth where we know of
intelligent species. Thus, we lack any kind of reference to which we can
compare and comment if our progress has been on a faster or a slower rate.
Pause. However, the rate of progress itself has been increasing as far as we
can discern. Let’s put a simple example. How would a person living in the 1st
century AD find the world different if he/she were to wake up in 1100 AD? What
things were radically different to human lifestyle in 1100 AD which were
totally absent or unthinkable in 100 AD? To my knowledge, nothing much! May be
the kind of dresses and clothes, kind of utensils, kind of food, what else?
Columbus was yet to sail across the Atlantic and the Renaissance was yet to
begin. So two persons separated by huge time duration of 1000 years would find
no radical difference in the ways of their lives! Really, human civilization’s
progress can never be so slow! Or am I missing something? I had asked this
question to many of my fellow PhD students and everyone seems to agree that YES,
the 1000 years from 100 AD to 1100 AD did not alter the human civilization any
radically or drastically in a way in which we lived our lives. If I plot the
progress of human civilization (some arbitrary quantity ‘x’ with respect to
time, then from 100 AD to 1100 AD, I would draw an almost straight line with a
slope of near zero.
A
person who lived during 1100 AD comes to life in 1900 AD, let us assume. Damn!
He/she would find the world a place of pure magic! Why won’t he/she? Of course.
There’re these automobiles which run so fast, there’re trains which run on
steam engines, there’s balloons on which people go up in sky and people would
be almost close to flying in airplanes! Bizarre things like electromagnetic
waves, radio, and telephone would be there. The person from 1100 AD would be so
amazed to use the telescope and see the Jupiter and its moons, and use the
microscope to see germs invisible to his/her naked eye! He/she could speak using
a telephone to someone across the ocean whom he/she couldn’t see! He/she would
be so amazed at the incandescent bulb. All these are scientific and
technological. Add to these the massive societal, philosophical, literary and
religious changes which the Renaissance would have brought in. So these 900
years separating 1100 AD to 1900 AD were visibly very progressive years, for
drastic changes did happen to how we
lived our lives and how much we knew about nature in a more factual and logical
way.
And
finally I don’t need a person of 1900 AD to come to life in 2012 AD. In fact,
many people from 1910s and 1920s are still living today, and although I have
never asked any such person about how he/she feels about the difference in our
world from 1930s to 2012, yet, I know myself
how it feels to witness the dramatic changes in the ways of our lifestyle in
the last 23 or 24 years (assuming my consciousness and ability to remember
events germinated while I was 3 to 4 years old). I have lived my life at a time
when having a color TV in your locality was a matter of serious prestige, and
when using a dial-up telephone was a rarity! In fact, I was in Nursery/Kindergarten
when I first ‘saw’ a telephone in one
of my aunt’s places and I boasted to my school friends for a long time that I
had the fortune of ‘seeing’ a telephone! If my dad captured a few pictures of
important family occasions or gatherings or festivals etc. using his
then-prevalent ‘non-digital’ camera, I would be waiting impatiently for the day
when all the 36 copies of the photo-reel would be exhausted so that he could
get the photo-reel developed in a studio and then I could see if my eyes were
closed while he clicked my photo! It could be a few weeks to a couple of months
before the reel was developed, and I had to wait till then. The Doordarshan
(India’s national Television broadcasting) program of Chitrahaar every Wednesday evening (I think it was 8 pm) was the
only time in the week when I could watch Hindi/Bollywood
songs and that too if load shedding did not disappoint! I get goose bumps
ruminating my days from 1990 to 2012, and how technology has changed our way of
life in ways we could have possibly not thought of in 1990. Obviously then, a
person born in 1930s and still living today would see it as a super fast
progress (?) of human civilization over the last 70 or 80 years. The rate of progress is indeed increasing. And
so if I do not die in an accident or in a gun-shoot out or bomb blast or do not
develop an incurable disease and I manage to live for the next 40 years till
2052 (with a higher possibility that I might die sooner due to health
complicacies given I’m highly overweight and with a diabetic tendency), then, I
will be fortunate (?) to see what unseen and unpredicted changes technology and
science bring about to change our lives in ways we can only imagine now. More
fortunate, hopefully, I would be to think of as well as to take pride of the
fact that I being a researcher of technology, took part in this journey of
trying to find out new things and applying them to useful technologies
(although my contributions would be nearly zero).
Ironically,
living my childhood days in late 80s and early 90s in a God-forsaken remote
place of Assam (which itself is a ‘remote’ (?) state in India), I enjoyed some
rare privileges which are almost non-existent today. That reminds me of my
conversation with a guy from India a couple of days back (August, 2012) whom I
had met at the badminton courts here at the Ohio State University. He exclaimed
“Oh, so remote! You come from Assam!” when I told him I am from Assam. Funny, I
thought, at least in 2012. Anyways, I think I am indeed super lucky that living
in that God-forsaken place in early 1990s provided me with some memories that
are sharper than anything else till now although I was just a child then! And I
feel deeply saddened to ponder that such privileges and opportunities are so
extremely difficult to enjoy these days, and no matter how much I try, I cannot
get those back! What is it exactly?
Have
you ever had the rare privilege of
staring for hours at a completely cloudless and moonless sky at night, with
absolutely no artificial light around? Not even a candle, not even a single
light bulb or street-lamp, not even a flash light – nothing with a radius of
few tens of miles. But total and all-engulfing darkness where you cannot even
see own hands properly, for starlight is so dim! The view of uncountable stars
dotting such a moonless, cloudless and no-artificial-light-around night sky is
a state of bliss incomparable to anything else! At least to me. No scenic
beauty which I have ever seen in my life till now can be simultaneously so
mesmerizing, intoxicating, captivating and breath-taking as such a starry sky
on a moonless and cloudless night. It
gives a humbling feeling of how tiny we are, how grand the ‘sky’ is and how
mysterious nature is. And I fell in love
with the constellations of Orion and Great Bear even when I was just seven
years old, and kept gazing in awe, nights after nights, at the Milky Way which painted
itself across the starry night as a faint, nebulous white strip. Actually, I am
not sure how many kids today have seen the Milky Way on a night sky. Street-lamps
and artificial lights from all around are so annoyingly ubiquitous now that
even when I am back to my home in Assam now, I cannot get a glimpse of the
night sky anywhere similar to what I had got 20 years back. Even if there’s
load-shedding on a moonless, cloudless night, the inverters in almost all the
houses (including mine!!) kick in instantaneously, lighting up the whole
neighborhood and blurring up the starry sky. Will I ever get that chance again
in my life? Will you get such a chance? And if you have not experienced it yet,
you’re missing something really breath-taking in your life.
The
irony of living at this time in history, in 2012, to a researcher/engineer like
me is that I have seen the exponential changes in our lifestyle brought about
by technology in a rather small duration of time, yet, I do realize that
technology is actually, beginning to saturate. All these fun gadgets like
iPhone and iPads, and all these fancy stuffs like Facebook, Twitter – all these
are mere by-products of the massive sweeps of technological breakthroughs in
1950s, 60s and 70s. The consumer-driven industry run by a handful of super
smart people has successfully managed to keep millions of people in a state of
utopia and fantasy by making them believe that technology is rapidly
accelerating while in reality, everything we are boasting of today in the
technology domain are mere by-products of the communication theories by Shannon
in 1940s (how many of us know that cell-phones & other communicating
gadgets owe tremendously to him!), the transistor by Shockley et al, the contributions
by Turing towards computer science, the semiconductor laser, the IC by Noyce.
They generated the tide of dramatic changes that swept mankind for the next
40-50 years. The face of mankind got changed in a way never before, but the
time is now ripe for fundamental breakthroughs which can generate another such
unprecedented wave of accelerated growth of human civilization. It is high time
we realize that all the fancy changes in so-called technology are mere incremental
progress. But the irony of this irony is that, even the existing technology,
albeit incremental, has not reached out to all the people of the world! The
benefits and advantages of all these awe-inspiring technological gadgets have
yet not been able to reach to remote places in under-developed and developing
countries, and thus, a fraction of mankind still are deprived of the magic
which is unfolding at this time of human history.
3:30
am on Monday is indeed a bad time to write a blog.
Comments
Post a Comment