I know I’m getting old but I am still going to brag about the fact that my generation will always be the one that happily sandwiched the Age of Information. We understand and enjoy technology so much because we remember what it was like when we didn’t have it. I stole this 1953 snippet from Facebook. It is amusing because I grew up in a house with a phone that was attached to the kitchen wall by a curly cord that only reached to the sink so there was no such thing as talking without parents listening, or even answering before you knew who it was. Lo and behold, Mr. Sullivan was probably considered a nut back then but he was clairvoyant after all. Maybe he was a time traveler and he hasn’t shared that technology with us yet.
I also watched the Jetsons, Star Trek, and Star Wars and they all had iPads. People laugh about how we thought we’d have flying cars by the year 2000 but we do have hoverboards and self-tying shoes like Marty McFly. People likely thought Gene Roddenberry was a nut but we do have armaments that are ‘set to stun’ and the military even has a directed-energy weapon that sends a pulse of electromagnetic radiation to stop someone cold in their tracks.
We don’t have warp speed but we do have Elon Musk and Erik Lentz who are working on negative mass and the math that will bend space-time and bring the stars to us. To answer your next question, I have no idea how so I am grateful to the Degrasse-Tysons of the world who will make a PowerPoint for me when the time comes.
We don’t have tractor beams but MIT invented laser beam ‘tweezers’ that can hold and move microscopic objects. And the list goes on.
Meanwhile, and totally digressing, I’m watching hummingbirds on my back porch and marveling at how much better our Creator is at technology anyway. The size and energy it takes to make human aircraft hover and fly backwards (a.k.a. helicopters) is cosmically silly compared to the simplicity of this little feathered guy who weighs as much as a penny and lives on sugar. Yes, I know we have drones now but I’d rather have a Blackhawk in a fight and science still doesn’t know how hummers change direction so quickly during aerial ‘dogfights’. Okay, maybe that’s a wash… or a tie.
In any case, we have figured out how to teleport, but only at the quantum level. Information from this photon is transferred to that photon without either of them actually moving. My question then is whether there has to be a copy of me already on the other side of the transporter to paste all the information from my 15 trillion cells? Even so, the original is destroyed in the process, so would I know I was a copy of myself? Can we style my photon copy to have less gray hair and abs?
I know there are already real-world applications. Quantum banking is in the works and the servers-in-space will be impossible to hack so no one can steal my money. Unhackable?… are you listening, every election board in America?
Still, I hope banks don’t do away with dollars and cents all together. I’d miss dumping a coffee can of coins on the porch and counting them while I watch birds and clouds. Heck even Captain Kirk would enjoy that. By the way, he’s due to be born in Iowa in just 206 years so let’s be sure to save some sentimental things for him too.