A friend and I were discussing the Bible recently. I wondered why nothing has been
added to it in so many centuries and suggested that perhaps it was time for
another chapter or two. She told me that
it was complete as written and that there was nothing left to add. When I said that I found this hard to
believe, her response was that everything from the beginning of time until the
End Times is included, forecast and chronicled. It’s all we need. There is nothing more to tell.
Progress is
an interesting phenomenon. Take a somewhat
closer look at the last two thousand years and you’ll find that humanity and
society have made tremendous leaps in science or technology or philosophy at a
few points in our known history and also have shown absolute stagnation a few
times. We had the Dark Ages followed by
the Industrial Revolution.
Most
recently, the invention and development of computers and telephone technology
has proceeded at a very fast rate. There
were several years during the 1990’s when I was hesitant to buy a computer
because every few months there was a new model that made everything else
obsolete. Changes happened so fast that
by the time I’d get a computer home I had a compelling reason to go buy the
next generation.
Technological
innovation is geared toward making our lives easier. Windows started out as a clunky, horrible
program and has evolved, like Apple’s operating system, into a self-teaching
set of interactive programs that make it simple for us to get any information
we need. Spreadsheet work is intuitive
and spell-check handles not only our spelling errors but even some of our
grammatical mistakes. Phones are just
simply amazing today.
Here’s the
thing, though. We are getting to the
point where we have just about everything that we want. New cell phones advertise ‘Better Cameras and
More Pixels!’ Most other improvements
are not at all earth shattering. I just
traded my eight-year-old laptop on a newer model and see very little change in
the operation. Technological change is
slowing down.
My personal
observation is that when you provide a certain level of comfort to a person or
group of people, they stop looking for more.
At some point, it requires ‘too much effort’ to improve something that
already does most of what you want it to do.
I used to be
very excited about the very cool stuff we were going to have, according to all
of my favorite Sci Fi authors. Heinlein,
Asimov and many of the others worked very hard to project advancement to a
point where they could create believable futures. Those futures had flying cars, advanced limb
regenerators and all sorts of matter transmitters. I was completely absorbed with the fantastic
but realistic future we were going to have.
Science
Fiction has changed a lot since I first started reading it. It doesn’t seem as much like fictional
science and it really shares a lot in common with what we used to call fantasy. I wonder if this means that writers
themselves are not able to look into a farther future and make further
predictions about where we are headed.
Most
importantly, these very same writers today are something of an indication that we’re
already there. Development is
slowing. Engineers are needed but the
call for actual scientists is on the wane and in many cases, we talk quietly
about what ‘real science actually means and ask what happened to peer
review.
I worry
about that. Humanity should be
curious. We should want to know
everything. We should always be
challenged by the things that we don’t have and by the future that we don’t
know. If we actually lose that momentum,
we stagnate and the Bible won’t require another chapter at all. We’ll hit End Times pretty quickly and will
disappear without so much as a whimper.
Wow. That’s depressing. I’m going back to dreaming some more.
