College and Stuff

Yay me! I'm working on getting into a real college! Heh. And, since the hardest part of any application is the essays (and even they aren't that hard), I thought I'd treat all you to one of my essays. The prompt was "What is the next big thing, and how will you recognize it when it comes about?"

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During my childhood in the mid- to late-1980's, the cartoon show "The Jetsons" was running in syndication, and was a show I watched regularly. The show took its viewers far off into 21st Century, where cars could fly, robot maids served families, and houses were built on long pillars in the sky. To a young child at the time, this "21st Century Thing" seemed like a great time to be alive. And by the time 1990 rolled around, I began to grow excited. "Hey", I realized, "I'm going to be a part of this brave new world! I'm going to get a flying car, a robot maid, and a house in the clouds!"

Midnight 2000 (and 2001, if you're a nit-picker) came and went without event. Cars and houses are still firmly attached to the ground, with the exception of Evil Knevil-type daredevils, and Honda's Asimo robot can't even service itself, let alone another human, without being told explicitly by a living operator. Collectively, as a world, we gasped. "Where is our 21st century? Why didn't the big 2 and its team of zeros change everything for us?"

The next big thing is going to be just the opposite, unfortunately. It is NOT going to be an instantaneous event heralded by the news men, a sudden change in our way of life. All of our previous achievements have been gradual advancements of human engineering and ingenuity, not some instantaneous epiphanies by unknown men and women, hidden away from the grasps of normal people. That in part is what makes the whole mystique of the 21st Century so laughable; it is humanities acceptance, and expectancy even, that if we merely wait for some predetermined point, all our wishes will be granted by some invisible force.

Consider the field of aviation. One might consider the Wright's first flight at Kitty Hawk to be its time's "Big Thing." The same could be said for Neil Armstrong's famous moon landing. However, both of these amazing achievements are not mere one-time blips on history's radar, but the culmination of years, decades, even centuries of work. Apollo 11 is the result of nearly two decades of extra-terrestrial research and development, by people all over the world. And the first powered flight had been a goal man had been working towards for even longer. Leonardo Da Vinci's flying-machine designs, dating back to the Renaissance, are just a sampling of humanities reaching for the heavens, one which has spanned for our entire existence as a species.

Computers are another example of a seemingly short term goal that has in fact spanned over a century, sense Babbage's first adding machine was introduced. Though computers do expand at an exponential rate, none of their expansion could be said to be anything like a quantum leap. It has all been a logical growth from one step to the next. Even our "new" Internet isn't all that different from the wiring together of the different pieces of equipment within a single computer. The lines may be longer, but the principles been in use for decades. Remember, distance is irrelevant to an electrical current.

So, what is the next big thing, and when will it arrive? Sadly, we probably will not know until a great deal after we have developed it and moved on. Of course, that is the key. We have to stop waiting for things to happen and actually accomplish them ourselves. In other words: talk to you in a few years, when I'm done making It.
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Oh, and a quick side note, I'm sorta kinda grounded, so if you don't see me, well, that's why. Okay, gotta jet. Tell you more later!