Careers in Science

Lately I've been starting to suspect that I am living in a Science fiction novel. One that was probably written in the fifties. Not in the sense that I am some action hero that has to save the planet, I am probably just some background/support character. But the world, in such a short time, has advanced so far. By 1910, Ford had constructed 12,000 Model T's. Most people alive then hadn't even seen a car, much less ridden in one. That was just one hundred years ago. There are people alive now that were alive back then. Now no one actually knows how many cars/trucks/buses are on the road in the USA. Estimates online range from about 70-300 million. I can get anywhere in the continental US in under three days thanks to cars. Remember the Donner Party? Imagine how different their story would have been if one of them had a Jeep. That is the difference that cars make. That alone should tell us how much a difference cars have been.

What was really making me think that I was in a sci-fi novel, though, was being at the airport. I took a plane between Portland and Seattle and I realized that they called it a shuttle and they had one going out about every half hour most of the day. And there I was, walking down onto the tarmac and climbing on a plane that thousands of other people had ridden and thousands of more will ride and we were going to cut through the sky and land in a new city in less than an hour. And this was so common that they considered it to be just a shuttle. I take shuttles to get to the airport, a shuttle to me is just a people mover. And that is how far we are in aviation. Planes are just people movers. We cram a bunch of people on and we can get them anywhere in the US in under 10 hours. Humans searched for the power of flight pretty much since we figured out how start building shit. We get it and all I can do is bitch about how uncomfortable it is to sit on an airplane.

But more than just transportation, the thing that really makes me question how far into this science fiction I am are iPhones. They are everywhere. People from about the age of 14-80 have them. A woman I met was showing me pictures of her daughter. She just pulled out her iPhone and started flipping through travel pictures. And she could have popped online, sent her daughter a message, ordered a pizza, booked a flight, and about a hundred other things while she was flipping through that phone. And everyone has one. We carry around a piece of technology that can do pretty much anything we can think of that involves any form of communication. And, sure, we think iPhones are cool still, but most people seem mostly numb to the amazing level of technology that is at our fingertips 24 hours a day. Growing up I always told myself when people started wearing wrist bands that had supercomputers fitted into them, then I would certainly be in the future. I was wrong, though, because people carry them in their pockets instead of wearing them on their wrists. Although you could wear an iPhone on your wrist if you fashioned something to hold it in place. All thats left is for the iPhone to be able to analyze soil samples and tell us if the air is safe to breath.

Humans have created a giant device to smash particles into each other so that they can see what the building blocks of the universe are. And if that isn't enough there are actual news stories questioning if the machine is being sabotaged. By mother fucking time travelers.

Doctors are, and have already been, discussing the ethics involved in human cloning. Not in some abstract way, but weather or not we should start doing it, because we totally could start doing it.

Our President is Black.



In 2001, what was thought to just be rain filled with red specks of dust was determined to be blood. And not just human blood, Alien blood. "[T]hese cells, whose origin is suspected as extraterrestrial. This way, the cells may represent an alternate form of life from space."

We are even getting close to synthetic telepathy so that we can communicate, through a computer, from one mind to another.

Just because we all aren't riding around in hover cars doesn't mean that we aren't pretty fucking deep in the sci-fi.

Society is changing, we are changing with it and we barely notice it. Exactly the way you would expect a futuristic society to behave. We have all this crazy shit but we are too busy dealing with life to really notice how insanely magical and wonderful it all is. Humans simply adapt to quickly. We don't have time to sit back and enjoy the new wonders of the world because we are so quick to get to work something even better. The problem with science fiction is that when it becomes science fact we cease to find it important and wonder why we don't have something even better already.