Are We Living in the Future?

I know you were all promised flying cars a long time ago, so this is going to be a hard sell. That isn't going to prevent me from trying to convince you that yes, indeed, we are living in the future. I'll give you several proofs, any of which would be conclusive taken individually. Taken in aggregate, they are indisputable.

Perhaps most simply, you're currently reading this post on a machine that contains somewhere between 50 and 400 million transistors. Before the tansistor was invented, vacuum tubes were used in their place. Each tube was approximately the size of a light bulb--say 10 fluid ounces or so. If your computer used vacuum tubes, your CPU alone would roughly fill a medium sized college football stadium. Good luck throwing that in your backpack and going to class--especially because your screen is now the size of a small lake.

Let's take a second to think about how this blog post got to your computer in the first place. The last hop on it's travels across the internets was most likely taken through thin air. Of course, it wasn't magic. Rather, the information traveled on an electromagnetic wave oscillating about 2 and a half billion times a second. If you tried to count that high, you would be counting for about 20 years. Your wireless card does that every second.

I'm assuming you're an international reader. (My extensive traffic logs indicate that I have a lot of these.) In that case, this post made several hops between my computer in America and your computer in Belgium. One of these hops must have spanned the Atlantic ocean. Surely a boat was involved. At the very least an airplane... Not at all. The packet travelled through an undersea cable. What's so impressive about that? The first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858. Unfortunately, that cable wasn't made out of glass and couldn't transmit at several hundred gigabits per second.

Perhaps you're not an international reader, and maybe you're not reading on a laptop over WiFi. That means you're probably reading this on your Android cell phone which has about 200,000 times as much memory as the lunar lander. The screen (reportedly) has more pixels than your eye can distinguish. When you're done reading this post, boot up your maps application. With a few keystrokes, you can be looking at a picture of your current location taken from a satellite orbiting 22,000 miles above sea level. Turn on GPS tracking, and your cell phone will start communicating with a separate constellation of satellites orbiting at the same height.

Because you're reading a blog, I'm assuming you're not driving a car. However, soon you might be able to do both simultaneously. Google is increasingly forthcoming about its once secret project to create a car that can drive itself. The car drives so aggressively that its tires chirp when cornering, and it can drive along in normal traffic. Cars might not have come through on their aviatic promises, but at least they're driving themselves.