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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Time magazine recently featured as a cover story the “Best inventions of the year” (2002). The inventions included the gimmicky—heavy bubbles and “Aero-gel”—to gifts only a government could afford, like space rockets. The prediction is that these inventions are going to shape the 21st century, so I thought I’d shop and evaluate a few on your behalf.
Car of the Future: I’m always amused when I see artists’ impressions of what our future automobiles will be like. Invariably, they resemble science fiction contraptions with Star Trek automation. Looking back through car magazines of the past 40 years, they’re nothing like what emerged.
But we’re told they will be “smart,” able to drive and direct themselves with the touch of a button or voice command. They will also be super-safe to reduce casualties, and pollution-free for the sake of our environment. Cars of the future will be a complete family entertainment facility and cheap to run to boot. But will they be cheap to buy? We’re never told that.
As I look at my tired old rust bucket in the driveway, I think about what I would miss out on if I made it into the future and if the future should deliver one of these space-age “no engine, no steering column, and no brake pedal” wonders to my garage.
Gone will be cold mornings of flat batteries and cloudy rear windows. No more oil spots on the driveway; no more fumes sucked in through the boot. The end is nigh for dangling wires under the dash and poked-in speakers that mumble their frequencies rather than speak them. And its redundancy for coathangers when those dangling keys in the steering column lock me out and mock my absent-mindedness.
Yeah, I’ll opt for a car of the future, but one in the present would be beaut!
Earth Simulator: This is a computer that, according to Time, is “worth every penny.” Then, with a price tag of $US350 million, I’ll take a couple, thank you. Why? Because it can perform 35 trillion calculations per second and “is the size of four tennis courts.” I’m impressed. Speed and size are everything—of course.
What Earth Simulator does with its speed and size is “create a virtual twin of our home planet,” enabling its users to project a thousand years into the future. As Time puts it, “By digitally cloning the Earth, we might just be able to save it.”
That’s what I like: a good invention with a good intention! If there’s a miniaturised model, drop one into the compact boot of my car-of-the-future. (You never know when Earth might need saving.)
Scientists and inventors these days have “the right stuff” (an Americanism), but can they be Earth saviours? If our problems were just material ones, I suppose they could. If all we had to contend with was easy transport and environmental management, perhaps science and new technology could go on making life heavenly for most of us.
If all that mattered was getting places and monitoring global ocean temperatures, I might be tempted to think of inventions as saviours. But inventive success is only half the story. We have to bear in mind that what science does in one epoch, it almost always has to undo in another. What it proves and improves in one time, it subsequently disproves and removes.
What amounts to scientific benefits for one place on the planet is commonly at the cost of economic and ecological exploitation in another. Great inventions advancing human progress for one culture often disadvantage another.
Science is like that; it is a two-faced logic that drives up and down, backwards and forward, blessing and cursing us at the same time. While it may offer a material salvation on one hand, it creates a problem in human spirituality on the other.
Unfortunately for science and inventors, material progress doesn’t feed the spiritual soul, it doesn’t sweeten the prospect and reality of death. As for saving the Earth, the Christian begs to differ.
If the origin of evil was the father of the necessity that mothers invention, God is the end of it. He is where human invention ends and the Creator and Saviour begin. As the author of science, He’s waiting for His greatest invention, humanity, to make their greatest discovery, Jesus Christ.
Extract from Signs of the Times, April 2003.
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