Monday, November 25, 2013

Feats of Humanity

This will be my last text post for quite some time, until I start releasing chapters of a book I was inspired to write with the news of the discovery of a mysterious dark planet 740 lightyears away. Let the post begin.
Sometimes I take ten minutes and stand, motionless, and realize "Holy fuck, humans have done some serious stuff." What kind of stuff? First let’s lay down the standards: We are primates. The most advanced tools of any other primate is a rock with gouges in it used to crack open nuts. None have harnessed fire. That is an obvious one that people don’t often realize. But we’ve harnessed the opposite too, and everyone I have ever met has taken it for granted and has said “so what?” when I pointed it out.
We have harnessed the cold, too, with refrigeration. The idea of a glass of cold refreshing lemonade wasn’t even thought of until the mid-1800’s. Does it not seem that big? Think again. It has changed the way we lived. But let’s move on from small stuff.
We are a land-based species that has reached the inside of the earth, the seas, the skies - even the heavens. Does it not stun anyone else that we have technology? That calculator you are carrying, that TI-84, has more power than the computers my parents used at the University of British Columbia. It is a lie to say that they are more powerful than the computers on board Apollo XI, they are pretty similar - but, wait, Apollo XI? What the hell? We’ve gone to another celestial body?
Humans have figured out how to get all the way to another place in the solar system. I hope one day I can look back on these statements and say, “Wow, have we gone a long way since then.”
We have half harnessed the power of the atom, but there is something far more simple that I believe is the most brilliant invention of humans: The screw.
The screw is used in everything - cooking, flight, cars, boats, machinery of all types… but it appears nowhere in nature. Things roll in nature, so I consider a failure that it took so long for humankind to invent the wheel. But the invention of the screw required even further thought. They are even used in the machines that transport people all over the planet every day, the jet.
And now, the sad part. We have become to obsessed with development for development sake that we have left them to rot. built 50 years ago, the first B727-100 ever built now rests outside a hangar, missing parts, falling apart in Everett, Washington. I have had the honour to touch this beauty. It was, in my opinion, the first modern jetliner. The BAC111 does not count, it looks like a propeller plane with toilet paper tubes on the tail.
But there it sits, desolate, forgotten by history, even though it was the greatest feat of engineering in its heyday. Visit a museum some time and just think about how amazing your species is.