Shrinking the Universe

Everything is so much closer nowadays. I remember when I was a kid, me and my dad use to play catch at the park together. We would throw the ball at the park for hours. I would scream to one side and he would holler back. We would get to distances as far 300 ft. I use to think that was really far away. I would take all the energy in my body to get the ball to him in the air. And we were communicating.

See, I thought that communicating to someone 300 ft. away from them was pretty good. I thought, I can communicate pretty far. But nowadays, I can sit in front of a screen, type a couple of words with a keyboard, press enter, and I have just communicated across the entire world in nanoseconds. Utterly baffling! I can communicate using a computer and the internet in less time than standing 300 ft. away from my dad and throwing the ball across that distance to him.

Now, 150 hundred years ago, you could have told an entire population that one day, there will be a way of talking to someone across the world just as quickly as you could holler to the nearest cabin from your cabin across the woods, and they would have laughed at you.

First of all, you would have probably had a difficult time explaining the roundness of Earth and the fact that it curves as you walk around it. Second, you would have probably had an even more difficult time getting them to see that you could take metal and put it together in all sorts of different ways which make lights appear. Your well trained alchemist would have been able to formulate an idea of what you were talking about, but the rest of the persons in those times would have told you that it had something to do with MAGIC and all sorts of wild things.

It takes lots of imagination in order to think up the society we live in today. It takes groups of people coming together and making lots of progress in the fields of science, mathematics, and so forth. When I was a kid playing catch with my dad, I imagined all sorts of things happening. Some of them did happen, and some of them didn't. But during the time from childhood to adulthood, I have seen a lot of things change, and the one thing I do know, is that you can never think too big. Whatever you can conceive as a possibility, can appear in the world around you.