21st Century Thinking
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
How often you hear somebody talking about 21st Century thinking; 21st Century technology; 21st Century whatever?
It's comforting to think that we have any sort of handle on what is likely to unfold during this century, isn't it? I mean, technology will continue to advance of course and so will our understanding of life and the universe, maybe even God, but surely life as we know it will probably not change in any really fundamental way .....
The truth is almost certainly that we really don't have a clue!
Let me illustrate:
To get some idea of how primitive our current perceptions are likely to be proved to be, as the century unfolds, think for a moment where the world was at the same stage in the 20th Century.
In 1906, motor cars were the playthings of the rich and many believed that they should be banned from public roads. The first Model T Ford would only roll out of the factory two years later. The first trans-Atlantic radio transmission had been transmitted a mere six years earlier, in morse code (which was still the usual form of radio communication.) The Russo-Japanese War had just ended but the outbreak of the First World War was still eight years away. Czar Nicholas II still ruled Imperial Russia.
The Harvard Business School had not yet been founded. That would only happen in 1908. The Wright brothers had launched their heavier-than-air contraption two years earlier, but it would be three more years before Louis Bl?©riot flew across the English Channel for the first time.
Surgery was a touch-and-go affair as antibiotics had not yet been invented. Most homes and city streets were still lit with gas or candles. Telephones were hardly commercially available at all.
The point is: most of the advances that mankind made during the 20th Century were almost completely unforeseeable from the perspective of somebody in 1906. The same, I very firmly believe, is true of us as we try to peer ahead into the main body of the 21st Century from our poor vantage point here in 2006. The future will be fundamentally more impressive than the best that we can possible imagine. Or worse, I suppose, but I choose to be optimistic.
In 1894, one of the most pre-eminent physicists of the day, Albert Abraham Michelson (the first American winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1907) said:
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these laws are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote ..."
He couldn't have been more wrong. So too are those that express similar views today.
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