They say that for the amount of time humans have spent on the Earth, if Earth’s entire history is represented by the Empire State Building, is something like the size of a fingernail. Yet, while we’ve been here, we’ve managed to invent peanut butter, kill millions of buffalo and build things as astounding as the Empire State Building.
One of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, however, has been reigning in the power of technology and using it for the Greater Human Good. If knowable human history only extends back 10,000 to 15,000 years, the technological advancements of the 20th century have compacted thousands of years of progress into a period of a single century. In Universal terms, the Earth century is like a fraction of a blink.
Yet, time moves slow for us. This might be because we’ve been spoiled by how technology seeks to expedite all of our otherwise mammalian processes. In 1901, we saw the birth of the first radio receiver and 1906 saw Lee Deforest’s invention of the electronic amplifying tube. Just four years later, Thomas Edison announced the first ‘moving picture.’ Six years after that, in 1912, mechanized movie cameras were produced and released, giving birth to a still dominant entertainment industry.
Short wave radio was next, produced in 1919 and undoubtedly changing the way WWI was fought. Finally, in 1921, engineers produced the first ‘robot,’ thus laying the quick-drying foundation for computer technology. In the 1950s, with television, FM radio and transistor radio already in widely accepted use (and with only half the 20th century past), programmers produce the first official computer language, Fortran.
From that point on, as they say, the rest is history. Computers have gone on to revolutionize the way we observe, consume and most importantly, communicate. Even still, technology is developing, advancing and clearly reaching a new phase of integration. Despite this, however, we are still not much more than a fingernail, albeit a well-programmed one.