so I dont really qualify as an old fart... lets play a game- lets try to predict the future- but first lets look at the past...

10 years ago I actually has to go to a library and look up papers- today, if i want papers on Titan's atmosphere I type a few words into a search engine and get a few hundred results... I honestly knew the internet would be useful 10 years ago, but I did not have a damn clue how useful it would be. Think about it- this is more of a change than the printing press.

In my last job I had a problem to solve- I entered a few words in a search engine and got an answer in the form of a paper on Titan's atmosphere- 10 years ago I would quite likely never found the answer- 4 years ago it took me 10 minutes. (The problem was "why is our vacuum chamber turning brown and smelling bad after we leak in nitrogen and methane and creating a plasma in it" the answer was "You are making hydrogen cyanide in copious amounts- MORON!")

So if we are astounded by the change in a few years how can we possibly hope to predict the alien world we will live in 5 years from now? I am really concerned about this- our grandparents lived in a world of slow change- how much is too much?

It is only going to accelerate- as we advance the rate of advancement increases, we are on that part of the exponential curve that appears vertical... I am not a luddite, but I have to wonder- at what point will we outstrip our ability to adapt? That point will come soon...

Am I arguing against change? Nope- I LOVE waking up to a radically different world every morning, but I know that the way we are going will lead to more change than we can handle...

;) call me a loon, I dont care... I have to go now- I will just inplug my 512 megabyte memory stick and put it in my pocket- dash off a few emails to a colleague on the other side of the planet, read papers published just yesterday, and make plans to travel a few thousand miles in a day by flying.

Our ancestors had a term for people like us... Gods