Sunday 7 September 2008

A Technological Reliance In A Modern World

Well it appears I have returned with another "Blog" about this most confusing world we live in and this time my theme is Technology, and just how much we rely on it today.

It seems one cannot walk down the road without encountering atleast one thing that includes some sort of computer chip.

China is clearly the most technologicly advanced and reliant country in the world, with over 500 million mobile phone accounts in China alone. An estimated 3.3 billion world over.

Mobile phones are possibly the biggest thing we rely on these days, and it makes me wonder, How on earth did we manage before them? well quite frankly, how we did it is not important, but the fact that we did is. We did not need the ability to take photographs on the move, neither did we need the Internet.

My point is that these days, we cannot live without the the Internet, mobile telephones and most of all, computers.

I remember the days building up to the year 2000 when the world collectively soiled themselves over the "Millennium Bug". The "bug" threatened to crash computers all over the world and send the economy into meltdown, although in reality all it actually did was make online calenders display things similar to 1/1/19100 instead of 1/1/2000. Bank ATMs could not read expiry dates correctly and that was about it. More than anything this relates to my earlier blog about the media blowing things totally out of proportion.

This technology is also seeing us reach into the future, unexplored places, dangerous places. There's a saying, "Curiosity killed the cat" Well curiosity could well kill the human race too, as many experiments are becoming more dangerous. We are reaching into the unknown, experimenting with things beyond our control but yet we still do it, we know the dangers, but go ahead anyway. Personally, I think it's bloody brilliant.

Somewhere, 100 metres below Geneva is a 27km ring of complicated machinery, dedicated to science, It has cost over 6 billion Dollars and threatens (if only very slightly) to destroy the entire universe, the same universe it was built to research! CERN know the dangers, but go ahead for the sake of science, for the sake of finding out what we are, for the sake of finding out what we are for. Fantastic! it really is, it may destroy everything ever imagined, but it doesn't matter, because science wins. If it proves that religion is stupid, the world will be a new place, most likely a horrible place to be, with people no longer believing what they did, we would be thrown into chaos. So whether this "Large Hadron Collider" succeeds or fails, the world as we know it will change.

All because of Technology. Something we cannot live without, and something we will probably use to destroy ourselves.

If we survive the trials of the LHC I shall post on September 10th.

Until then,

V.