Monday, May 18, 2015

Travel, Time, and Technology

As I sit writing this entry, in the First Class Cabin of a United flight from Denver to Newark, I am left to wonder at the way the world has changed. I’ve been reading a novel set in some indeterminate period of the past (train travel is still the big and hot thing in this book) and I marvel at the way the world has changed in the past half century.

I marvel at how the world is changed by technology and vise-verse. For example, I woke-up this morning in a small town (yeah right, Lakewood is a small town!) west of Denver and travelled past the system to the apron of the plains east of town to the airport. This feat would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. I’ve read accounts of Molly Brown (whose summer home is less than a mile from my home) taking the all-day journey from her main home in Capital Hill to her summer home in the Bear Valley.

But that was just the first of the Amazing things that technology has done, in just over an hour, I will be landing on the east coast, a trip that used to take MONTHS and then I will have lunch with a friend up in Connecticut before I head south again and go to bed tonight in Piscataway, New Jersey.

And I write this entry on a computing device about the size of a sheet of writing paper. If all this technology goes well, then it will post itself to my blog tomorrow morning while I am in a meeting with a company that does impossible things like sending moving pictures around the globe at the speed of light.

Yes, technology has changed travel, and the meaning of time. It is a wonderful thing. And a horrible thing as the guy next to me is playing some game where he apparently has to slice fruit with a sword as it is thrown at him. Technology is cool – and frivolous.

Wherever you are today, I hope that your day is going as well!

Don Bergquist – May 18, 2015 – Piscataway, New Jersey, USA


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