Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Today, September 10th, the Earth was destroyed

with the successful starting of the cyclotron in CERN, a new World was created...

Imagine that you were a bride or groom in the late 1800s and you were in your late teens... you were on the North American prairies, about to start a homestead... rumours of experiments were trickling out to your town, about a crazy idea to use lightning to light the world... you heard people say, that if it happens it will mean the end of all life... to use it would mean that you will die... that it was unholy...

but fast forward to 1940's, and compare the two worlds... the immense changes, that this couple lived through... their children and grand-children and great grand children... now come back to today, and look at a similar couple, starting out life... excited and letting the news of the experiments in CERN filter through but not paying too much attention... their lives have been as dramatically altered today as had the previous couple... only difference, they can not begin to guess in what ways, as neither can we...

BUT, CHANGE WILL HAPPEN, and as dramatically as it has for our fictitious homesteaders... Without electricity being harnessed, we would not have motors, or motor vehicles... electric light, computers, audio and video equipment... planes would have been impossible... our world would not exist without electricity... the discoveries that will be made with the new cyclotron will revolutionize transportation, health care, computers, how we work, and how we communicate... it will bring space travel into the 21st century, and out of the model T era of liquid fueled rockets... how these changes are assimilated and how fast, will depend on the resilience of out societies and economies... just as electricity and the use of oil were slow to get off the ground, so we will see similar resistance... greed will be the number one enemy... the benefits that will save many lives, will be reserved for the rich, and powerful, but perhaps altruism will prevail... we can only hope...

if the 20th century model of economic power is over thrown, and the new economy, that is the Internet/Web and the GRID, prevails we will see the benefits spread faster than wild fire... and mankind as a whole, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, all of us will begin to benefit...

that is my dream... for if it holds true, I may be around to see these benefits come to pass... even though I will be 140 years old... if not, then mankind will truly have destroyed his home, and native land... proving once and for all, that he is an unfit species for survival... all because of greed...