A group of friends were talking when one said, that unlike ancient times, we don't have magic in our lives today. I immediately objected. I didn't repeat the famous remark of Arthur Clarke that any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic but in a way, I totally agree. I held up my iPad and asked if it wasn't magic. It clearly is. The range and power of what it can show, sound, connect to and accomplish is beyond belief, until you get used to it.
One of the most moving audiobooks I have heard is "The Demon Under the Microscope" by Thomas Hager. As you listen to the conditions in health and medicine in all the years before the late 1930's, you grasp that a scratch, a broken blister, a gunshot wound could all easily lead to unstoppable infection and death. Hager cites the attack on Pearl Harbor as the first time in warfare that infections and death from them were held to a very low number.
We do hear a great deal about over-use of antibiotics today and the rapid change that microbes can make in their genetic components to stay in the business of infecting us. I don't know much about the situation but I do know that I have read about work on changing the sort of challenge we can give microbes from poisonous ones to genetic ones. Genetic manipulation might be a whole new tool we can use defeat the little bugs.
Recently, I was given a prescription for antibiotics and at the same time, a prescription for probiotics, meds that would be an attempt to replace friendly or necessary life in and on me that I actually need. That is the first time I have experienced greater attention being paid to the biological balance of me, so far more or less limited to my gut. I have seen many references to greater awareness of, respect for and research on the thousands of organisms that live in me and what they actually do.
It is such a commonplace to talk about electronics, cellphones, computers in cars, derivative activities such as Ebay, Facebook, online banking and YouTube that they are hardly worth mentioning but they do constitute another sort of magic. Magic that 4 yr olds can employ in some of their own lives!
Just as Steven Johnson in "Everything Bad is Good for You" and Clive Thompson in "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better" say, we are likely to find that adults and children alike know things, do things and see things that are far beyond what people could do, in say, 1950. David Weinberg says that today's internet is "Too Big to Know" and he is right. Further, smart people are trying every day to find new services, new activities, new games that we would enjoy or profit by.
It is not all rosy but we probably do know more about what and where the least rosy parts of our world are than people have ever been able to know before. I think we might as well expect more magic yet in the coming years.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
