'Feeling Lucky'

Feeling Lucky

By Blog Stories at 12/24/2007 09:15

We are arguably blessed because we are living in the 21st century. Well, I feel I'm blessed, at the very least--since I'm biased to modernity and technology.

Take for instance, the computer, one of the most important inventions during the 20th century. Computers made our life easier, more efficient, grander--it made our lives better. I cannot think what would I be like if I lived in, say, the 16th century when the lightbulb has not even been invented. Those were dark days, I believe, for communication was a luxury only the nobles and governments could afford. If you were a peasant, you'd probably know almost nothing around you. Now, many people from different income brackets have mobile phones and landlines to reach one another, wherever they are.

Without digitalization, much of the processes done today would have been a lot lot more expensive--if not impossible. Yes, many would have been impossible...from big things like the Internet and global economic integration to not-so-big things like photo editing using digital cameras (though I'm sure film-lovers would like this). It would have been an inconvenient life in an unconnected world.

Some, I know, would say that they'd like the cleaner and greener world of the past--global warming and all--than the dirtier world of the present. I believe, however, that it's just a phase that we all have to go through. I believe that we can manage to pull out of this environmental disaster. End of the human race? Most probably not.

I feel lucky that we are living in a highly technological age--that we are living in an age when the territories on this planet are starting to become one. This wouldn't be possible, though, if not for the technological innovations of the past that led to where we are now--the fire of the prehistoric era, democracy and philosophy of the Greeks, the innovations of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, to the space know-how during the Space Age. The Information Era wouldn't have existed if those other phases in human history had not occurred.