 | Ed Martin is owner of Healthy Choices, Inc. of Wichita. Ed has been involved in the energy and health fields for over 30 years, focusing on pioneering new technologies and bringing cutting-edge products and services to the marketplace. You can reach Ed at; 316-207-7343, or by e-mail at healthychoices1@cox.net |
Health & Wellness
2006-06-01 09:41:00
To grasp the future, look to the past
Some of your thoughts about how nanotechnology will affect our future are interesting, but they sound almost too good to be possible. Can this be true?
ANSWER: For several months now, I have been answering questions about nanotechnology, which experts believe will be a pivotal factor in how our lives will be changed in the future. Yet for many people, it seems like “Star Wars” technology, …interesting, but too far out to be believable. It is too much change for them to comprehend.Change is an interesting thing. Our lives are constantly changing, but it usually happens gradually. That’s why we often don’t see the full scope of change until we look back and see how much things are different. It’s a little like aging. One day we realize that we have gone from being the young couple on the block to being one of the older couples. Our kids grew up and now they have kids of their own. Looking forward 30 years ago, it would have been difficult to comprehend, but looking back, it is amazing how quickly and easily it happened. Changes in technology affect our lives in much the same way.In 1972, I worked downtown, and I was excited to learn that Macy’s had stocked a new technology. I quickly wrote a check for $75 to purchase a battery powered 4-function calculator. It was a Commodore brand, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and I thought it was fantastic. Later calculators became so complex with so many buttons that you had to be either an engineer or a scientist to understand them, and they evolved into computers. Other calculators became smaller and smaller until some were the size of a credit card with buttons too small to use easily. Two weeks ago I purchased a large-button calculator better suited to my fat fingers. It is solar-powered with all the functions I could ever want, and I paid $1 for it in a discount store. What was once a technological wonder is now not much more than a throw-away toy from a Cracker Jack box. (Remember those?)In my 1959 high school typing class, I learned to use a manual typewriter. After a few years, electric typewriters were introduced, and later my office changed to the latest IBM typewriter with all the letters on a round ball instead of individual arms. Next was the typewriter with a memory card so that documents could be stored and recalled, and then we graduated to the word processor that was sort of a single function computer. Technology was gradually changing how we did business.Computer development actually began in the 1940’s. The first computer, the ENIAC, was built for the U.S. military, and it was huge, covering 1,800 square feet and using 18,000 vacuum tubes. By 1951, the first UNIVAC computer had been completed for the U.S. Government which was much more sophisticated, used only 5,400 vacuum tubes and covered only 352 square feet. The size-reduction race had begun.Do you remember when computer data was stored on punch cards? That was the technology until magnetic tape replaced them in the 1980’s. Punch cards are now as obsolete as dial telephones, carburetors on cars and vinyl records in your stereo cabinet. My how quickly things change.The first personal computers were introduced in the mid 1970’s, and by the 1980’s there were people whom I worked with starting to use them. I resisted until a little over 15 years ago, but once I started using computers, and they became increasingly faster and more powerful, they quickly took over how I did my work. Now I spend hours every day on computers in my work and at home, using them for communicating by e-mail, writing, using the internet, developing data bases, creating spreadsheets, paying bills, and yes, even playing games. I can’t imagine getting things done without the speed and efficiency of doing it on a computer.Today with everything becoming digital, and with the internet and wireless communication, the lines between computing, photography, graphics, music, movies, telephones, e-mail and text messaging are all beginning to blur into one big digital stew. On one hand, the past 25 years have been a whirlwind of technological change, and many older people feel left behind, but for the younger people who have grown up with it, what we have today is perfectly normal. One thing we know for sure, change will continue at an incredible pace, and the future will make whatever we have today obsolete.More change has happened in the last 100 years than in the entire history of mankind up to that time, and what we consider normal today was incomprehensible just a single generation ago. Yet everything man has accomplished has been through converting raw materials into finished products that meet our needs. As we have learned more, we have been able to work at greater detail in smaller and smaller size. Knowledge and the ability to apply it have reached the point where we can now make changes at the molecular level. That ability is the bridge to new developments in nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has already impacted products through improvements made at their molecular level, and there are exciting new nanotechnology based products currently available for increased energy, improved sleep, pain relief, younger appearance, etc. In future columns we will continue to look at how nanotechnology may be changing lives through new developments in the years ahead. However, if you start to feel that these thoughts for the future are too much to believe, just look at the technological changes that have happened in your lifetime. With that much change already, how can we say that the future is unbelievable? At today’s rate of change, the future may be here sooner than we think.
