The Wright stuff

It was on December 17th, 1903 that Wilbur and Orville Wright took to the skies in a heavier than air machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They were originally into bicycle manufacture and repairs, but were very gifted engineers. They had to design new propellers from scratch, since previous ones had only been used in water. They had to devise a method of steering, and invented a way of warping the wing to alter its presentation to the air. Their flight was for a smaller distance than the wing span of a Boeing 747. But it did the job, and they went in to improve and refine their craft until it pioneered the modern aviation industry.

It seems astonishing in retrospect that it was only 65 and a half years later that humans put their footprints on the moon. Such is the accelerating pace of modern progress.

It was also on December 17th, this time in 1935, 32 years after that first hesitant flight, that the Douglas DC3 Dakota first took to the skies. It was one of the most successful and widely produced planes, the first to be valid as a passenger-only plane, and one that saw extensive military service as the C47. I was surprised on one of my early rips to the Florida Keys in the late 1980s to find myself in a DC3 passenger plane that was probably older than I was, yet still in commercial use.

Exactly one hundred years after the Wright brothers first flew, Burt Rutan’s privately built and financed SpaceShipOne went supersonic for the first time. The following year it went on to win the X-Prize for taking passengers into space. To appreciate the pace of change, reflect that the smart phone, the indispensable and ubiquitous gadget of today, was not launched until four years later. And those who claim that we cannot go on “using up” the planet’s resources, should reflect that the iPhone in today’s pocket uses a tiny fraction of the resources that went into the room-full of junk needed a couple of decades earlier to fulfil the functions that it achieves.

The point to appreciate is that the Industrial Revolution has taken us out of the world of Parmenides, in which everything is constant, and plunged us into the world of Heraclitus. We step and do not step into the same river, for new waters flow ever about us. The technology present at our birth seems like ancient history as we mature, and older people find it hard to keep pace with it.

There are those who want us to stop, who yearn for constancy, and who want to live in a predictable world that we can shape. It is not going to happen. The pace of change is accelerating. Lab-grown meats, autonomous cars, people-carrying drones, and genetically engineered organisms are just a handful of the technologies that will make the future unrecognizable from the past.

We can cope with this by staying flexible and adaptable, using our creative skills to solve the problems that developments bring with them, and using the new technologies to solve the problems that have eluded us thus far. It is possible to look to the future in terms of the hazards it might present, or to look to it in terms of the opportunities it will offer. In virtually every measure of the human condition, the present is better than the past, and the future will be better still.