Happy 40th Birthday Internet
Forty years ago on October 29, 1969, the first two nodes of ARAPANET were connected between UCLA and SRI International in Melo Park, California.
The father of the Internet Professor Leonard Kleinrock (no not Al Gore) was at the 40th celebration. He said,
The Internet is a democratizing element; everyone has an equivalent voice. There is no way back at this point. We can't turn it off. The Internet Age is here....
The next step is to move it into the real world. The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there. It will talk back to me.
The remarkable thing for me is how under-the-radar the Internet/Arapanet stayed for so long. I was born the same month as the Internet and managed to graduate college before I knew about it. If you went out and did a "Jay Walking" segment asking the average person how old the Internet is, you'd probably get numbers like 15, maybe 20 years. Few would guess its 40 years old.
For over 20 years the future was there... unevenly distributed. Cell phones went through a short stage where the elite carried bricks and the rest of us envied them.
What technology, today, is ready to explode out on us? I have some speculations:
- Everyone has the Internet with them at all times. This is an easy guess. Many of us already carry the Internet around with us. The iPhone has probably been the biggest platform for that. I suspect that it will continue to disappear into everything. Our cars, our homes and offices, and our clothing.
- The electric economy. Electricity is the ultimate flex fuel. With sufficient storage technology we could power everything with it. Well, maybe commercial airliners might still need liquid fuel, but even that liquid could be basically an electric storage medium.
Powering that electric economy could be focus fusion or, perhaps Bussard's electrostatic confinement fusion. A breakthrough with either program would give us cheap, practically inexhaustible electric power. That power would be free of greenhouse gases and would produce little or no radioactive waste.
- Life extension. In the coming years medicine will begin to address the seven known processes that make us old. The first treatments might not even be primarily for life extension, and they will only be modestly effective. But once the public begins to understand that lengthening life is possible, the trickle of research we see today will become a flood.
Comments
Ah, the narrow horizons of youth. :)
[I was born early in Ike's first term]
I think your first example will prove to be the literal truth Stephen - actually carrying the data available over the 'net around in a compact, permanent storage device that periodicly updates itself (think Windows Automatic Update). You search your personal terminal as desired whether or not you are currently connected to the 'net.
In anticipation of Phil's Star Trek post, I am becoming concerned that the historic example of technology advancement in times of conflict will become a much more widespread and commonplace event for the next decade or so. As a result, I think industrialization of near-Earth space will be achieved by a marginal group of people (small country, big corporation, association of mega-rich individuals) in an effort to avoid their political (or actual) destruction (a recurring theme in Dean Ing's novels).
What I find most exciting is the prospect that, once the invested-in-the-status-quo effectively fail to hold back the technology tide, the rate of change will be awesome and the breadth of change will fundamentally alter the characteristics of human interaction.
The trick, of course, being to stay outside the shark 'till the tide raises all our boats together.
Posted by: Will Brown | October 30, 2009 12:09 PM