Time Isn't What It Used to Be

Bob Carlton at The Corner posted the chart at left from The Trend Watch. It shows the length of time it took some technologies to reach the 150 million user mark. Facebook did it in 5 years compared to the telephone which took 89 years.

Take another look at that and you will also see that a mere decade ago, 10 years, neither iPod nor Facebook were even on our radar screens. Today they are two of the most ubiquitous technologies around. What took decades in the past now happens in almost an instant.

I remember a few years ago that people were talking about information doubling every 18 months to two years. Some of that was based on the famous "Moore's Law" which according to Wikipedia,

describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for almost half of a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.

Applying that idea to information it was said that we have more and more information to deal with more quickly. The graph at left also seems to indicate that we have more and more ways to access that information more and more quickly.

So in many ways it appears as if the arrow of time is still moving in only one direction but we are moving a lot faster than we used to. Change is now normal. Lack of change is, well, not normal. We are seeing things develop and disappear more rapidly than ever before. Just because we did it that way 10 years ago (let alone 50 years ago) doesn't mean we will be doing it that way as soon as next week.

I'm not sure where all this leads me today. A week after surgery I am grateful for the speed of change in medicine. In 1958 I had my tonsils removed. They used ether. I stayed in the hospital 24 hours and was in bed at home for a week. A doctor couldn't believe that they actually used ether.

In 1979 my wife had the same surgery I just had. She was in the hospital a week, wasn't allowed in a car (other than to go home) for six-weeks and was told to lie down and not move a lot for the first few weeks. They had me out of bed less than 12-hours post-surgery and home within 30 hours post-surgery. I am already allowed to drive now since I am not on any narcotics. "Walk," they told me. "Walk as much as you can."

So the chart is a framework for a lot of things, not just technologies. Are there dangers? You bet. The ease of lack of privacy is one. So is the ever widening gap between the haves and have-nots; the industrialized nations and the yet-to-be-industrialized nations. We may be overwhelmed by a lot of this change if we do not also maintain our soul. (And I haven't even gone to the impact on the church.)

Having said all that, it is still good to pick up a book and read. Just for fun. Like the sci-fi novel I am working on now about what happens when bio-nano-technology can build new people or rebuild old ones in a time after a cosmic power surge has knocked out technology as we know it today.

Ironic, huh?