We could use some more breakthroughs
We already have a bunch of stuff that would make inventors like Marconi, Edison, Bell and the two Wrights leap right out of their skins.
We can cure most blindness with surgery. We have aircrafts that can triple the speed of sound. We almost have microscopic computers.
However, there are a few things that we still need if we are going to measure up to what the rest of the civilizations in this universe undoubtedly already have.
First, we need teleportation. Goofy concepts like “Star Trek” and “The Fly” aside, there are a plethora of everyday problems that a simple low-grade matter transference beam would solve in a heartbeat.
If everybody had one, then there’d be no need to be pulled out of the line at airports to have your children’s baby bottles tested for explosives.
If you were talking on the phone with your ailing mother and she suddenly stopped talking and you heard a loud thud on the other end, you could just leap straight for the teleportation machine and be at her house in seconds.
It wouldn’t matter if she lives in a two-bedroom flat in New York and you live in a spacious three-bedroom tree house in Madagascar; you’d be there helping your dear old mum in a few seconds flat.
Second, we need floating cities. A little high-tech engineering means you could float the foundations for any size metropolis up into the stratosphere with a couple industrial-strength anti-gravity generators.
Once you’ve got the foundations floated, airlifting the rest of the materials is a breeze. Presto. You have a fully self-sufficient city floating thousands of feet above the surface of the Earth.
It’s not as risky as building cities that float on the oceans (no need to muck about with tides or currents) and it’s a great deal more scenic. It would solve a lot of overcrowding problems down here on the surface as well.
Third (and this is something they’ve been plugging away at for some time) is personal jetpacks. I heard the Army did some work with them after World War II, but they couldn’t get the darn things to work right.
Oh, they’d lift you into the air and you could almost control the direction you went in, but they burned fuel like crazy and the steering was kind of quirky. In the end, the military decided equipping its troops with jetpacks just wasn’t economical or feasible.
Since we’d have teleportation, the jetpacks would be absolutely no use as transport, which means they’d miss the corporate industry scene and skip right to consumer goods.
Just think: on all the days you couldn’t snowmobile, you could strap on a jetpack and go sky hopping around the countryside. One jump (and the push of a button) and you’d go soaring with the birds, hovering with the bees, zigzagging with the dragonflies or (occasionally) hitting the ground and exploding into flames.
Fourth, we really have to get on the ball and invent some submersibles that can actually explore the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean.
It never ceases to embarrass me to think of the miniscule amount of ocean bottom that we’ve explored. Sure, we have topographical maps of the mountains and trenches, but hardly anybody has actually been down to see these wonders firsthand.
I’m sorry, but we’re just not keeping up with the Joneses as far as our technology’s concerned. We haven’t even explored our whole planet yet, for Pete’s sake.
As soon as we’ve got floating cities, instantaneous transportation systems, recreational sports and finished exploring the oceans, only then will we have earned bragging rights.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum