Just getting started

By Lyman McLallen

Suppose we had a time machine and could send some college students back to the past, 100 years ago, not the top students but students who are struggling to get by, worried about their grades but still muddling through.

Even so, the things they know and experience in their everyday lives are beyond what anybody who lived a century ago ― our great-grandparents’ generation ― could have imagined, and the people of that time would praise these students as geniuses if indeed we could send them back.

Suppose we could send some other students into the future, one-hundred years from now, the top students this time. Once they arrive, they’ll soon learn that today’s most advanced machines will have become antiques and the people living in that time ― our great-grandchildren’s generation ― will regard most of what we know, or think we know, as quaint.

They won’t think us stupid for this but will understand that we don’t have their mastery of the world nor could we. The accretion of knowledge, after all, is cumulative and it’s taken untold ordeals of trial and error for us to get this far, and generations not yet born will solve problems that vex us, only to struggle with mysteries we can’t even begin to understand.

Never satisfied with how things are, we can’t help but keep reaching beyond our grasp. We’ve been reinventing ourselves since the beginning and so we will continue. We really are pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps but no doubt many groups of early humans unwittingly stumbled into their own demise which only shows that what we don’t know can hurt us.

Yes, we’ve gained in our understanding and reach but we also get ourselves into dilemmas that humanity has never faced which puts our species and a host of others in danger of becoming extinct if we aren’t careful but we’ve been in trouble from the start. Still, we have this wonderful talent to dream and reach beyond ourselves.

Until recently most people faced the constant threat of starvation. We can now produce enough food to feed every person on earth, but despite that, as many people are starving today as were alive one hundred years ago which reminds us that we have more work to do.

Almost half-a-century ago astronauts went to the moon, walked on its surface, and safely came back to earth while staying in radio contact with the NASA engineers who’d meticulously charted the voyage and measured it out to the minute. (Incidentally, the space technology used to land on the moon in 1969 has been rendered crude by advances in space science since then.)

By comparison, Columbus’ first voyage across the Atlantic 500 years ago in a small wooden sailing ship was fraught with the unknown and he wasn’t even sure where he and his men were sailing or how long it would take them to get there.

We’ve changed the landscape of Earth so much since the earliest humans decided to come down from the trees, stand on the ground, and walk out on the savannah, that we might as well be living on another planet in another galaxy in a distant part of the universe.

High-tech back then was making things with sticks (building fires, making shelters, and, yes, weapons, too), and though we moved on from stick technology a long time ago, we’re not different from our prehistoric forebears.

We really don’t know much, but just as our ancestors did, we keep learning.

McLallen teadches at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. His email address is lymanmclallen@gmail.com.