'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict
Venice to Vienna
It is said that the railway track from Venice to Vienna was laid before there was an engine big enough to make the Alpine crossing. The railway investment fever of the time could have been responsible but it is also possible that the punters were well aware that the bigger beast was already in the making.
Predicting our use of technology has been a road to riches for many over the last one hundred and fifty years, but this techno-prediction is a fine art. A slight miscalculation can put the foreseen development off by years. Some things like pocket calculators and mobile phones come on in the blink of an eye. Other inventions like the fax machine hang around for a couple of generations before being utilised.
‘And the computer itself,’ I hear you say. ‘Look how that has come on.’ Well, I am not convinced. Certainly the last twelve years have seen things speed up some, but we are still dealing with moving hard drives, and are only just on the verge of solid state computers becoming a force in the market place. I had actually thought all this tapping around on keyboards would by now have been replaced by voice recognition and that our computers would be working on chemically constructed or molecular technology that I first heard about ten years or so ago on the BBC World Radio Service. This was described as the Teramac Molecular Computer and if you search it on the web you will appreciate the vast changes that this technology may yet bring about. It is also said that the present technology will have reached its optimum capability at some point in the next year or so and then the urgency of its replacement will become more pressing.
Often, this urgent need is what moves us forward, although ‘forward’ might not be quite the right term to use when considering the wartime push to create the first ‘A’ Bomb, thereby setting the scene for the nuclear reactors that followed. It may well have been another twenty years before this physical breakthrough would have come about in peacetime circumstances. We also have the Cold War to thank for the landings on the moon and the ensuing satellites which now run so much of our lives. So much has to do with the political and therefore financial muscle which is placed behind new technological applications, as to when we see the benefits. It is also true that technological innovation can be muzzled by these same forces. Who knows what the keyboard manufacturer’s influence on voice activation technology may be?
President Obama is facing some of these ‘big money’ calls in his consideration of not only The United States, but the Worlds long term energy requirements. It seems to me that much more money should go into harnessing tidal energy as the raw force of water makes the wind lightweight in comparison, but apart from this one obvious gap in the present ‘clean energy’ scenario, the big tab item has got to be Nuclear Fusion as opposed to Nuclear Fission, with its less desirable side effects.
Fusion’s theoretically clean and renewable resource could put everything else in the shade, but is currently considered to be forty or so years away, which is as good as saying that it might be another forty years after that. Does Barack put this Nuclear Fusion research onto a war time footing, and blow big bucks on the gamble that he can deliver in say five years, which would get us out of the hole ten or so years after that, or is this just too big a call for him to make? It is certainly something that he is bound to be wrestling with at this time.
Come to think of it, so much of what we do including writing this article has a major speculative aspect to it. Writing a book, recording a song, painting a painting – having a baby - are all done on a wing and a prayer – sometimes more of a wing and sometimes more of a prayer, but the gamble on the eventual pay-of is always there. In my case, the audio books of my stories are a gamble on future technology providing faster download speeds than currently available. The advantage is that digital information, unlike a book on the shelf does not degrade and go out of print, so I can play the long game, just as with the fax machine.
Yes, in the end I guess we all roll the dice on a railway ride from Venice to Vienna.
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