Boldly Going

Today is my wonderful Daughter's 18th birthday, a very special day for a very special person.   It grieves me that I won't be with her today, or indeed at her party at the weekend.   Still we had an excellent day out together on Sunday,  We visited the Science and Natural History Museums in South Kensington. When she was younger we used to do this quite regularly, we would take a whole day and a packed lunch and spend the day pushing buttons and looking at dinosaurs. Her favorite bit has always been the earthquake zone in the Natural History Museum Earth Zone, what I used to know as the Geological Museum.

Puffing Billy, the World's oldest locomotive.

We visited a lot of old friends and saw a few new exhibits as well.  I was struck by how many of the exhibits in the science museum I remember being in regular use.   The speed of technological advance is staggering, we have gone from basic telephones to instant wireless on line communication in a few decades, from the discovery of flight to everyday use of geostationary satellites in just over a century.

What struck me was in one gallery we saw Puffing Billy, (left) the World's first locomotive from 1814, in the same gallery has a mock up of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing in 1969, just 155 years later.

My Daughter took a photo of the Apollo mock up on her new iphone, which I understand has more processing capacity than NASA had to put the real thing on the Moon.

30 years ago I could not have predicted where we are now, the dependence on information technology, the beginning of the end for oil based fuels, the way we work (I am sitting at home taking a break while working on my laptop) the way we find our entertainment.  

Watching Star Trek we already have some better toys that Jim Kirk and his boys enjoyed, I wonder how long we will have to wait for a Transporter?