A Sci-Fi Kind of Feeling

I was exploring part of a city last night with Linda. She wanted me to see where her grandson would soon be working. So we were on a video chat using Skype, and we were using Google Maps to look at a section of Roanoke, Virginia. Sometimes I was hovering 200 feet above the ground, then I would zoom down to ground level, gliding up and down 9th Street looking at buildings. Then I would be hovering again, an eye in the sky, looking down on streets and buildings and people and cars. And the conversation would be something like, “I’m above the big smokestack, and I see the front-end loader, and there are two guys, one is wearing an orange shirt and one is wearing a lime-green shirt…” And suddenly it struck me as surreal: Linda and I were 200 miles apart, each in our own home, but video chatting while exploring pictures of the city where she lives and where I lived for 17 years. Even 15 years ago, such a thing would have been science fiction. And after that virtual visit was finished, I began another video chat with another friend in Roanoke and his cousin in Texas. And I’m not even a high-tech kind of guy.

Google Maps was launched in February 2005. The first public beta version of Skype was released on 29 August 2003. And now people hundreds of miles apart—or on opposite sides of the planet—can visit and speak with each other in real time while hovering over a city, perhaps a city neither has visited, and “walk” its streets. I think Millennials take such things for granted. I was born into a world where transistors were laboratory curiosities, computers were women at desks with mechanical adding machines, television with crude black-and-white moving pictures was on the horizon of reality, and something like the Internet was a science-fiction fantasy. Even when I graduated with an engineering degree, engineers still used slide rules to make calculations. The first 4-function electronic calculator I ever saw was one that I built.

So sitting in my home while flying over a distant city, while at the same time visiting and chatting with a friend in that city, struck me as a bit like living in a science-fiction story. It was a momentary feeling, but it was enough to remind me that I am living in a science-fiction reality. In another 20 years, another 50 years, another 70 years, what will the world be like, and what kind of people will be living in it? Perhaps there will be regular flights to the Moon and Mars, with good jobs for those willing to work in the asteroid belt. Whatever the future brings, it will be something that we people of today cannot imagine, even though some of us—the Millennials, the Gen X-ers, and their children—will bring that future into reality.