Why We Aren’t Already On Mars

Lack of technological focus may be causing delays in our future.

The year is 1989, I was a senior in high school. During that time period, I had already been a self-proclaimed technological geek for many years.

I had already spent a considerable amount of time learning how to use the computer technology of the time, building my own PC computer, programming out of magazines, and using the Vic20 and Commodore 64. While these were some of the finest computers that I’ve ever used, I don’t truly miss using a tape drive to play a video game only in ASCII-based textual format.

A few years later, I was enrolled in my local community college for the Electronics Technologies program to study electronic circuitry. Originally I was hoping for the robotics course, but they had canceled that. In any case, this was a good option at that time.

While my program of choice allowed me to study the basics of electricity, basic computer circuitry, and even build small computer-based systems, it was not focused on just engineering but was much more a practical applications course.

When Electronic Engineers often would design circuitry that didn’t work in the real world, we would let them know why and tell them how to fix it. This often meant a little bit of ribbing back and forth as to whether a technician was better than the engineer, or vice versa, but that was a different time.

A few years later I was taking a course on Sociology, which as one might consider just to be an elective, turned out to be far more important to my future than I would know at that time.

The year was now 1991, and the Internet had become a real thing. This Internet would begin to reach into each and every home that could afford a computer and a 300 baud modem. Yes, I said modem, for the youngsters out there, technology was way slow back then.

It was a new day, we could interact with people all over the world. We could send messages, all be it, text only, and we could chat in real-time, depending on the lag and delays of course.

But the problems were just beginning and we should have seen them.

The Problem Was Technology

As part of my Sociology course, I had to write a thesis paper. The topics were pretty open to us and it took me more time to think of the topic I wanted to write about than the process of writing it took and that took just a few days time.

What topic did I choose, you ask?

Well, I chose the topic of the day, “the Internet”. however, I wrote about it from the aspect of my Sociology class and this is where my life was going to change forever.

The Social Impacts of The Information Age

The title of my paper, which I suppose is sitting on a 30-year-old hard drive somewhere in my spare room, was title “The Social Impacts of The Information Age”. A paper that I wish I still had right now to publish today to see whether or not I was wrong, but today’s story isn’t about Sociology, entirely.

In that paper, which totaled 18 pages, I outlined tons of potential uses for the blossoming Internet that I saw available to society even as far back as 1991.

I wrote about being able to communicate around the globe, keep up with advancing sciences, teach others all there is to know, being able to shop from home, or in fact never even leave home at all, if one so chose not to.

I also wrote about the pitfalls that this technology would incur if we embraced it far too much, such as a lack of physical, intimate relationships with our fellow people. The distancing of the emotional chasm between people that grows wider the more time we spend alone.

It turns out that after 30 years of knowing many of the good and bad issues that surround the concept of the Internet, I am faced now with the realization that I was far too cautious in my assessments of what those problems would really entail.

We Chose To Go To The Moon

While I was born in 1971, I was not around for the speech that President John F Kennedy gave, titled: “We choose to go to the Moon”, on September 12, 1962.

However, as an avid technologist and historian I have listened to it hundreds of times, and looking back at it today I feel that he was right and that in itself is where the problems now lie with technology.

You see, if we look back at that particular event in history, there was a “Space Race” to be the first country to the moon. This was a nationally focused, highly-charged endeavor that we took on as a single Nation here in the United States.

Back to 1991

Moving back to 1991, while writing my paper I had to determine the pros and cons of the Internet and as a technologies student, I was super excited to be able to join the newest Internet craze like everyone else, the Forum.

This is exactly when I realized that the problem was going to become far more massive in scale than anyone could possibly have thought at that time.

Here’s how it went.

I joined a forum group on Electronic circuitry. I logged in to read the messages from my first day. Ok, there were a hundred new messages. I read them all.

Most of us already know where this is going, but I’ll continue… I read those and thought, that was great information. I can’t wait until I check again tomorrow.

Wait, I said tomorrow. Yep, back in 1991, you might only get a half hour of good Internet time per day if you were lucky. A far cry from the average daily screen time of 8.5 hours per adult now. (note: kids are likely driving the average even higher)

So the next day came, I logged into my forum account and I was stunned. The sheer number of responses was astronomical, to say the least. Turns out that so many people had joined the forum that there were nearly 10,000+ posts happening per day.

This wasn’t Facebook. This was not Twitter. It surely wasn’t YouTube. This was just one, small electronics technician forum in the year 1991. It wasn’t even the entire message board. It would take me a lifetime to read all of these messages.

You see this is where the true nature of the problem of technology seems to persist. It changes at an alarming rate. Computer chips are obsolete almost before they are even brought to market. The extreme volume of data being generated on any given day is mind-boggling in sheer scope.

The Overload of Data Is Causing Problems

Fast forward 30 years and the amount of data that gets created in the time it took me to write this one story, about 30 minutes, has likely been a thousand times greater than the data produced just a few short months ago.

Millions of new websites pop up each year. Tens of millions of tweets, posts, and new videos are created non-stop. This is information overload on such a massive scale that our brains simply cannot handle the amount of information being processed.

Sure, we can learn stuff. I watch videos, read new books, and even write new content, thereby even technically adding to the problem, but there has to be a level of focus on what you are learning, how much you are learning, and how you are learning or using this information.

There is a real potential problem with an additive component to the process of learning itself. We as a society have become “Information Sponges”, where we are constantly trying to absorb an ever-increasing amount of new, and potentially irrelevant or even useless information at a nearly constant, breakneck pace.

We’ve become unaware of the fact that like a sponge, sometimes you just can’t fit any more water into it until you let the water out of it.

Focused Learning and Focusing Society

I’m a big fan of learning as much as you can about any topic that you are interested in, and one should strive to become knowledgeable about topics one loves.

However, one cannot strive to know everything there is to know because there is just too much to know. Even as I think back to 1991 and to the potential of reading 10, 000 posts, all it takes is a simple look at my Gmail account that has 134,000 unread messages (I so love spam filters) to fully appreciate that there is not enough time to focus on everything and still accomplish anything.

And this is where today’s story takes us. We are, as human beings, being so beaten down with the volume of knowledge that we have become overburdened with the weight of it all. There is no longer a balance within our own minds of “What we once were and what we enjoyed doing”.

Imagine for 1 full minute, where your own life would be right now if you simply took away the overwhelm you feel from listening to the television all day. Imagine for 5 minutes what you would be doing with your life if you were not constantly being pressured all day long by a constant stream of emails flooding into your inbox that caused you to stress, anxiety, and despair.

Take a 10-minute break and sit out in the sun and just breathe and do nothing related to technology or information for those ten minutes. Remind yourself of what it was like to be the child you were at the age of 14. Remember the hardest thing that you had to do when you were that age and imaging how many of us dreamt of “going to the stars”.

I know that only ten minutes a day will not seem like much, but I believe that if you take those ten minutes, to walk away from the technology that has held such a tight leash around your neck, you will find that you are capable of so much more in your own day than you remember being capable of.

Society has become fractured and fundamentally broken not because we as humans are so different, but because we are in fact quite a bit the same, as we are all being overwhelmed by technologies that we assume are beyond our control.

We have lost sight of how to balance ourselves with our surroundings and have become far too dependent on technology to do our thinking for us.

We can choose to “go to our own moon”, but it will take each of us to learn, in fact not learning, but to remember how we used to live before we became so entrenched with a phone, a laptop, a desktop, and a dozen social media accounts, as we all attempt to keep up with the millions of random messaged coming into our brains at any given moment of our day.

We believe we are being productive because we are getting a ton of things done, but we have become too focused on doing the mundane daily minutia, and not focusing on the larger, greater purposes without our own lives.

It should not take massive national endeavors to cause people to work together toward a singular goal, but this has become the bane of the Internet, and the likely root cause of many of society’s problems, Including why we are not on Mars.