Man's Obsession with Speed

Ever wondered why man is obsessed with speed? Wait, what? Man isn’t obsessed with speed – it’s just a phase – every man grows out of it and becomes a suburban dad who teaches his daughters to drive slowly. Well, when we zoom out and look at the big picture – the first automobile that travelled at 16kmph and around 125 years later, our fastest speed is – prepare to drop your jaws - 440kmph!! [If you haven't dropped your jaws, here’s a little historical time reference –The wheel was invented around 4500BCE - so it took forever to go from wheel to slow-ass automobile] So, here’s where we conclude that man indeed is obsessed with speed.

 It must have all started with his own two feet – He realized that he can run faster than some wild animals chasing him and sought out to find what all creatures he can outrun (that’s a part of bloody history interlaced with stupidity we don’t want to discuss). Running races with fellow humans began as an ego boost. Lets take a break and image prehistoric man say this in Barney Stinson*'s voice:

And along with technology racing started getting out of hand – Tour de France, NASCAR, Formula 1, etc. As man began to understand physics better – his need to be a better, nay superior human being started growing stronger. Wow, the things we do for an ego boost.

Although we can travel faster than anybody could ever imagine in the last century, we still want to travel faster than we now can. How much faster can we travel before we start travelling through time? Is that our ultimate goal – to become time travelers? Or to apparate – which can be really useful to magically flit out of embarrassing situations or those of criminal kind – Holy f**k! The smarter we get, the more evil we become!! (Or is it just me? :-O) 

Now may be the time to plunge head-first into some possibilities of travelling at the speed of light. FTL (Faster than light) is not an alien** term for physicists and space travel enthusiasts. Travelling at FTL, although still possible to achieve – could take us many more years to physically implement. Accelerating masses such as whole space shuttles to achieve speeds to 300,000,000 kmph is more than a bit of a challenge. [For reference – ISS orbits at 7700 kmph] It is going to interesting to wait for scientists to try to achieve FTL speeds and then we can race through space and break more records and warp time?
       

                                                       

*- If that name is unfamiliar, stop reading and return after watching 8 seasons of How I met your mother (season 9 is worth skipping).

**- pun intended  

{I have been meaning to ask tp to write something about his views on time travel and the origins of the universe - that would be part -2 of Man's obsession with speed - The Space Race}

Engineering or Evolution?

I have always wondered why evolution, that was so myriad and distinct to observe over the millennia, has not been happening noticeably to man since many centuries BC. Are we so supreme that there is no way to evolve any further? Or are we the end of the long chain of biological evolution that ends if humans die out? Or haven’t we been here long enough to evolve noticeably? That got me thinking about how far we have come since we were naked, club wielding, raw meat eaters to the sophisticated, multi-lingual, planet-colonizing nuclear war-gods? 

Engineering is the evolution that we have seen quantitatively since the beginning of mankind. The guy who invented the wheel must have showed off his supreme invention to his neighbors, sons and grandchildren. Say one out of the 50 (approximately, considering the sparse population of the stone-age and lack of birth control) people he shared DNA with, thought it was a fab idea and tried to sell it to others as his family heirloom? He must have learnt it, enslaved and started a mass production so he would trade the wheelbarrows to get himself exotic meats and even exotic hook-ups.

Maybe along the line, his descendants carried the gene of his father - the wheel inventor and he began using his cave to carve ideas and these crazy drawings lead on to more inventions. Somewhere at the same time when man was beginning to understand what we now called science, another man who couldn’t understand the eccentric man’s drawings but could have a grunting match with many tribes. Maybe his son sewed the threads of grunts together and developed a pre-historic language. Artists probably began to bourgeois at the same rate as science dudes and business men.

So we now have the crafty tradesmen (Homo Negotiatoris*), crazy science geniuses (Homo Physicus*) and lost-in-a-trance artsy hippies (Homo Artifex*). And while we moved on from the period of element worship and came closer to the birth of Christ, many civilizations from the east to the west started evolving into smarted human beings – with bigger brains, straighter spines and opposable thumbs. Language was becoming more solid and so was understanding of each other. This was probably around the time documentation began. Some Homos** (the ‘Sapiens’ kind) started writing down stuff when the gyros-eating guy started drawing triangles on the ground and a vagrant telling tales of his bath-tub revelations at the tavern, who for some reason started chanting numbers looking at his slice of pumpkin pie¹. 

The East, in fact was growing smarter too. Unaffected by the mighty wars plaguing the west, its population grew exponentially but unfortunately not its recognition in the advancements in fields like medicine and astronomy, due to their social stigma of crossing seas and many difficulties scaling the great mountains, traversing icy landscapes and trying not to get burned in the desert, all on the way. But early invaders came, discovered, conquered and profited from the peaceful easterners.

Man discovered more modern vocations – the linguists and the Physicus* started sharing DNA and writing machine language, paving way to computers and all modern gadgets. The Artifexs* and Physicus* fell in love and their offspring created strong bridges, mighty ships and steel skyscrapers.    

So, what I was trying to convey was – maybe this is the path that evolution is supposed to take. Maybe we will not physically grow wings and fly or grow gills and swim – but man is on the expressway to becoming a superior being – with abundant knowledge, ability to create ideas (are ideas created in the mind or randomly appear out of thin air and fall into the mind of the genius?) and he is no longer a mere part of the chain that ends when Homos** die out – rather a chain that will grow longer with clones or even artificially created beings that deliberately lengthen the chain of evolution and chart a new course in the what we believed was nature? Humans could be the nature a thousand years later. Peace out – with scary thoughts.    

* - Latin names to humor the author

** - Random jokes, also to humor the author

¹ - The author assumes it was pumpkin pie – no other pie is so boring it reminds one of numbers