What Am I Whinging About?

Skype (Hype) Of The Future

            Sure, it felt good to let it all out and feel a bit sorry for myself in my last post. Saw my kids on Skype today and realised, what great times we live in. How fortunate we are, how fortunate I am, to live in these circumstances. Compared to families torn apart by war, civil war, famines, droughts and political unrest around the world, families suffering starvation, grinding poverty and deadly diseases, my family is so much better off. Even here in Australia, there are people in more dire circumstances than us.

Compared to a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago, even 20 years ago, we are so much more privileged to be able to communicate at an instant and see our loved ones when we want. The old pioneers who explored the world, travelled to trade, for adventure or from sheer search of opportunities to make a living, did not get to see, talk or write to their families for months, or years. For a long time there were no mail or letters, you saw family when you came back. When letters and mail came along, it could take years or months. Even when phones came along not everyone could afford them. They braved and weathered all this separation from loved ones, more difficult than the adventures themselves and accomplished many things in life.

I can see my kids in colour, hear them live, now. I can almost hug them. In the not too distant future, I might be able to actually do that. Many such things will be possible over this Internet thing – we will see our kids in 3-D, almost real. Then we will all get into tactile and touch exchange technology to be able to hug and kiss our loved ones a thousand kilometres away. It will seem real. What seems real might not be, but it will be available.

This brings to mind a theory in physics - that we are all, including this universe as we see it, a projection of a larger reality. What appears real is not really so, we think a rock is still, but every electron in its atoms is moving at incredible speeds. It appears solid, but it is in reality mostly empty space. It is another theory that empty space happens not to be as empty as we think it is, and so on…

There are apparently possible parallel universes all around us with slightly different versions of ourselves in many such universes. That would be similar to having 3-dimensional projections of ourselves in many places on the Internet, projections that can be touched and felt. I cannot wait for Skype version 50.0 or a GoogleTouch+.

Copyright  (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2012
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