When my grandfather was young man, he went to New York harbor to see his sister off. She had married a Sicilian, and was headed by ship to start her new life. My grandfather fully expected to never see her again. At that time, world travel was a huge ordeal and very expensive. A trip to Sicily to visit his sister would have been a multi-month extravagance, well beyond the means of an upper-middle-class high-school principal.
Yet during his life, airplanes moved out of the research phase, became instruments of war, luxuries for the super rich and eventually a routine form of transportation. Later in life, he flew in a jet to visit her. It took about a day, the amount of time we expect it will take to get pretty much anywhere on Earth.
But the Moon takes longer. The phrase “when they put a man on the moon” meant to my grandfather more or less what “when hell freezes over” means to me. His phrase now connotes humankind’s astonishing ability to do the seemingly impossible. Late in his life, of course, he saw the moon landing on TV. The computer, which used to be a profession – the guy with the slide rule, became a machine that, among other things, made the moon landings possible. My grandfather saw the development and rise of the computer, and died in 1974, around the time of the ATM machine, which he never seemed to get the hang of. His long life was made possible by many medical innovations. The Spanish flu, killed more people in the US around WWI than that or any other way. It was caused by a virus, a biological entity unknown at the time. Now we routinely use viruses to transfer manipulated DNA into cells. These medical advances save had tremendous impact of ordinary people. My brother caught the bubonic plague a few years ago – the disease that destroyed much of Europe in the middle ages, and rather than having a death sentence, he was quickly diagnosed and given an antibiotic that cured him in a day or two.
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