Itβs the 28th of February and Iβm on a flight from Vancouver to Texas (Houston and then Austin) to organize Hack Club Scrapyard. I have the window seat :) Iβve been fortunate to be in this position dozens of timesβairpods in, flying thousands of miles across land and waterβbut it always hits just as hard as the first, especially when Iβm all alone.
Air travel always reminds me of how absolutely insane human innovation and ingenuity is, but also how much more there is to achieve if we keep accelerating at the pace we are. Right this second, I can look around me and attempt to comprehend the current unfathomable reality: Iβm in an enclosed pressurized aluminum tube flying a few hundred miles above the surface of the Earth, travelling at a velocity fast enough to get me across the continental United States in barely a few hours. I can look below me: cars, ships, highways, skyscrapers, bridges, factories, oil rigs, and the dozens of cities scattered across our pathβeach home to millions of different people, animals, children, families, and students. Each person is currently living their very own complicated eventful life. I can look above me: the vast blue-gray sky, undoubtedly dotted with other planes, satellites, spacecrafts, stars, planets, and more. Itβs absolutely surreal.
Weβre right over Denver! Look at this jet, the city, the desert, and the snow-tipped mountain rangeβall in one frame.
We often see the timeline of human innovation: how it took millennia to invent the wheel, learn how to fan flames, and work together to build cities. And we can look at our exponential pace now: from the first flight barely a hundred years ago to democratized air travel for the layperson today; from closet-sized computers with megabytes of memory to pocket-sized phones and laptops with terabytes of storage; from a clustered disconnected world to interconnected civilizations with global trade, instant communication, and a consistent effort towards positive causes. Fostering peace and health, fighting climate change and infant mortality, and renouncing tyranny and authoritarianism (kinda!). With humans growing at such an exponential rate, what do we stand to achieve in just the next decade? the next century? the next millennium?
Thatβs the other thing that air travel reminds me of: the vast uninhabited natural landscapes that can still be preserved; the clear skies and space that we have still barely explored; and the vast deep oceans that escape all human intelligence. I see beautiful endless snow-tipped mountain ranges, lakes and oceans with no visible civilization, entirely uninhabited deserts, and also so much beauty: biome to biome with absolutely no signs of human life. Weβve achieved so much with barely 5% of our land being visibly inhabited and developed by humans. Do we really know anything at all?
Given our pace of innovation, and given my belief that our innovation will never converge and flatten out, and given that there isnβt a Great Filter-esque phenomenon that will end the human raceβ¦ whatβs to say that nothing is impossible? We can travel faster than the speed of light, we can make space tourism as cheap as a bus ticket, we can ensure safe time travel, we can develop the ability to teleport. If the Laws of Physics were only discovered through a sample of just one single planet (that hasnβt been fully explored as well!) or just one single galaxy or just through just a few millennia of research, I refuse to believe that their constraints will actually hold us back for much longer.
Hello Houston!
Hello Austin!
