I often ask this question to myself. What is the next frontier for our race, in which direction are we heading, and how will we get there?
To give you some background on why I think like this. We know humans are curious by default. We want to explore the universe. Even when we are not exploring, our mind keeps on imagining stuff. The following 2 are good examples of our curiosity.
Someone had to dream to make these a reality. someone had to be curious enough to say, I wonder how this poisonous fish tastes like? or I wonder what lies beyond this vast ocean? these are some brave adventures and they surely can kill you but our curiosity always trumps anything else.
Wright brothers took their first flight on December 17, 1903. It’s been almost 116 years since that event and we have achieved so much during this period. We have created aircraft that can cruise at thrice the speed of sound, we have created submarines, rockets, and a lot of other amazing things. We even went to the moon and came back in about 60 years from the time we first took flight and that is a tremendous achievement.
When I was a child, we didn’t have smartphones. We just had normal phones like Nokia 3310 which wasn’t even colored. When our mother got her first colored phone, I was very skeptical of its durability. I even got my first computer when I was in the 3rd semester of my university. But now, there is hardly any home without a smartphone.
It feels like we are adapting as a race. It’s quite natural as well. We still talk about the traits our ancestors had due to their living conditions that got transferred to us. For example, our ancestor’s bodies adapted to storing energy because they didn’t know when will the next meal be and when will it get more energy. Now it is found in us as well. We still feel hungry even though we just ate, because our body is still trying to think it won’t know when it will get the next meal so it has to store as much energy as it can. The same is happening to us in terms of the digital world we are currently living in. Within 2 decades, our bodies and minds went from being skeptical to a mere 5-year-old knowing how to operate them. This change is not bad, we just have to take it in the right direction and embrace it.
We are also progressing in exploring our star systems and trying to find new homes for us. SpaceX is creating new avenues, NASA is researching into this field and countless others are providing their inputs as well. The only focus is to figure out how far we can go as a species and how to go there. The picture below really takes me down the memory lane into the times when we were at the cusp of something big and I have to tell you it feels good.
As the closing statement, I would like to emphasize one thing. It is really important for us to stay hungry, curious and literally shoot for the stars. We didn’t get here because we liked to rest. We got here because we were curious. So, if possible, please practice this, and let’s get to our evolution together.