Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 14, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column
Someone once wrote “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” And I must say that this so true in our world today. I remember as a boy reading Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty thousand leagues under the sea’ and enjoying it immensely.
Of course by the time I read that book man had already devised the submarine. However, I could not help but think about Verne’s imagination and what led to his science fiction. If only he were alive a few decades later he would have seen that what he conceived as impossible had become reality.
There was the futuristic novel about surgery, really delicate surgery, without the knife. That book told of reducing the surgical team and injecting the members into the body. Brownian motion and all, the team survived, growing in size because there was some delay in reaching the brain, which they eventually did. Of course they had to escape through the eye. And in the nick of time. This too could be a reality one day sooner rather than later.
Today, there is non-invasive surgery. This is so commonplace that it even has a name—angioplasty.
People, not so long ago, had to use their imagination to visualize what was happening in another part of the world. Today television has changed that. The telephone has made communication with anyone at any time and from any location possible. That instrument has gone further. It can transmit pictures in real time.
I used to sit and imagine a man in a room in some corner of the world talking to others in another room. Today that is known as teleconferencing. It is sad that I never shared my idea. I might have got a commission with the invention.
Some of the things that man conceived are not as lighthearted as the idea of teleconferencing. For some reason, man is afraid to die, although if we look at the suicides we would think otherwise. Because of this fear of death mankind invented things like afterlife and resurrection. If people find me cynical it is because none of the people who have died have ever come back to tell me about this netherworld.
Indeed, I have dreamt some of them, and in my dreams have spoken to them, but for some reason there has never been a mention of this “better place”. A Jamaican in a movie once said, “Everybody want to go to heaven but nobody don’t want to die.”
I can swear that the fear of death forced mankind to come up with the idea of making life. This caused me to remember the cartoon in which a group of scientists in a room shot one of their colleagues. The caption read, “He discovered a substitute for sex.”
Mankind has indeed discovered a substitute. He can make babies in a laboratory by taking the sperm from a man and the ovum from a woman. The man and the woman need not do anything more. These days they call it in vitro. It used to be test tube babies
Man has gone even further. He is making himself and he is calling it cloning. The clone is said to be identical to the real thing. So a man can make himself for spare parts. If he develops a heart condition he can take the one in the clone.
What I am not sure about is whether the clone will want to surrender its heart since it is going to be alive, just like the man after whom it is made.
Air travel and the like are now as simple as kissing hands. But there was the legend of Icarus who flew too close to the sun and his wings melted. And we should not forget the Birdman of Alcatraz. These were matters of fiction but I happened to be sitting before my television the other day watching ’60 Minutes’ when I saw a group of men who actually fly like the Birdman of Alcatraz and Icarus and his father.
These men fashioned specially winged suits and they flew. They now travel around the world to find high mountain peaks from which they jump and fly. They have taken flying far beyond the days of the hang glider.
I now have this dream that one day people will not have to depend on motorcars and bikes. They will fly around, even flying to distant lands in the same way birds migrate when conditions where they are do not suit them.
And what is there to stop them? They have mastered staying aloft. There is the International Space Station that has been aloft for as long as I can remember. They have gone beyond the days of Skylab that came tumbling down some years ago and sparking a number of women to name their sons ‘Skylab’. In India one woman named her son Skylab Singh.
George Orwell finished a book in 1948 and he named it 1984. That book was futuristic. I still remember the phrase, ‘Big Brother is watching’. The story written sixty-two years ago spoke about the country watching every move the people make. Today this is no longer science fiction.
In the United States, Dubai, Great Britain and heaven knows where else, the law enforcers see people’s every move. Big Brother is coming to Guyana. In fact he is here. I was at Cool Square and I saw a video of me having a drink.
Then I walked into a police station and saw the cameras. Many business places have Big Brother. He watches me in the banks, in some stores, in some offices and soon he will be watching me on the streets.
Nothing is science fiction any more. George Orwell would faint if he were around today.
Jagdeo giving Exxon 102 cent to collect 2 cent.
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