I'm doing my "amazed" thing again... sitting in seat 02K of a BA 747 heading home to London after a most relaxing two weeks in Palm Springs. Settled in, with maximum comforts, we roar through the night sky at thousands of feet above the ground and over a zillion miles an hour.
Today, most of us fortunate to be living in the western world take this sort of travel for granted. However it was not always so.
Our driver this afternoon commented on how ill-able the early white settlers in California had been in crossing the desert as opposed to the native Indians. Where one relied on oxen or horses to carry water and provisions, the other moved easily through the hostile terrain from water point to water point. The aborigines and Khoi San people had similar skills to deploy in their native terrain.
A former colleague maintained that aircraft were only kept airborne because the majority of the passengers believed it possible ... I am not quite such a Luddite or sceptic, but I am still constantly amazed by powered flight and the technology that keeps us aloft and me scribbling this blog as my plane hums along. But, I wonder, with each step of progress that we make as a species, how many yards of instinct and acquired knowledge do we lose access to? How many of us can navigate by the stars or even communicate by whistles, silent hand signals or, for that matter, even morse code? Will writing and reading follow? Will the alphabet that I spent so many hours learning, be the ancient sanscrit of the future and, how soon that future?
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