Sometimes I wonder if my world is normal, just like Calvin, asking his mom if he is a special child or not. Every time I ask my friends if I am weird or not, they will just throw me a grin, a cold smile, or worst, a silence. Maybe I am indeed weird. Some says I am intelligent but other says I am just trying to be someone. Sometimes I think I just lost my sense of reality for I tend to slumber, preparing myself to embark a wonderful journey to lalaland.
At this moment I am looking at the engraved “
Now my mind is warped in some dimensions and I am thinking of crazy things. I am trying to recall the topic I am supposed to write today. For some unknown reason I can’t pin point which one I am planning to write. My mind is wandering around International Space Station, then to M31, then to the Competency Assessment of my team, and then to some unknown realms of my imagination. Aha! I remember it now. I will be writing about the Midnight Children, not the book written by Salman Rushdie.
What about the Midnight Children?
Few days ago, I mentioned to my friend that our generation is very lucky and I call our generation as the midnight children, embarking to the dawn of digital society of digital civilization. We grew up in the transition period of everything, from analog to digital, from war-torn to somewhat stable, from localized capitalization to emerging globalization, from the casual weather observation to the onset of global warming awareness, from the environment dangerous economic policy to conservation policies. We were born in the period when everything was slowly moving to some levels. Our generation is lucky to observe the transformation of analog telephone to digital telephone to beeper, to mobile phone. We have been witness to the exponential evolution of mobile phones. If you have not experienced the joystick of Nintendo and haven’t enjoyed the Xbox, Wii or PS3, then I guess you can claim that you belong to our generation.
One phenomenal event that we witnessed is the conversation of our analog world to digital world, as catalyzed by the existence of internet or information technologies. We have seen bandy clock cards been replaced by biometrics, from walkman to discman to iPod, from writing on a simple journal to blogging, from broadsheet to e-news, from mail to e-mail to internet messenger, from betamax to VHS to DVD to HD, from hard bound encyclopedia to wikipedia, from paper notebook to electronic notebook. Technology transformation happened so fast that we could not notice anymore the transition of things we used to know to new things we have to know. The transformation is so fast that we have been caught by it that we no longer remember the simple joys we can derive from the analog world. Do you still feel the thrill of waiting on the telephone for your special someone to call? Do you still worry if you can’t call home when you are caught somewhere? Do you still understand the romance of a pay phone, the satisfaction after writing on a lined sheet of your journal/notebook, the fun of answering the questions of someone slambook (now replaced by Facebook and Friendster), the rewarding wait of buying the newly released album?
As everything changes so fast, everyone is becoming impatient. Things, goods and delight should be delivered on time with no allowable unit of delay. And we, who were born in the waning period of analog and infant period of digital, have witnessed the gentle creeping of the dawn of digital life in human society. Because of this, I believe it is just right to say that those who were born in the late 70’s, the whole 80’s and early 90’s are the midnight children.
If we relate this to the actual clock, I can say that we were born at exactly 00:00:01 AM and now we are at 00:30:00 AM. The day of the digital world has yet to come. We have not yet entered its glorious period. I would say by 2090-2100 we have already reached the golden age of the digital world. Electrons, they were discovered decades before we entered the digital world, and super/semiconductors drove us to embark the wonderful landscape of digital future.
For me we are the First Wave Generation of digital world and as we go on living we will be witnessing the births of the succeeding generations. What will happen when we end the digital era? I guess we will be entering a new age again and I believe we cannot live that long to see the next era, the Subspace Generation.
Today if we are using electrons to run almost all of our technology, the emerging technologies of the next era will be utilizing subspace particles or even space-time itself. This era will dawn roughly by 2110-2150.
I hope cryogenic will be mastered before I die because I want to witness the dawn of Subspace Era. This time maybe human society is starting to understand the use of holographic principle, of holographic technology, the warp drives, of Solar systems energy, of teleportation and neural networks (including the programming of dreams) and some other beyond reality (of the moment) technologies.
If we have ISS now, I doubt that we cannot achieve all of these.
Now I am going crazy and my mind is ready to fly to neverland.
I am one of the Midnight Children.
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