[en] Thoughts on fragility
I am no longer a child but I am still in a constant state of awe. There are so many things in this universe that are just plain bigger than me, and I realize that every day. The thing that surprised me these days is how much work people have put throughout the ages into achieving the current state of progress and how much they keep putting in pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
I am amazed at how much work goes into things which seem small and simple such as organizing a conference or running a bar and then I totally speechless when I think of the amount of work and thought that goes into building and managing a big company or developing amazing technologies such as android or .NET.
And then I think of how I am supposed to build on the shoulders of the people before me and face up to the challenge of rising to at leas their level. But then, the entire development of humanity is incremental. We, as a specie, could not have evolved in any way past what we were thousands of years ago without tools, or, more precisely, tools to store, transmit or share knowledge. I remember in of those bad, cyberpunk movies from the Escape from LA and Escape from New York, they had some system that blasted some kind of EMP pulse over the entire world and destroyed every single type of electronic machinery. Basically, it sent people back to the prehistory.
And I'm thinking how fragile the entire progress of the humanity is, how small we all are and how little we need to disappear as a civilization. It's going to be a miracle if it all sticks together until the 24th century...
