The view caught me by surprise as I walked out onto our balcony. The sun was doing something so spectacular with the light that I almost missed the airplane entirely. But once I saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
We don’t really see airplanes anymore. Not really. They’re just there, the way clouds are there. The way birds are there. A machine carrying hundreds of people, thousands of miles, and we glance up casually before going back to whatever we were doing.
But picture that same plane two hundred years ago, dropping out of the sky into a cornfield. Four hundred people climbing out of a metal thing that just fell from the heavens, carrying objects in their hands that glow and talk. Nobody watching would have the word “airplane” to explain what they were seeing. They might reach for “monster” or “demon.”
Someone born in 2000 BC could have slept for a couple of millennia and woken up in a world without much to be surprised by. My great-great-grandfather wouldn’t say the same about the world he’d wake up into today.
We’re carrying god-like technology around like it’s nothing. We have machines that fly, that talk across oceans, that see through skin and bone. Now we’re handing some of our thinking over to AI. And if a farmer from the early 1800’s would have thought a 747 was a monster, I don’t know what he’d make of that. Hell, my children don’t even know what to make of it.
We live in truly amazing times. We’ve just gotten very good at not noticing.
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