The mind boggling complexity of everyday life.

Technology is all around us. The range of human invention is absolutely astounding to me. The lowly pencil is a marvel of engineering. Our dishes and cups are perfectly milled. Even the water we drink is carefully cleaned and processed to filter out the bad to keep the good. The wealth we enjoy on a daily basis is hard to fathom, even a scant hundred years ago. But, have you ever stopped to think how all this is accomplished? The factories that produce pencils are absolute marvels! I watched a documentary about how ballpoint pens are manufactured, and the technology is bewilderingly complex. For instance, the little ball at the functioning point of the pen is so perfectly made that there is only space for ink and none for air--and those balls are microscopically tiny.

I love to learn of the sequence of advances leading up to modern technology. Often, it's expansion and extension of already known ideas, pushed into new arenas and modified to work. The refrigerator is a side-effect of scientists working to discover absolute zero (a temperature so low that not even atoms jiggle about and no heat is found). The plastics we find in daily life is not the same we started with, but is a finely tuned product with a huge variety of strengths and capabilities. Even the paper we use is wonderfully suited to our needs, and we hardly give a thought to how it's made.

Many early science fiction stories used a plot of dragging a future man into the present, where people would question him and try to learn new technologies. These attempts would always fail, because even a scientist would not be able to completely detail even simple tools. After all, you can drive a car, or rebuild an engine, but could you give schematics and processes and tools for building one from scratch? Even if you did the design, there's the fabrication and metallurgy and skills to go along with the process. Today, I very much doubt any single person could be of much help to someone a hundred years ago, other than to offer ideas and concepts.

Isn't that amazing? We live in abundant times of sheer magnificence. Take a little time and appreciate what's available to you daily. We are blessed.

- M