[NicknamedBob]

"I guess that shows how futile our worries are."

Actually, what shows how futile our worries are, is remembering back to a year ago, in one of everyone's gripe sessions, concerning whatever it was they were griping about.

Then trying to remember what happened to those gripes.

You see, what happens is that someone found a way to deal with the problem, or someone who was a problem went somewhere else, or maybe we just learned to accommodate, as other things surfaced to become the problem du jour.

And that's after only a year.

Imagine if you take steps by generations, or lifetimes!

One of my favorite games is to consider what my great-grandfather might say about us, as we go through our daily lives, and give voice to our problems.

He'd probably be convinced that the world is full of crybaby pantywaists, who've got the world at their feet, and they don't even appreciate it.

I mentioned replicators. Have you heard of copying machines? Xerox Company?

I'll bet you've got a copier not very far from where you are right now. Most computer printers have that as an ancillary function.

Remember what Thomas Jefferson had to do to have a copy of his correspondence that he was sending out?

It's hard to realize that there was a time when it used to be someone's job to help you make telephone connections through the labyrinthine mazes criss-crossing even the smallest towns.

Or in a time before that, you had to send a runner with a message to or from the telegraph office, or on horseback.

But obviously the direction of our progress is clear. In the future, no one need ever be out of touch with the entire world, and all of its knowledge. That's a powerful change.

And what will we do with it? Why, we'll keep our friends informed of every occasion that we choose to clip our toenails, or when we find lint in our pockets.

[Tax-chick]

Didn’t Jefferson invent the duplo-pen on a strut to simultaneously write what he was writing? I can’t think it would work all that well. He could have employed a stenographer, except he was always in debt up to his topknot.

[sionnsar]

But obviously the direction of our progress is clear. In the future, no one need ever be out of touch with the entire world, and all of its knowledge. That's a powerful change.

Which brings its own problems -- how to sort through it. I had booked the hotel I'm in right now weeks ago, but it was only yesterday morning (in the previous hotel) that I found the information about exactly where it is in this airport, and it's not the "short" walk to my terminal previous information suggested. I have to take a shuttle.

[fanfan]

So true. I often don't even remember what I allowed to irritate me last week.

And what will we do with it?

We will be buried in the sands of time like every other civilization before us. ;-)