The Only Thing Constant is Change

Our world is going through a process of constant change. Wheels of change turn faster and faster. But us mere mortal human beings are basically still the same creatures that we have been for the last 10000 years or so.

I had an interesting discussion with my 87-year old father the other day. I remarked “What incredible changes you must have gone through in your life”. He admitted that he had seen many dramatic changes since he was a little kid.

He told me about when my grandfather had brought home a new invention called radio. It consisted of a crystal and a needle and if you managed to tune in to the only existing test transmission in Sweden at that time you could listen through a set of earphones.

Some years later he saw a demonstration of a revolutionary experiment, an installation where you could see live moving pictures transmitted from one room to another at the world exhibition. The first steps of Television!

The car has become everybodys toy. When my father was a kid there were only a few cars in his home town. Even after he got married the family went on vacation by bicycle to my grandmothers summer house that was almost 150 km away!

He has also witnessed how jet airliners have made world travelling a lot easier and faster. How charter tourism have opened the world to a large part of the population. He has also seen telecommunication develop from a luxury of the few into todays mobile telecomm world where we can reach each other almost anywhere, anytime. Telefax has appeared and already almost become obsolete,

The computer has entered the scene and today everyone has internet access. Almost anything is available via internet, the problem is to find the information we are looking for. The typewriter hardly exist anymore because it is so much easier to use some word processor on the computer. Pocket size calculators appeared and made us forget how to count.

Photography changed from black-and-white, turned into colour and today film has more or less disappeared completely and been replaced by digital photos and videos.

When my father was a kid rich people had an ice-box at home; and someone came every day and delivered a huge block of ice to keep it cool! What a difference from today when everybody has coolers and freezers. And the microwave oven has made life easier for everyone.

Man has landed on the moon several times and today makes frequent space shuttle flights. There are manned space stations and satellites orbiting earth. When my father was born it was less than 20 years since the first heavier-than-air flight.

Some military inventions that scared the world are the atomic bomb, the neutron bomb, submarines, ballistic missiles, large-scale strategic bombing of civilian targets, napalm, agent orange... He has eye-witnessed Stalins and others communist terror, Hitlers nazism, Pol-Pot and the Khmeer rouge, Culture revolution in China...

To summarize, our world has undergone some dramatic changes during my fathers  87 years! Life conditions have changed for a lot of people. The world has become “smaller” because it is easier to communicate in all respects. And the change is becoming faster and faster.

So how do we adapt to this fast-changing scenario? Well that is quite a different story!