It’s changing all the time
July 23, 2012 (Tuesday)
Last weekend my daughter-in-law, Janet, visited and demonstrated “Skype,” a communications program, on our computer here at the house in Rockport. It’s a modern miracle, by which one is able to chat with another person somewhere else, not only hearing them but seeing them as well. Janet talked with her daughter, Jennifer, in Hawaii, and then with her husband, David, in Qatar on the Persian Gulf. I chimed in for a few minutes on each of the calls.
It seemed weird to me that we could be face to face with a family member thousands of miles away. I saw Jennifer opening a can of biscuits as she prepared a meal in her kitchen in the Pacific Island paradise. Then I saw David wiping the perspiration from his brow from walking for exercise in the desert heat. It was 8:30 p.m. Saturday in Rockport, 3:30 p.m. Saturday in Hawaii, and 4:30 a.m. Sunday in Qatar. In a sense, one might say we were experiencing time travel.
In a relative short period of human history we have come from Pony Express to telegraph and telegrams, to telephones, to two-way radios, to cell phones, to the computer age with Skype. It’s enough to make my head spin.
Here’s something to wrap your brain around: when we see distant stars, we are actually looking at the light from that star that left it aeons ago. The same would be true for people on that distant star as they look at earth. Here’s the kicker: somewhere out there in deep space, light is still traveling from our planet that shows Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, Elijah calling down fire from heaven, Paul preaching the gospel, Washington crossing the Delaware and Lincoln giving a speech at Gettysburg. Some day we may develop instruments that capture those photons and beam those events back to our television sets. Don’t let these thoughts keep you awake tonight.