THINKING ALOUD: Unbelievable transformation

Many people mourn the loss of the old world. But I doubt if past generations had even been privileged to mourn in like manner, for so little changed from one generation to the next

In 1873 the French author Jules Verne wrote a science fiction book titled “Around the World in Eighty Days,” a gripping story of the adventures of an eccentric who bet that he could travel the globe in eighty days. He made it, but barely.

In February 1946, TWA advertised the inauguration of the world’s first regular transatlantic commercial flights. The four-engine Constellation, the airline boasted, would “put the United States within swift, easy reach of Paris” by flying “from Paris to the United States in 22 hours!” Thirty years later, the supersonic Concorde delivered passengers from Paris to New York in less than four hours.

The pace of change is simply mind-boggling. It is now possible to go round the world fifty times in 80 days on commercial planes, not to mention supersonic military jets which fly twice as fast. Forget the space shuttles!

It is hard to believe that it is just about a hundred years since the Wright brothers first demonstrated, in 1903, that man could fly. Their first flight was airborne for 12 seconds and covered 39 meters! The fourth flew 279 meters at an altitude of just over 3 meters. Today’s commercial airliners fly non-stop for over thirteen hours, carrying over 350 passengers in one hop from London to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, and from New York to East Asia, South America and Africa.

Apart from travel, telecommunications perhaps best encapsulate how much has changed in a very short time in everyday life. Until the late 1980s, even money couldn’t buy you a telephone in Pakistan, for bureaucracy and technology conspired to create a situation in which the waiting time to get a phone connection was over ten years. This meant that very few Pakistani homes had a telephone. Having one was a mark of status and privilege.

In the space of just over a decade, every middle-class home has a landline phone and perhaps as many mobile phones as there are members in the household, barring children. Pakistanis can now afford to make overseas calls, which even Americans did sparingly only ten years ago.

Then there is the revolution called personal computers (PC). When PCs became commercially available in the mid-1980s, they operated on 5-inch floppy discs with a capacity of 256 kilobytes (KB). One inserted a boot disk first and the computer took a long time to boot, groaning and grunting while doing so. The PC was “short-tempered” and would freeze easily and often. Yet, it was an unbelievable piece of invention, heralding a revolution in typing (now called word processing) and amazing with the things it could do.

Ever since, there has been a non-stop exponential increase in the capacity and ability of PCs. The latest PCs have hard drives of 320 GB (320,000 MB or 320,000,000 KB). Computer memories (RAM) have increased from a modest 2 MB to 1 GB and speed has shot up from 100 Megahertz to 3.2 Gigahertz.

The Internet has put the world’s reference libraries literally at our fingertips and email keeps us connected in a way that was unimaginable even 10 years ago. To give you a specific example of the wonders of the Internet and email, I research and write my column on a PC, email it to the editor (from any location in the world) on Wednesday afternoon, read it in this newspaper’s Internet edition (again, from anywhere in the world) on Thursday morning and get readers’ comments via email from various parts of the world — the whole cycle of dispatching to publishing to reading to receiving readers’ comments (on a global scale) completed in just about 24 hours.

Recently, while driving from Sydney to Orange in Australia with a group of friends, I had an opportunity to see a Global Positioning System (GPS) in action. Once the destination has been fed to the GPS device, it gives accurate directions both visually (on a screen) and by voice, aided by an electronic street directory and locating its own position through a space satellite. It asks the driver to turn right or left, to keep going straight, or to make a U-turn as soon as possible if one fails to heed the directions.

Someone in the car said that Muslims could do without such a sophisticated device as the GPS. All they needed was a voice that kept reminding: “bismillah kar kay chaltay rahein (say bismillah and keep going)”. The truth is that the GPS device won’t work in any Muslim country, as they don’t even have printed street directories, which are embedded in the electronic chips that operate the system. (Some years ago, I was surprised to discover that homes in Saudi Arabia don’t have street addresses.)

Although achievements in space science and technology are more spectacular and those in telecommunications more substantial, the attainments of medical science, particularly organ transplants, must have done more to shake peoples’ faith in the traditional, metaphysical beliefs about life and the correlation of soul and body.

I vividly remember the sensational news of the world’s first successful heart transplant carried out by the South African surgeon, Christian Barnard, in 1967. However, the 53-year-old recipient’s immune system failed, and he died of double pneumonia 17 days later.

As of April 2000, there were 55,359 heart transplant patients worldwide, according to the registry of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation. Many heart transplant recipients were alive more than 10 years later. The longest-living heart transplant recipient was still well after 23 years.

Medical science has advanced rapidly since that first heart transplant. The only organ that perhaps remains to be transplanted is the human brain. A couple of years ago we saw on television an American soldier, 31-year-old Mike McNaughton, who had had one leg amputated from above the knee, jogging with President George Bush with a robotic, prosthetic leg.

I was too young to care about or notice the reaction of the clergy to that first heart transplant, but there can be no doubt that they would have seen it either as a lie and a hoax or denounced it as an act of blasphemy, a declaration of war against God. Now, many maulanas, imams, priests and pundits must be happy and grateful to be kept alive with the transplanted heart, liver, lung or kidney of a dead person.

The pace of change is simply incredible. The last three or four decades have witnessed the most momentous transformation in human history. Few have even an inkling of what is to come. All humanity, or should I say nearly all humanity, has benefited from this progress to a greater or lesser extent.

Many people mourn the loss of the old world. But I doubt if past generations had even been privileged to mourn in like manner, for so little changed from one generation to the next. Similarly, given the rapidity of change and the stresses associated with it, I wonder whether future generations will have the time to reflect on the past, let alone be nostalgic about it.

The Pakistani state may have tried to kill history for political and ideological reasons. But rapid scientific and technological change, which impacts every country, threatens to make even the recent past irrelevant.

The writer can be contacted at raziazmi@hotmail.com