The Sky Calls to Us.If We Do Not Destroy Ourselves, We Will, One Day, Venture to the Stars.

(H/T)

Yesterday morning, with rain in the forecast for today, I went flying. It was a fairly routine local flight, made more to warm up the engine, boil off any condensation and to keep rust at bay (for me and the engine) than for any other reason. It also gave me a chance to fill up the tanks; I had not done that after my last flight as the line at the gas pumps was too long. Besides that, long experience has shown me that the bugaboo of atmospheric water condensing on the walls of a partially-filled fuel tank and contaminating the fuel really doesn't happen over much less a period of time than months, so if I've taken off with fuel tanks and finish the flight within 1.5 hours, I often won't bother refueling after such a flight.

So, as the first decade of the 21st Century shambles towards its close, I went flying in an aircraft made 60 years previously. As I said, it was a routine flight. But for how many thousands of years had people dreamed of flying and yet, there I was, flying. Those dreamers, spread over all those millennia, would have been astonished and probably delighted to have sat in my airplane, seeing the landscape laid out from over half-a-mile up in the sky, as we flew through the sky at a speed that would have been beyond their comprehension (120mph). It was impossible to do, in their day, but there I was, flying through the sky in an airplane that is now considered to be ancient, outmoded and slow.

And so we progress. Within less than two centuries, we have gone from being able to travel maybe fifteen miles a day across land (if the roads were tolerable and there was an inn to stop at) to being able to journey from a home in Boston to a relative's home in California in less than a day. We seem stalled at that speed for the last fifty years, but that will eventually change, as it always does. After all, took nearly two thousand years to get to the point where overland travel was appreciably faster than it was in the height of the Roman Empire.

If we can keep our civilization intact over the following centuries, I do believe that humans will venture to the stars. The technology to do so will be as unimaginable to us today as the inner workings of an aircraft engine would have been to a Sumerian, but provided that we do not destroy ourselves or our habitat on this big blue marble of a planet, the technology will come and we will go to the stars.

A still more glorious dawn awaits.