Alice Minium

The twentieth century is arguably the chronological home to more significant advancements by mankind than any era before it.  It was an era of evolution in every way — evolution of war, evolution of science, evolution of arts, evolution of medicine, evolution of consciousness, and evolution of technology.  When confronted with the question of which of these monumental advances was the most instrumental in the evolution of history — which of these discoveries is the one that will change the course of the history books — one is almost taken back at the enormity of the events to choose from.  However, when one removes oneself from his immediate mindset and looks at these events in light of the grand scheme of time, the answer is blatant and simple — the invention of the Internet.

The ease of communicating information affects everything, primarily the speed, agility, and encompassment of the development of modern thought.  If all the great minds of the present day can collaborate their ideas and work together to expand and elaborate on them with the instantaneous exchange of facts, research, data, theories, and evidence, progress will accelerate at lightning speed.  If open sharing and universal access to an infinitely vast library of intellectual property is a fact of life for everyone, and we all have access to everyone else’s ideas, new aspects of the universe, science, math, and invention will be discovered daily.  With this ability, the collective mind of the present day will reach a consciousness and complexity it never has before.  Technology will advance rapidly, and mankind will become universally more informed.  Free thinking is now an option for anyone, as a database comprised of billions of diverse opinions and taboo information are available at the click of a mouse.  Real-life activity also becomes sub-relevant to survival as opposed to the way that it was — you can watch movies, do your homework, shop for groceries, read the news, plan a vacation, listen to music, talk to your friends, pay your bills, and fulfill the duties of your job all without abandoning your couch.  The invention that makes all this possible has changed absolutely everything, including the direction of mankind itself.  With free sharing via the Internet, we are all connected.  Your mind is not completely your own.  Yet, simultaneously, more of the world belongs to you than has ever belonged to a generation before us.

In 1950, the first portable digital computer is invented.  In 1960, work on hypertext and the related sharing of war-related information via technology is deeply in progress in an operation called Project Xanadu.  In 1962, JCR Licklider fantasizes a global network of inter-connected computers, and he and his colleagues introduce ArpaNet — the prescursor to the Internet.  In 1971, Ray Tomlison makes the sending, receiving, and forwarding of data messages on ArpaNet a reality — he calls this exchange of information “e-mail.”  In 1973, Ethernet is developed at Xerox PARC technologies.  A “bulletin board”-like program for companies to exchange information is born in 1979 — it is available in most large corporate environments by 1982.  In 1984, Jim Thatcher develops the IBM screen reader and letters and names can now be translated into IP numbers and addresses.  In 1991, World Wide Web files become publicly available on the Internet.  In 1993, the Internet is declared free for anyone to use.  The first popular web browser, Mosaic, was released.  In 2011, it is estimated that there are approximately 2 billion people accessing the Internet at any given second.  From a Yahoo-attempted index in August 2007, it is estimated that there are currently 29.7 billion Web pages active on the Internet today.

There have been thousands of monumental events in the twentieth century, but pause and consider which ones truly changed your life.  The Internet transformed not only the extent of what we are capable of as the human race, but also the way we see the world as a whole, and the way our children will see the world.  The Internet changed everything.  One might argue that the Internet is not as significant as an invention that might demolish man’s existence, like the atomic bomb.  However, consider the wise words of modern-day physicist Richard Dawkins: “We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us — through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology — that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.”  The Internet is our atomic bomb, and we don’t know where it’s taking us next.