That was then, this is now...

One night in the late fall of 1957 when I was 12 years old I stood, probably barefoot, on the dry sharp St. Augustine grass in our back yard in Waco Texas, staring up into the central Texas sky. My friends and I would have been barefoot because the central Texas summer is late to fade. It was usually a weather front blowing in off the Texas panhandle that would drop the temperature by 20 degrees in a matter of minutes and force us back into shoes during non-school hours.

The Russians had launched Sputnik on October 4th and we were trying to watch for it as it went overhead. I tell my self that I saw it go over but I really can’t be sure. Things I have read since then imply that it would not have been bright enough to see. I’m pretty sure I recall something, more than likely the booster rocket but we were in Texas after all and everything is bigger and brighter there, right?

No matter; the point of this is that today, less than 50 years later, I sat in a place called Camille’s Sidewalk Café and connected to the Internet through their Wi-Fi link and a laptop computer. One of the headline stories on CNN.com was about Opportunity getting out of the sand that had it bogged down for the last 6 weeks.

You’re thinking you don’t recognize that name, “Opportunity”, right? It’s one of the two Mars rovers and it was manipulated out of the sand by remote controls operated by scientists here on earth. The article included pictures of its own wheel tracks stretching out behind it as it moved away from where it had been stuck.

In 1957 we watched black and white TV and heard them play through the static a beep, beep, beep from a silvery sphere that would have looked like a chromed basketball with whiskers and then went outside to try and see it as it orbited over the flat land of Central Texas. Today I sat in a café in a Virginia shopping center as the screen of my laptop computer displayed pictures of man made wheel marks from 65,000,000 miles away in the deep dust of the Mars.

Now if that’s not a paradigm shift, I don’t know what is…