Science – It’s great.
I love the internet. It’s an explosion of information. It allows anyone from anywhere to learn anything about anything (more or less). The old adage used to be that you learn something new every day. With the advent of the internet, the “day” part of that is becoming hour, or maybe minute.
Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of getting to talk about TED. TED is a conference which has been going on since 1984. Their site explains their mission much more thorougly than I am here, but the basic gist is that they gather together people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design to give 18 minute lectures on basically anything. Since April 2007, they’ve been posting videos of conference sessions on their site, and the output is nothing short of remarkable.
If you’re a science geek, you could spend hours watching videos on this site. Some of the ideas and technologies on display are breathtaking, and it makes you feel like we’re actually going somewhere as a species. In particular, I want to highlight the video I just watched. Go ahead, take the 18 minutes and watch this:
Isn’t that just the most amazing thing ever? Not just the fact that this group of scientists are figuring out such incredible stuff, or what this could mean for humanity, but the fact that it’s available for anyone to watch and learn about. It feels like this is what the internet was built for – to spread ideas, share knowledge, to advance our civilization. Ok, maybe that’s a bit lofty, but it things like this that help me counteract all the doom and gloom in the world today. On the one hand, the planet may be in an environmental death spiral, but on the other, we’ve got insanely smart people figuring out stuff that will maybe help save us in the end.. and thanks to the internet, we all get to participate in it, or at the very least watch.