More Tech Than the Enterprise . . .

Captain Kirk could go to planets, I envy that, but the computing power in my house equals that found on Enterprise.

Spock could say he knew all there was to know about computers when faced with a conundrum about the Enptrise machines. I do not know much, but I have a better computer than Spock had on the bridge:

My watch takes calls, my phone shows movies, and the machine on which I am typing this weighs less than my junior high textbooks. We can ask for data, turn on our lights, and change the temperature all by voice.

My brother and I longed for computers, any computers, throughout the 1970’s. Eventually Dad and Mom got us a Vic-20 computer and our dreams were closer, even William Shatner endorsed the machine. We could program, play games, and do some “word processing” . . . we could see the future. No computer has ever been as excellent and we built into the heart of our Barterran spaceship The Gala.

Now I have such tech easily. . . And the result is glorious.

I get it. Too much screen time is bad. Social media is not for children and there is much fakery on Facebook. I get bogged down on Twitter and I am not proud of everything I have tweeted.

Yet . . . Hope and I get to watch movies that were unavailable to us when we were married: all the Jimmy Stewart there is, was, or ever will be. We can research topics that were once obscure. One book I wanted to buy in graduate school took me years to find. I can get an e-copy for nothing and order another hard copy (for very much more than nothing!) in seconds. Here at 30,000 feet, Hope and I can tell our adult children where we left the keys to our mailbox. Social media has connected me to people who have taught me new things, corrected errors I believed, and become friends. Phillip Johnson of UC Berkeley reached out to me by electronic mail and my life was changed. There would be no Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University if there was no e-mail. Classical education produced by “modern” technology.

This is fantastic.

It is just as good as I imagined technology would be when I watched Spock, Kirk, and McCoy. Adventures, moving to California was one, are made possible through techonology. You can misuse it or only look at this glorious world through a screen, but Star Trek taught me that this is bad. People, not machines, boldly go.

We use the machines to get there.

So the next time you read an article bemoaning technology, stop. Think about it. Don’t just embrace it. Reject the the uses of tech that are bad, but be glad we can broaden the writing that can be read, the information that can be accessed, and the friendships that can be made.

If this is indeed, the worst of times, it is also the best of times.