In 1789 it took George Washington eight days to travel the 200-odd miles from his home, Mount Vernon, to the scene of his inauguration as President in New York City. The fact that it required eight days is not significant. The important fact is that the time was the same as it would have taken two thousand years before. No real progress had been made in transportation in twenty centuries

Moses or Nebuchadnezzar could have traveled just as rapidly. Julius Caesar could have stepped from the first century into the nineteenth more easily than Benjamin Franklin could have stepped into this century. Now, for the first time in history, no man dies in the historical era in which he was born.

Studies have shown that the halfway point of all human knowledge is located less than ten years ago; that is, man's knowledge has doubled within the past decade.

When Apollo 13 was lost in space, computers worked out in an hour & a half a way to bring it back. It's reported that it would have taken a scientist working with pencil & paper over a million years to figure out how to perform the same feat.

80% of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today. Every minute they add 2000 pages to man's scientific knowledge, and the scientific material they produce every 24 hours would take one person 5 years to read. About a half-million new books are published every year.

...But even since 1970 computer technology has developed so fast that if the auto industry had developed at the same rate, you would today be able to buy a Rolls Royce for three dollars!...and you could fit eight them on the head of a pin! The most basic building block of computer technology, the transistor, was invented at Bell Labs in 1948. In 1994 a computer chip could hold 3.1 million transistors, more than twice as many as the previous year's model. By the end of the decade, a chip will contain more than a billion transistors. Machines today have become so complicated, only the most highly trained technicians can even understand them!

...But have all these amazing scientific discoveries & technological breakthroughs made mankind any happier or more civilized? It seems like the more gadgets & luxuries with which man tries to find happiness & satisfaction, the more discontented & miserable he becomes!

...In our day & age "knowledge" has certainly "increased". But although the so-called "developed" countries such as the U.S. claim to have the most "advanced" & expensive educational systems the world has ever known, yet they've been turning out the most confused, ignorant & violent children they've ever produced!

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