by John Anderson

Created on: November 26, 2008

NOT A CHANCE... I'm sorry if I am the first to mention it, but even if "ever" is a lousy fifty years, my bet is that we are going to be opening nuts with our GPS and any other hard-cased gadget that requires a grid and a satellite to run it. The ones with the shiny cases will be great for flashing signals to others.No, I am not a believer in "the end of times." It just appears to me that we are not anywhere near getting a handle on greed, much less intolerance or even closed-mindedness and without something like a miracle shift, I don't see the chances of a snowball in a hot place that we will still have such large-scale energy transmission systems. Who knows. Maybe about twenty years after the grid collapses, a bunch of concrete will be broken up for some other use and grass will be growing everywhere and we'll wonder why we didn't shut it all down sooner.

So, my argument has little to do with the advantages of GPS which I think are pretty amazing. I happen to love my I Phone. When I am even a little confused, I yank that puppy out and punch in my destination. It asks for a start point and I tell it to use my current location. Pop! It gives me a little blue ball right where I am sitting and a red one where I am going. In my city, I can choose whether I want to know how to get there on foot, in a car, or on public transportation. For most locations, I can click on the red ball and it will show me an interactive photo of the building that I am going to. I can choose to keep moving down the street to see what the local intersections look like. I can spin the photo in any direction, even up, and see exactly where I can park and what the scene looks like. I have loved maps my whole life, I have stacks of them. But, if I have access to both a map and a GPS, I know which one is going to get my attention. So, I will miss the GPS terribly as well as all the rest of the stuff. But I think the only way the grid survives for more than about twenty five years would be if we, as a species, decided to get along and that would probably require that we get rid of separate countries. And you know how likely that is to happen.

I say have fun with our toys as long as you can. I drive a gas-guzzler with heated seats. I have a device that converts my car's DC into AC and I plug in a massage chair that sits on top of my seat. We are going to look back fondly on all that the human mind out of control was able to produce. If you can use it all without identifying with it, you will be able to stay positive about whatever is next...Not to worry...But keep your maps...

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