The Computer Zone

This marks the third installment of the “Technology in Our Lives” series. Today’s topic expands a little on a part of yesterdays: Transportation. Today I’ll talk about how transportation has changed over the past few centuries, and what this means for us and how we live.

Technology Back in the Day
Imagine going on a cross-country family vacation. You’ve planned where you’re going, packed your bags, made sure everyone that’s going is present. All that’s left is to board a plane or get on a train or maybe even drive. But what if you were doing this 100 years ago. In that case you’d probably be traveling with a horse and buggy. The trip would take weeks and depending on the weather it could be a pretty bad trip.

Because the transportation wasn’t as good back then as it is now, traveling options were rather limited. Vacations (when they were taken) were generally taken locally because traveling far was 1) very expensive and 2) took a long time. As you can see traveling back in the day was not nearly as fun as it is now.

Technology Today
Technology today has improved a thousand fold since the days of the buggies. Computers are now embedded within every car thats produced, everything that can be automated has been and a few cars can even park themselves! With the advances in the transportation traveling to far away places has become a reality. You can get to Australia from Canada in just under a day of air travel. This just wasn’t possible 100 years ago.

How else has advances in transportation helped us? Emergency services now use GPS to find out the quickest path to wherever the emergency is. Helicopters and plans can now get to places quicker than cars (and buggies) ever could. Firefighters now have an easier time with fighting forest fighters. They now have plans that’ll drop the water right onto the fire. There are way too many things to even think about mentioning. Transportation technology has made our lives so much easier.

The Future of Transportation
So what kind of things can we expect in the future. I think that flying cars will soon become a reality. Imagine instead of waiting in your car on a busy highway being able to soar through the skies withing ever having to worry about. What about teleportation. Just think, you can travel anywhere in the world almost instantly. Other forms of transportation would become obsolete. If you were in a car accident you would be able to be taken to the hospital instantly, reducing your chance of permanent injury.

There are so many ways that transportation could evolve in the future that its too hard to think of them. I personally can’t wait for the future because I’m looking forward to the new ways that people will get around.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Tech In Our Lives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.