The Future is Now

Ever since man was born, technology has continued to evolve. In 1945, the whole world believed that man had reached it's fullest technological potential with the explosion of the two atomic bombs in Japan. People were devastated by the destructive power of the two bombs and asked, "what has this world come to?" Has man's technology evolved so much that we can no longer control the power we created? Katherine Anne Porter addresses this issue in the short essay "The Future is Now".

Porter, a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, wrote this essay in 1950, five years after the first atomic bomb, at the age of 60. She was born in a time when the industrial revolution was beginning to take off; technology was not something new to her. She lived through two world wars and understood the death toll, the chaos, and the terror war can create, providing herself with an incredible ethos. She realized that war was what caused massive jumps in technology, "bows and arrows, stone cannon balls, gunpowder, flintlocks, pistols, the dumdum bullet, the Maxim silencer, the machine gun, poison gas, armored tanks, and on and on to the grand climax- if it should prove to be - of the experiment on Hiroshima" (197).

Society was beginning to believe that it has come too far. Technology has been created that shouldn't have been, and it is too far into the future. Yet, Porter quotes what one of her apprentice authors said, "the future is now" (195). She states that, "the future does arrive every day and it is all we have, from one second to the next" (195). People were angry and disturbed at the fact that a single bomb was able to kill millions instantly, but Porter argues, "I fail to see why it is more criminal to kill a few thousand persons in one instant than it is to kill the same number slowly over a given stretch of time" (198)

Throughout time, man has been killing people by the millions using the weapons he created. The only thing that changed is that the killing has become quicker and more efficient. She wishes that people do not start to curse the technology that they created, for technology will evolve as long as man commands it. She points out that the human race is better off evolving its technology than eating raw meat and living like cavemen.  Undoubtedly, killing is never justifiable, but as Porter says, "what we have is a world not on the verge of flying apart, but an uncreated one" (198). In an growing and evolving world, mistakes are bound to be made in the form of war, death, and destruction. Society and technology has not yet been perfected, but it is bound to be, in the future, which is now.

Uncontrollable technology at its finest