"It's a small world" - Idiom - Said to show your surprise that people or events in different places are connected, Cambridge Dictionaries Online.
I've had my fair share of "small world" experiences. They tend to happen as we meet new people or try new things. It can be a fun experience when you meet someone who knows your best friend, or has been to the same place as you, or turns out to be a relative (or the ex of a relative). That last one happens more times than not when you belong to my family. I remember one of my teachers in high school telling me that not only were my first and last name the same as her fathers, but we even had the same middle initial. That same year I learned that my dance instructor was my aunt's cousin, and that my dad had dated my band teacher's older sister.
Many may say that with the world of technology that we live in such experiences may be more likely to happen. If you think about it when the most the average person could travel in a day was twenty miles and communication was limited to how loud you could yell, it was very likely that you knew everybody that everybody else you knew was acquainted with. When your area of impact is relatively small it is unlikely that your ripples will be felt by others. Many may cite the butterfly effect and say that we are all connect regardless of distance and time. While I do agree in the idea of a connected existence I also believe that, like the ripples on a pond, the further away from us our influence travels the smaller it gets. Unless, of course, you are a quantum weather butterfly. But even then your thunderstorms are only about 6 inches across.
When you take into consideration that we have ways of traveling all over the earth in less than a day it has a way of "shrinking" your world. Take the longest flight in the world (supposedly currently running) Newark to Singapore. A 9,545 mile flight done in a little less than 19 hours. Seeing how the Earth is 24,901 miles around that flight is 37% the total way around. If I figured this right, that means you could circumnavigate the globe in an Airbus A340-500 in little over 51.3 hours. Just over two days. Ferdinand Magellen's crew did it in 3 years in the early fifteen hundreds. Even the Great White Fleet of Theodore Roosevelt which set sail in December of 1907 didn't return until February of 1909 - a 14 month trip. Even with air travel, the first flight around the world took 175 days. I've discovered that in March of 2010 the world record for a flight around the world was 57 hours and 54 minutes, so my estimate of 51 hours was a little off of reality. The story of Jules Verne Around the World in 80 Days (which was published in 1873) has been dreamed, enacted, and surpassed. It may be realistic to suppose that you could reach anywhere on the globe in a matter of days, and that's not considering parachuting.
Combine this with instantaneous communication (or "screaming fast" like my internet provider advertises) and you you can not only be anywhere in days, reach almost anyone within minutes. Apparently there are enough mobile phones in the world to cover 87% of the population. Or to put it another way - more people have cell phones than toilets. Now it appears that only 34.3% of the population of the world has internet access, but that's is still around 2.4353 billion people. Just think, the ripples you could be casting don't have to travel geographically anymore. Just from your fingers to your keyboard and from the screen to someone's eye. Current events are real time. Wars are fought with words as much as weapons, and the fighters can be everyday people with a smart phone or laptop. The world is indeed smaller.
The really cool thing is that despite the world shrinking in terms of travel and communication there scientists discover about 18,000 new species every year. And that's just the zoologists and botanists. Think about the discoveries in physics, chemistry, engineering, electronics, geology and all those other greek words. The world may be shrinking, but there is still plenty of it to explore.
I've had my fair share of "small world" experiences. They tend to happen as we meet new people or try new things. It can be a fun experience when you meet someone who knows your best friend, or has been to the same place as you, or turns out to be a relative (or the ex of a relative). That last one happens more times than not when you belong to my family. I remember one of my teachers in high school telling me that not only were my first and last name the same as her fathers, but we even had the same middle initial. That same year I learned that my dance instructor was my aunt's cousin, and that my dad had dated my band teacher's older sister.
Returning from our flight of fancy into the butterfly effect, I do find that our modern forms of travel do decrease the size of our world. For instances, my parents live below the radar domes pictured here. They are large enough that you can see them from over 20 miles away. Every time I see them I think about the original settlers in the area who walked or rode horses or carts to travel. A trip from my current home to there is a little under an hour. Trip on horseback could be anywhere from 10 hours to an hour and a half. As it is, I have no difficulty driving down to see them for an afternoon and then getting back in time to put the kids to bed. Now a days if I can see it I can reach it fairly easily. That has not always been the case.
When you take into consideration that we have ways of traveling all over the earth in less than a day it has a way of "shrinking" your world. Take the longest flight in the world (supposedly currently running) Newark to Singapore. A 9,545 mile flight done in a little less than 19 hours. Seeing how the Earth is 24,901 miles around that flight is 37% the total way around. If I figured this right, that means you could circumnavigate the globe in an Airbus A340-500 in little over 51.3 hours. Just over two days. Ferdinand Magellen's crew did it in 3 years in the early fifteen hundreds. Even the Great White Fleet of Theodore Roosevelt which set sail in December of 1907 didn't return until February of 1909 - a 14 month trip. Even with air travel, the first flight around the world took 175 days. I've discovered that in March of 2010 the world record for a flight around the world was 57 hours and 54 minutes, so my estimate of 51 hours was a little off of reality. The story of Jules Verne Around the World in 80 Days (which was published in 1873) has been dreamed, enacted, and surpassed. It may be realistic to suppose that you could reach anywhere on the globe in a matter of days, and that's not considering parachuting.
Combine this with instantaneous communication (or "screaming fast" like my internet provider advertises) and you you can not only be anywhere in days, reach almost anyone within minutes. Apparently there are enough mobile phones in the world to cover 87% of the population. Or to put it another way - more people have cell phones than toilets. Now it appears that only 34.3% of the population of the world has internet access, but that's is still around 2.4353 billion people. Just think, the ripples you could be casting don't have to travel geographically anymore. Just from your fingers to your keyboard and from the screen to someone's eye. Current events are real time. Wars are fought with words as much as weapons, and the fighters can be everyday people with a smart phone or laptop. The world is indeed smaller.
The really cool thing is that despite the world shrinking in terms of travel and communication there scientists discover about 18,000 new species every year. And that's just the zoologists and botanists. Think about the discoveries in physics, chemistry, engineering, electronics, geology and all those other greek words. The world may be shrinking, but there is still plenty of it to explore.
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