Looking ahead

Thursday 3rd March 2011
If the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright had woken up one morning with the idea of jet propelled flight and tried to develop it in 1903 they would have failed. Propellers had to come and go first, in sequence, before such ideas could take hold.
There’s probably an obvious sequence to everything important that occurs in this world, and we can see it plainly enough when we look back, but projecting forward is not so certain. We don’t know the sequential steps of what’s coming next. It’s impossible to see where an idea has to go. It’s impossible to see, unless by intuition, if an idea will die or become as big as the jet engine. All we can guess is that any good-looking idea must evolve from one stage to the next. Before the advent of ‘flight’ the jet idea was absurd because we couldn’t see how it could happen. Now slow flight seems absurd and fast flight is indispensable.
An old idea is as open to improvement as a new idea, and none older than the human body. It functions because of the things we do to it. We can change its functioning by doing things each day (the way people have always done). First and foremost we feed it. We eat as we ate as kids, later adopting a diet in keeping with the people we live with. But when we start to look more consciously at what we’re doing, especially feeding, then, suddenly, out of the blue, we might ask ourselves the preposterous question: is there a better way? Is it possible that the traditional way of feeding human bodies might be inadequate to the more sophisticated humans we are becoming today? Can our diet be dramatically improved?