High life
Time and terror
Taki
TRougement here's a whiff of autumn in the air, and I don't like it. At 65, every day is precious as hell, or heaven for that matter. After all, have you ever asked yourselves how long ago one million seconds was? It was 11 days ago. Oh, what I would give to have one billion seconds back. If the Almighty granted them to me, I'd be 34 years old, with six years to go before starting to write for The Spectator. Mind you, not being a greedy type, I'd hate to have one trillion seconds back. That would make me zero minus 31,000 years, and nobody, not even Bill Clinton or that murderous pig Mugabe, would like to live that long. Or, knowing them, perhaps they would.
Time is a fascinating thing, even more fascinating than reading about Kate Winslet's impending divorce. We tend to forget how fast time goes by, just as we tend to overlook how fast technology was already moving in the 20th century. From the time the Germans dropped bombs by hand from Zeppelins over Allied trenches in the first world war to the time we dropped atomic bombs on old men, women
and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was only 28 years. Fewer than one billion seconds. And from the Wright Brothers' first manned flight in 1903 to man's landing on the moon was only 66 years, or two billion seconds.
Just imagine what the next ten years will be like, What's safe to say is that we will see more technological breakthroughs than we experienced throughout the 20th century. IBM scientists have managed to assemble arrays of particles so minuscule that 100,000 of them would still be only the width of a human hair. In other words, all of human culture in all of human history could fit in something the size of a can of Coke.
The Internet, needless to say, does not bear thinking about, at least where computer illiterates like myself are concerned. Socalled 'distributed' computing, the new methodology that harnesses the power of many machines linked together for a common purpose, will give unlimited power to the individual. What may then happen is that close-knit, informal groups of people will start setting up global policies, quasiinternational forms of government. The precursor of this prediction was Jody Williams. Operating with a laptop out of a log cabin in Vermont, she mobilised likeminded groups around the world, circumvented national governments, and landed the Nobel Prize for the anti-landmine treaty.
On the other hand, it can be used for terrorist purposes. As I am writing, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York are burning. It looks like Middle East terror, no ifs or buts about it, which I guess goes to show that when people are pushed to desperation the results are vile and very, very violent. Osama Bin Laden, the world's most wanted alleged terrorist, has become a cult figure among Muslims the world over — and a hero on the pedestal of Islamist extremism — due in no small measure to the Internet and to the way the US has demonised him.
One thing is for sure, America will bear the brunt for its pro-Israeli stance because unlike Israel, which is used to terror and knows how to protect itself, Uncle Sam has never been bombed, never been invaded, and has never experienced the horrors that go with open warfare.
As computer-literate youths migrate into the ranks of conventional terrorist groups, the baddies are already increasing their reliance on state-of-the-art encryption. One thing is for sure. Outrages in conventional suicide terrorism such as what has happened in the US aside, computers and new technology in the wrong hands will play a horrendous part in future.
I received the news as I was writing this column about time and the future, and suddenly the lightheartedness of the beginning of the piece seems obscene. Now is the time to pray for the victims and have a rethink of our Middle East policies.
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