Read What I See

     In today’s world we find that our lives are fed by a constant bombardment of communication.  Over two hundred years ago ingenuity and some luck in discovery opened the gate to communication.  The discovery of electricity and the telegraph evolved into the telephone then the radio and so on. As a result we have found ourselves with an incredible amount of communication that far exceeds our needs.  Take for instance the news: You can turn on your TV and see weird news with no relevance to our everyday life.  Sit in front of a computer and browse the Internet: There is more communication and trivial information than most of us would be interested in. If you read this article you will have found a straw in a stack of hay.

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   More amazing is the cell phone, it has given us the freedom to communicate everywhere at any time with anybody. The once famous Dick Tracy who  communicated with a futuristic wrist watch has been dwarfed with a communication gadget that can take pictures, play music, videos and browse the Internet.  A down fall of communication is that it is also used for the purpose of misinformation and indoctrination.

     Unlike communication, transportation has doomed itself with the lack of innovation.  We can brag about being able to fly around the world and having gone to the Moon but our current technology is outdated.  We are dependent on a transportation system that revolves around a concept that was invented over 5,000 years ago.   Certainly our world would not be what it is today without the invention of the wheel but after thousands of years the only thing that has changed is how we turn it.  Early civilizations used human power later they use animals and eventually the internal combustion engine was born.  With the invention of the internal combustion engine came our dependency on oil.  When societies that depended on this oil sucking gadget realized of its importance, the struggle to secure the oil supply became a survival issue and the race to conquer this source of energy began.

     North Africa was a battle front during War World as Hitler made an attempt to control the region oil fields.  Superpower countries in the world have struggle to control the flow of oil for nearly a century.  We have had two recent wars involving Iraq to protect our vital interest and the supply of petroleum.  Our nation’s policies have had plenty of critics for having done so but these critics are amongst the first to voice discontent when our supply has been minimized or it has become costly.  In spite of our recent involvement in the Middle East it has not been the intention of our government and allies to deprive oil producing countries the revenue from their oil wealth.  The objective has been to insure that there is a continuous flow and that it cannot be used to black mail our economies that are so dependant on their product.

     Cries of dependency on domestic and foreign oil by our citizens and government have become the sounds of broken records.  With recent events on the rising cost of fuel and the effect that it is having in our economy and that of the world, we appear to be going around and around as the wheel that we are so dependent on.  We have become inundated with cries for development and changes on our sources of energy.  We hear about development of new sources of energy from wind, solar, nuclear and so on.  Our energy problems can easily be resolved if we would only rely on it for the production of electricity.  Our energy problems lie within transportation, for there is where the bulk of our energy is consumed and dependence on foreign oil is crippling economies.

     Everyone seems oblivious to the fact that our problems lies within the wheel that we have been using for over 5,000 years.  As the automobile replaced the horse pulled carriages we began to rely on roads to put our wheels on.  As time went by and we became more populated and our dependency on roads and highways have evolved from a single lane streets to multilane expressways.  There is no end in sight to this phenomenon. No sooner than an expressway is widened to accommodate more vehicles, more lanes are needed to allow for traffic growth.  The wheel concept of transportation is obsolete. We wore out this antiquated discovery and it should now be considered defunct.  Just as communication made revolutionary discoveries in a short period of time so it is needed for transportation to do the same.  New sources of energy to fuel our vehicles that run on top of wheels are not going to solve our energy or highways problem.

     It is disappointing to see the lack of innovation and ingenuity revamping the way in which we get around.  We need those who have the knowledge and wealth including our government to rethink the entire concept of making the world go around on wheels.  Other sources of potential energy need to urgently be explored; from magnetic fields; gravity and any other possible source of energy that surround us and we have not extensively tried to pioneer.  Whether the future of transportation will be the ability to levitate using forces in our physical environment or any other possibility is for science to resolve but we are past due a major change of fresh ideas.  Common sense should tell us that we must get off the wheel or our present problems of energy, transportation and roads will never be resolved.

     The scientific community, innovators, our governments and greed have let us down and we must find a new direction.  There is an imminent need for those who possess the means to stop spinning their wheels and find a real solution for mobility and transportation.  We cannot longer survive on a system that is nearly 6,000 years old.  We need to put the wheel away in a museum where it belongs and get off the ground.