By Jim Hagarty
2006
A friend of mine was showing me his new truck the other day and it’s a dandy. It has heated seats to warm his butt and at night, when a car approaches from behind, the car’s headlights automatically cause the truck’s rear-view mirror to darken down, saving the driver from distracting glare.
There are two drivers for my friend’s vehicle and each has a separate key. When he bleeps his key, the truck’s interior features automatically adjust to his preferences: Seat goes back, mirrors go into correct position, etc. When his wife uses her key, her settings are immediately set in place.
There is not much new about these things. They’ve been around for years. But they’re impressive nonetheless.
But my friend is most proud of his global positioning system. To demonstrate it, he touched a button labelled “home” on the little machine’s screen and instantly up flashed a map showing every road he should take from Clinton to Bayfield. He told me that if he takes a wrong turn, the GPS makes a sound to indicate he is going the wrong way.
Now, as knocked out as I am by all this, I think it’s worth taking a step back and comparing these amazing accomplishments to other times and things in nature.
Example One.
My father used to talk about a farmer he knew who would take his horse and buggy to town on Friday nights, drink too much beer in a local hotel and sleep all the way home. This was possible because the horse knew the way and would deliver him to his front door, nearly 10 miles from town. When a satellite and a little computer can take you home while you are having a snooze, I promise to build a shrine to it in my home.
Example Two:
Yes, GPS is astonishing in its brilliance. But what about the CHC (the common housecat)? There is no end of stories about the ability of cats to find their way home. I knew a man who lived near Kinkora who had grown weary of his cat. He put it in the car, drove it out to a road near Dublin and dropped it off. A week or so later, it showed up back home which was not bad for a cat who had never been off the property, let alone to Dublin.
So, the man piled it in the car once more and drove it in the other direction to Monkton. But apparently, it is no harder for a cat to find its way home from there as it is from Dublin.
Defeated, the man kept the cat till its dying day.
GPS I can sort of understand. Cats I cannot.
My trucking friend then showed me a panel in his way vehicle, a GMC truck, for OnStar, a service available to GM vehicle owners only. If you are in a serious accident and your airbag deploys, the people at OnStar, wherever they are located (somebody said they are in California) know about your situation instantly and begin talking to you on an intercom to see if you’re OK. They will even call the ambulance.
But how about this.
If you have locked your keys in your car, you can call these nice people at OnStar and they will unlock the doors for you remotely, from whatever centre they are located in, wherever that is. Again, through the wonders of modern technology.
This, I am truly blown away by. Somebody in California, Alaska or New York, perhaps, unlocking my friend’s truck in Clinton, Ontario, Canada, about as far into the boonies as you can get.
But I am left to wonder if other uses could be found for this technology.
Could guns, including pistols, machine guns and rocket launchers, be jammed remotely, let’s say, by the United Nations? Grenades and bombs defused by satellites? Landmines blown up in the same way? Could every weapon produced be outfitted with an indestructible sensor that would make all this possible? A mass murderer foiled after his first shot when monitors jam his weapon, perhaps.
It wouldn’t stop wars since wars will never end. The combatants will kill each other with sticks and stones if they can’t find anything else. But it would take a lot longer to kill a thousand people and knock down their homes with a stick than with a bomb.
