Nine drops

Pitch is a liquid flowing 230 billion times slower than water. It looks solid, feels solid, even shatters if you hit it with a hammer. But it’s actually a liquid.

Why am I talking about pitch? The pitch drop experiment. This is the longest running lab experiment where 3 professors have died watching it, the current custodian has been watching it for decades, and only 9 drops have fallen since the experiment commenced in 1938.

But the interesting piece is not the beginning or the present day, but the progress in between. Of the contrast where each drop fell once a decade in the lab – but if you left the lab, the progress was faster, much faster.

When this experiment started, computer referred to a job title, not a device. Computers were mostly women who did mathematical calculations by hand for science and industry.

Seven drops later, in 2014, we’ve got as many computers as we have people.

And each of these computers (smartphones) is millions of times more powerful than the one we used to send humans 400,000 km away, which happened just 4 drops ago in 1969.

1 or 2 drops from now, we’ll have computers that are much smarter than any human being, possibly smarter than all humans combined.

If the world itself is moving faster everyday, why do you expect the next five years of your life to be roughly similar to the last five?