Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably heard that the smart fellows at Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed to land a rover on Mars. Or more accurately, the scientists and engineers managed to program a robot to successfully enter the Mars atmosphere, guide itself towards its landing destination and then lower a 900 kilogram rover from 7.5 meters while it is suspended in the Martian sky by rockets. JPL, headed by Lebanese born Charles Elachi, did that with a budget of $2.5 billion dollars.
In fact, it has been a good couple of weeks for the world of science. Just around a month ago, on July 4, 2012, scientist at CERN have announced that they have most likely confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, so called the “God particle”. Scientists have managed to achieve that feat by the help of Large Hadron Collider that sits underground between and literally spans across French and Swiss borders 4 times.
And of course, the 2012 London Summer Olympics. For the first time in history, a disabled athlete, South African Oscar Pistorius is running alongside able-bodied athletes using his prosthetic legs made by a Icelandic company. Another first in this olympics games is about women; with Brunei, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia sending female athletes this time, 2012 games is the first Olympic event ever where all countries have sent female athletes.
While Hans Rosling would –rightfully– argue that the world is much better than it used to be, sometimes it is hard to believe that. Right near my home country, the Syrian regime is literally killing its citizens by the hundreds on their way out. Egypt, one of the poster boys of the Arab spring, is dangerously close to adopting Shari’ah law.
The world is changing, every day.
More importantly, especially for those who are fortunate enough to read this, there is not a shortage of important or really hard problems in any given part of the world. However, somewhere along the line, we have conflated “changing the world” rhetoric with simply “making a lot of money by exploiting a new market”.
There is nothing wrong, in my mind, with wanting to make a lot of money, being famous, or gaining the respect of those who we look up to. We owe many of our modern conveniences that make our lives easier, the medical advancements that keep us alive to those who simply aimed to make money.
Nevertheless, not everything that effects a lot of people changes the world. And on the flip side, you simply do not have to touch millions of people’s lives to make a meaningful difference in the world.
There’s a irony in that while we made the world interconnected than ever, we actually just make it possible to simply ignore those that we don’t want to connect to. In other words, we have just made it possible, for virtually everyone, to live in a world of their own choosing.
While it might feel like we are all living in our own worlds, there’s nothing like a little humilty to remind oneself of what truly great achievements could be, how it can affect many lives in very small ways of just a few lives in huge ways. And that humility, is what I’d really love to see more of.