By Joshua Thomas

C-S-E Editor

If we could travel back in time, even just fifty years, to tell people that many humans in 2013 are in possession of pocket-sized devices that contain every bit of information known to man, I wonder what would be the reaction.

When asked to expound more on this device and all its wonders, one could talk about how life has changed because of it. Watches have become virtually obsolete, as have land line telephones and flashlights, because they are all contained in this device.

A person can receive phone calls anywhere they go, not just while at home. Physical books have basically become a collector’s item, as have record players. Another invention to go the way of the dodo is jukeboxes, the entirety of which can now fit inside this magic device.

Where cameras were once a luxury, something only a person with money or a profession requiring one would possess, now everybody has one, along with video recording capabilities. Film no longer even needs to be developed, and you won’t find a one-hour-photo anywhere, if those even exist yet.

Many people, though, use this device to take pictures of their pets and pick fights with people they’ve never met, I’d explain. They use these things called applications to play digital pianos that make gross noises, see what celebrities who are only famous for being famous have to say, and talk about the intricacies of their daily routine using poor grammar, even though dictionaries and thesauruses (which nobody has physical copies of anymore) are one click away.

I’m curious if they’d wonder if modern fineries replaced common sense.

I can’t help but wonder what a person traveling back from the future 100, or even just 50 years, would tell us about the state of the world. What has been replaced, and how far has the human race evolved? Would we consider it evolution?

I recently read about a camera operated by the human eye that’s currently being developed, soon to be available to consumers. To blink would be to snap a photo, and the mechanics of the eye — how the human sees an image — would effect how it’s captured. In the future, will that be the norm, with images captured on the backs of our eyelids, every photo library only a blink away?

I wonder if we’d be told that the human body has become obsolete, as people now teleport their minds and memories from one place to another without moving a muscle. Would there be a way to record and watch our dreams? Dream creation as the newest form of filmmaking. While humans of the future are all capable of recording dreams, it takes a real visionary to record theirs vividly for all to see, while others run their dreams through applications to make them palatable enough to post on the worldwide mind web.

Humans of the future, we’d learn, have devices built into their bodies capable of healing. They’re capable of universal travel, and can be used to truly perfect the art of human interaction, and communication amongst species, but most people utilize to take and share mind photos of their cats, pick fights with strangers, and see what the Blobdashians — an alien race of socialites — are up to. True evolution.