Since I was born (2022)

The world’s spinning fast. Sometimes I forget about how much science and technology have progressed in my lifetime. Here are some advances to help remind me.

Since I was born…

• 1971 - The Stanford prison experiment was conducted.
• 1974 - Start of Dauphin Manitoba’s Mincome project (until 1979).
• 1974 - The world population reached 4 billion people.
• 1975 - The term fractal was coined.
• 1976 - General relativity was tested and confirmed to an accuracy of 0.0000007%.
• 1976 - A spacecraft successfully landed on Mars.
• 1976 - The first known Ebola outbreak occurred.
• 1979 - Smallpox was eradicated.
• 1980 - I saw my first bank machine.
• ~1980 - I first used a wireless remote control and a microwave oven. The dawn of the age of “action at a distance”?
• 1981 - I first played a video game console at a friend’s house.
• 1981 - First launch of a Space Shuttle.
• 1982 - I first heard of a new disease, AIDS.
• 1983 - I wrote my first computer program, in BASIC (on an Apple II Plus at my junior high school.
• 1983 - Polymerase chain reaction was invented.
• 1984 - Prions (infectious misfolded proteins) were confirmed.
• 1985 - The wreck of the Titanic was discovered.
• ~1985 - I first heard about the Antarctic ozone hole.
• 1986 - I bought my first computer, an Apple IIc (with a 1MHz CPU, a 320kB floppy disk, and a 9" monochrome monitor).
• 1986 - The worst nuclear disaster in history occurred.
• 1987 - The world population reached 5 billion people.
• 1988 - The first confirmed exoplanet (extrasolar planet) was discovered.
• 1988 - I sent and received my first email.
• 1989 - The Berlin Wall came down.
• ~1990 - I saw a cell phone in person.
• 1992 - The Atlantic northwest cod fishery collapsed.
• 1993 - I browsed the world wide web for the first time.
• 1994 - Fermat’s Last Theorem was proved.
• 1996 - Dolly the sheep was cloned.
• 1996 - I got Internet service at home. (Dial-up service @ 56kbps until 1999, then cable broadband.)
• 1996 - A feathered dinosaur was discovered.
• 1997 - Global average temperature reached 0.50°C above the 20^th century average.
• 1997 - A computer beat a chess grandmaster in a match.
• 1997 - I started my own website. (It received 100 visits in the first 3 months; about 1,000 in the first year; and about 10,000 in the first two years.)
• 1998 - It was observed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
• 1999 - The world population reached 6 billion people.
• 2001 - Wikipedia was launched.
• 2003 - The human genome was mapped.
• 2003 - I bought my first cell phone. (Held out as long as I could 😄)
• 2003 - My first wireless access to the internet.
• 2005 - Same-sex marriage legalized in Canada.
• 2009 - Bitcoin, the first digital cryptocurrency, is released.
• 2010 - I started buying digital music when some digital stores started selling unencumbered MP3 songs. Previously, music was encumbered by Digital Rights Management in Canada.
• 2010 - The first privately funded company to successfully launch to orbit and recover a spacecraft.
• 2011 - I cancelled my cable TV service – strictly Internet since.
• 2011 - The world population reached 7 billion people.
• 2012 - The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed.
• 2012 - A man-made object reached interstellar space.
• 2012 - I digitized my entire research library (about 30,000 pages of books and papers) – strictly electronic from then on. Also switched pleasure-reading from paper to e-books. (By 2012 we had accumulated about 1,000 paper books.)
• 2013 - I switched from incandescent to LED light bulbs at home.
• 2015 - I first heard about CRISPR, the most powerful gene editing tool to-date.
• 2015 - An Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa killed over 11,000 people – more than all previous Ebola outbreaks combined. Also, the first vaccine for Ebola was developed.
• 2015 - The first time somebody close to me bought an electric car.
• 2016 - Global average temperature reached 1.00°C above the 20^th century average.
• 2020 - The COVID-19 pandemic killed an estimated 7 million people worldwide and led to lockdowns, work-from-home, and face masking.
• 2020 - I started video calling regularly with family and friends.
• 2022 - I first started having useful chats with an artificial intelligence. At the time it had 175 billion parameters, about 0.1% of the synapses in the human brain.
• 2022 - The world population reached 8 billion people (more than doubled since I was born).

I wish I could remember…

• When did I first hear of global warming?
• When did I eat my first genetically modified food?
• When did I first see GPS in action?

— Rik Blok