Did you know that Henry Ford - in order to own all elements of his supply chain - had a rubber plantation in the Amazon called Fordlandia? Where alcohol was banned, workers were forced to keep working through the hottest hours of the day, and they had to learn to square dance for some reason? If you know at some point every Model T also came with an anti-Semitic newsletter?

I’ve been thinking a lot about history and how more narratives than we should be comfortable with are quickly getting buried and disappearing in the flux of social media distraction, and whatever else is being thrown our way these days.

Then yesterday, one of the world’s favourite humans, Sir David Attenborough turned 100. He turned one century old. And I began to consider just how much of history he had lived through, been witness to - and shaped. You know he helped make tennis balls yellow, right?

Let’s walk through a slice of his journey.
He was four when Pluto was discovered. Then WWII, the nuclear bomb, the transistor, the discovery of DNA, colour television, Sputnik 1, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the invention of the World Wide Web, modern telephony, a crop of assassinations, the civil rights movement, the invention of the miniskirt, the cultural revolution, all the formats of music, the invention of smartphones, the 24 hour news cycle, social media, connected devices, and then now, artificial intelligence.

That is a staggering amount of history to live through. A lot of… stuff for one mind to experience.
And I keep wondering what that feels like emotionally.

Does it feel like wonder? Disorientation? Gratitude? Loss? For a man who filled all of us with wonder, I’m going to go with wonder. It’s a wonder he doesn’t walk around with a stick at 100. That’s the energy of living a life filled with wonder, I bet. Not turmeric and fruits.

Then there’s us. 40 fam. Lmao!

It’s safe to conclude we are as infants in this equation. We definitely didn’t see the modern world being built. We arrived after many of the big foundations were set. This is why seeing old pics of your moms and aunts in afros and miniskirts still leaves one with a sense of both disbelief and awe.

But I do feel like we’ve lived, and are living, through a strange threshold. And now I must implore you, dear reader, not to die anytime soon because there’s much more to come. So much more. (And I want company in case the robots take over.)

But I digress.

I remember enough of the world before all this “digitisation”. When being unreachable was normal — not a cause for concern. When not carrying the internet around in my pocket was also normal — and comfortable.

I remember when, if you didn’t know something, sometimes you just didn’t know it. Or you had to go somewhere to find out - usually a book or a parent.

So to be fair, my generation also experienced the analogue world where there was more friction. More waiting. More gaps. Definitely more room to think.
And this is the only point at which we may confidently pretend that our experience intersects with Sir David’s.

The internet arrived. Then it became normal. Then essential. Then invisible. The phone stopped being a phone and became everything else. And now, the era of AI.

And that’s the one that really makes me pause. Because if Sir David’s century was about expanding human reach, ours feels more like it’s about redefining human boundaries. Or turning them on their heads. Tomato, tomato.

Part of me is excited about what our own century will look like after our run. On one hand, the possibilities could be extraordinary - better medicine, deeper access to knowledge, cleaner energy, longer, healthier lives, new forms of creativity, maybe even a level of global coordination we haven’t managed before. Teleportation? Vertical flight? Time travel?

But another part of me wonders what gets lost. And this is where I would like five minutes with Sir David. I would love his perspective on what he thinks humanity lost, replaced, or lost sight of in the perceived glory of history.

Either way, the tougher question is: a hundred years from now, what will people say about this moment in time? The bomb won the war. Or did it only seem that way then? In hindsight, did it? Did it really? What would Oppenheimer say if we asked him?

So, a hundred years from now, when you and I are driving in our flying cars - leave me alone, I saw what I typed - will we be patting ourselves on the collective back? Or will we be wondering why the hell we’re still alive in some wretched dystopian timeline?

I don’t know.

But I do know that whatever our timeline looks like at the end of our 100 years, whether we get spontaneous standing ovations or become batteries for the robots, we will have only each other to blame.

For now, live, my friends. Live in wonder and live deeply because the truth is, you can’t affect the world from a grave. Just ask Sir David. If there was ever a mind to be uploaded into the cloud… he'd be at the top of the list.