But it’s not just furniture. Or buildings. (Where are the vertically and horizontally moving elevators?). Or cars. (Would have thunk airborne cars to have taken to the ‘road’ before electric cars.) Or (non-Elon Musk a.k.a. affordable) space travel. Or transportational devices that atomised things and people in one place and re-atomised them in another almost instantaneously (instead of Zoom).
It’s the matter of long-distance surveillance, too, of the non-internetty, non-CCTV, non-Israeli spyware kind. I mean spy balloons? Balloons? Seriously?
I learnt about surveillance balloons still existing after I learnt about the US shooting down a few earlier this month, including one in Canada. Canada being Canada, of course didn’t mind not one, but two, non-Canadians entering its aerospace. Now, however sophisticated you make a surveillance balloon sound, it’s still a balloon.
Like duct tape, undershirts (vests), the internet and the microwave oven, the IFO – identified flying object – was first put to use for military purposes in 3rd century China (where else?) for signalling by strategist Zhuge Liang. This was not a balloon, sure, but a sky lantern of the kind you light up in Diwali, after having burnt at least three of them trying to get one of them to go up. But another 1,500-odd years later, observation gas balloons started being used from the late 1790s by the French. They were used extensively by all sides during World War 1, with artillery observers in them looking in to report back positions if they did not suffer from vertigo.
With the advent of cameras and other recording devices, high-altitude balloons started getting handy during the end of World War 2. And then, things revved up – as most things did – with the advent of the Cold War. Suddenly, you had, along with the space race, things like the US Army Air Forces’ classified Project Mogul – which would probably be reclassified as Project Amrit today. This involved high-altitude balloons recording long-distance sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests. And long stretches of static.
Then, of course, the satellites took over – to put a lipstick to the word, ‘reconnaissance satellites’. By the 1950s, the US took a leading role in ‘photo-reconnaissance satellites’. And with Sylvester Stallone-John Rambo still two years away, Jimmy Carter was telling Congress during his 1980 State of the Union address, how these devices ‘are enormously important in stabilising world affairs and thereby make a significant contribution to the security of all nations.’ Meanwhile, no mean peanut farmer himself, Joe Biden, in his State of the Union address a few weeks back mentioned, without the original Uncle Joe’s Vissarionovitchy moustache Cold War coolness, that ‘if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.’ By shooting a balloon down. A balloon. With a $400,000 Sidewinder missile attached to a $200 million F-22 Raptor fighter plane. Perhaps, a high-end BB gun would have done the trick?
Sure, there are drones now. Other surveillance devices that may be placed everywhere including inside toilet commodes. But it turns out that China, Britain, and the US had been boosting their spy balloon programs even before the skies were alive with Chinese balloons. First, they pulled the space shuttle program off the air. Space exploration is apparently back on the table. But let’s face it – in 2023, we’re way behind schedule if we want to reach the original Star Trek standards of circa 2266 AD, apar from the mobile phone/communicator.
Barring the internet, frankly, the present looks quite meh. Not quite 20th century, perhaps, but certainly not 21st. Calling things ‘disruptive’, ‘future-ready,’ ‘AI’ and balloons ‘spy balloons’ isn’t cutting it, I’m afraid.