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A busy day, and some experimentation with having a social life, means that this challenge - How an event from yesterday could have gone - is a day late. Hopefully it will prove worth the wait...
A Difficult Decision
Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a
tornado in Texas? It is Thursday morning and, unwittingly, I face a decision
that could change the very world as we know it.
The choice between tea and coffee
is one fraught with difficulty at the best of times; a cup of tea can be
fashioned quickly and with minimal fuss – merely add a teabag, a suitable
quantity of boiling water and a dash of milk to finish it off: job done. A cup
of coffee (or, at least, a homemade cappuccino), on the other hand, is a very
different beast in terms of the amount of work involved; there is heating of
milk, grinding of beans, adding of water at just
the right temperature -not to mention ensuring the perfect ground
coffee/water ratio – and finally frothing the milk to the perfect frothy, foamy
consistency.
After a few moments of umm-ing
and ahh-ing, I make a choice. I choose the path of least resistance and I go
with the tea; five minutes later, I am back on the sofa with a mug full of tea
and I’m back at work.
But, just how different could
things have turned out? What if I’d taken the time to make the coffee instead?
The butterfly’s wings flap…
Making coffee takes longer and
so, instead of waiting in the kitchen, I wander back to my laptop while the
milk heats on the oven hob. With a few minutes spare, I head over to the New
Scientist website and read a random article that has a profound effect on me. A
flood of activity cascades throughout my brain; neurons firing and wiring, abstract
connections being made between the facts in the article and my existing
knowledge; and, by the time, the coffee is ready I have the stirring of an idea
for a radical reworking of social media.
Three hours later and I have,
like a madman, detailed the ways in which my social media revolution could work
and can find no apparent flaws in my theories. I call a close friend that I
know I can trust, and whose opinion I can trust even more, and explain my
thoughts. He’s flabbergasted and thrilled in the same moment; he sees the
immense potential of my idea and wants to work on it with me. By dinner time,
we’ve already been skyping for several hours and have managed to sketch out a
rough plan of action to move this from an idea to a prototype.
A week later and we have a hastily
drawn up business plan and a meeting with a London investment fund that
specialises in cutting edge internet technologies.
A month later and I’m handing in
my notice at work and we are setting up a company to absorb the several
millions that the investment company has decided to provide as seed capital.
Confidence is high for all concerned.
A year later and working
prototypes have been so ridiculously successful that we bring forward our beta
testing phase and open things up to the public. The world goes wild. Demand is
even higher than we could possibly have expected.
Two years on from the coffee and
Facebook table a nine figure offer for our company which we turn down. They
return with a ten figure offer. We turn that down as well. Facebook is the old
guard. The world has moved on.
Five years on and our site is the
only social media in existence. It has expanded beyond all initial expectations
and, with massive take-up even in countries such as China, it begins to have a profound
impact on society.
Fifteen years on and the site has
been instrumental in bringing about broad changes to society throughout the
world; with one shared location for all humanity to be linked, there is an increase
in tolerance and logical thought. The world is subtly changing.
Thirty years and the site has
acted to deliver world peace. Mankind unites and casts off the chains of
conflict, discrimination and prejudice that have held it back for millennia and
embarks upon a quest to further humanity by joining resources in order to
colonise the Solar System and spread mankind to the stars.
Fifty years further and the world
holds its collective breath as the first Hawking-Drive powered space probe
embarks on a mission to visit the nearest star; its matter/anti-matter engine
warping space-time in order to deliver it to its destination at ten times the
speed of light.
Two months into its voyage, the
engine signature of the space probe is detected by a VyJovian Battle Cruiser in
a deep range scan. They capture the probe and examine its (to them) relatively
crude technology. A discussion ensues on the bridge for a few minutes before it
is determined that it would be in the best interests of VyJovia if they were
trace the path of the probe and make contact with the civilization responsible
for dispatching it. The tracing procedure is mere child’s play and, within five
minutes, their engines are spooled up to full speed and the Battle Cruiser warps,
almost instantaneously, into a near-Earth orbit.
Unfortunately, the shape of
Australia, the first continent seen by the newly arrived VyJovians is – by some
cosmic coincidence – almost exactly the same as an extremely blasphemous rune
in VyJovian language whose existence is banned upon pain of death for the way
in which it degrades the reputation of the VyJovian diety, Golob. And, while Australia
on its own may not have been enough to precipitate what happened next, the fact
that the first communication they received from Earth - “Welcome to Earth” –
translates, phonetically, into the perfect Vyjovian for “Golob is a fuckwit”
was enough for a third lieutenant, who was particularly religious and very much
affected by the whole affair, to activate the Planet Killer cannon which
vaporised the planet in milliseconds, leaving nothing more than molten slag
where Earth had once stood. When it was realised, years later, that it had all
been something of a misunderstanding and that a bit of mistake had been made,
the lieutenant was told off quite sternly and received only 90% of his annual Golobian
bonus that year. Which was, admittedly, of no real consolation to the nine
billion disintegrated inhabitants of Earth...
And that is why it was probably a
good job I chose to have a cup of tea…
