Me, My Dad and the Man on the Moon

From the village pump to the algorithmic age, within living memory

My father told me about standing on the hill behind Ballyboughal football pitch in 1963, watching an aeroplane fly towards Dublin Airport. John F. Kennedy was on board.

The president of the United States was descending out of the sky over North County Dublin. My father was a boy standing in a village that, according to him, possessed only a handful of cars. People still travelled by horse and cart. The distance between Ballyboughal and America was not merely geographical. They belonged to different worlds.

He told me about walking from his home down into the village, passing the gypsy caravans, as people called them then. There were horses and fires. Pots and pans were being hammered and mended. The noise and wildness of it frightened him. It was an old human scene, one that would have been recognisable centuries before he was born.

Six years after Kennedy’s aeroplane passed overhead, my father watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon.

There was no television in his own house, so he watched it on a small black-and-white set in somebody else’s. A group of people in rural Ireland gathered around a flickering box to see a man emerge from a machine nearly four hundred thousand kilometres away and place his foot upon another world.

“One small step for man,” Armstrong said. “One giant leap for mankind.”

It is difficult now to understand the scale of that moment. We have seen too much since. Rockets rise from the earth with such regularity that most of us do not notice. We carry moving images of the entire planet in our pockets. We can watch a war live while waiting for a bus, speak face to face with someone on another continent, or ask a machine to compose a song, diagnose an illness or explain the origin of the universe.

But my father had gone from the horse and cart to the moon in six years.

My mother’s life crossed much the same distance. On the day she and my father were married, she drew water from a roadside pump near their home to wash her hair. They had electricity before they had running water. This was not some remote ancestral existence. It was the morning my parents began their married life.

Not literally, of course. Ireland in 1963 was not the Middle Ages. But the last practical remnants of that world were still alive. Life remained local, physical and governed by the immediate conditions of place. You walked or cycled because there was no car. You knew darkness because there were few lights. News arrived from elsewhere. Memory lived in people. The weather was not something displayed on a screen but something coming over the hill.

Then an aeroplane carrying the most powerful man in the world crossed the sky. Six years later, another man crossed the surface of the moon.

Geologists say we are living in the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch. The Holocene began with the retreat of the last Ice Age, roughly 11,700 years ago. The Meghalayan began around 4,200 years ago. According to the official geological record, my father has lived his entire life within the same age.

Humanly, he has passed through several.

He was born into the lingering remains of an agricultural world. He came of age in the Space Age. He raised his children through the Information Age and now finds himself in the Algorithmic Age, carrying in his pocket a machine vastly more powerful than the computers that helped bring Armstrong to the moon.

The device knows where he is. It receives signals from machines orbiting the earth. It gives him news from every country, directions to any road, photographs of his grandchildren and access to almost everything humanity has recorded. It can hear his voice, recognise his face and anticipate what he might want to see next.

And like the rest of us, he may feel a small stab of panic if he leaves the house without it.

Imagine trying to explain that to the people gathered around the television in Ballyboughal in 1969. Imagine telling them that the journey to the moon would not end with the moon. It would return to earth and enter every home, every workplace and eventually every pocket. The technology developed through war, aviation and the race for space would alter how human beings communicate, work, eat, sleep, travel, remember and perceive.

Tell them that one day almost everyone would carry a small black device. That it would contain their photographs, letters, maps, money, music, work and private conversations. That they would use it to find love, announce death, order food, measure sleep and speak to machines. That leaving home without it would feel like becoming lost, even while standing on the road where they had lived all their lives.

They might imagine some higher tyrant had ordered us to carry it. They might assume we were being punished or controlled.

The truth would be more difficult to explain.

Nobody had to force it upon us. The machine made itself useful. Then necessary. Then intimate. It entered our lives as a tool and slowly became part of the structure through which life itself is experienced. It does not merely tell us where we are. Increasingly, it tells us what is happening, what matters, what to desire and where to look.

That may be what distinguishes the Algorithmic Age from the ages that came before it. The machine no longer sits outside us, waiting to be used. It participates in our attention. It learns our habits and reflects them back to us. It quietly arranges the world before we encounter it.

My father watched a man enter a machine and travel to the moon. I am watching the machine enter the human being.

And now I am sitting here, telling a machine the story my father told me, asking it to help me understand the distance contained within his life.

There is something astonishing in that distance, but also something difficult to comprehend. Human beings did not slowly adapt across generations. The world changed repeatedly around the same people. The child frightened by the hammering of tin beside a roadside fire became the teenager watching the moon landing, then the father using a telephone attached to the wall, then the grandfather carrying a networked computer in his pocket.

I live now in the same part of North County Dublin where my parents grew up. When I go outside at night, I look into the same sky my father looked into from that hill behind Ballyboughal football pitch.

The stars still twinkle in their apparently fixed positions. But among them now is a multitude of other lights moving quickly across the darkness. Satellites. Earth-made objects circling the planet, carrying our voices, our images, our maps and our coordinates.

In 1963, the sight of a single aeroplane carrying an American president was enough to bring my father onto the hill. Now I can stand beneath the same sky and watch machine after machine pass silently overhead.

My mother drew water from a roadside pump on the morning of her wedding. My father watched a man step onto the moon. I carry a machine in my pocket that knows where I am, and I am using another machine to help me tell their story.

All of this happened within a little more than sixty years.

Nobody gathered around that small black-and-white television in 1969 could have imagined the world that followed. We are no better placed to imagine what comes next.

If this is the distance we have travelled in sixty years, what will be passing over that hill sixty years from now?

And what will the human being standing beneath it have become?