Monday Morning Motivational Message (On Tuesday) - Orgel's Rule

How many times have you said, "That could never happen?"

According to Orgel's Rule, which pertains to evolutionary biology, evolution is more clever than you might imagine. When trillions of organisms among millions of species interact for billions of years, the results can be indistinguishable from magic. The same is true for technology and social trends.

For example, less than 150 years ago, many experts believed the incandescent light bulb was an impossibility.

In 1910, a year after Wilbur and Orville Wright proved a fixed-wing airplane could fly, William H. Pickering, the director of the Harvard College Observatory said, "It is clear with our present devices there is no hope of aircraft competing for racing speed with either locomotives or automobiles."

In 1917, when Cutex invented liquid nail polish,  most critics panned it as a fad. As late as 1932, The Atlanta Daily World wrote, "Dame fashion, whimsical and wayward as the wind has so many strange and unique fads, that her latest vagary, that of tinting her fingernails...has become quite popular."

In terms of the future, automobiles, which were thought to be a whim for the rich in the early 1900s, have evolved into self-driving cars a little over 100 years later.

While we have smart watches, Fitbits, and heart rate monitors that can provide medical-grade EKGs on your phone, the future will supply you with artificial blood, neural prostheses that can substitute for a motor, sensory, or cognitive portion of the brain that has been damaged, and external digital cameras that will interface with the retina and optic nerve, which will allow the blind to see.   

So the next time you think something is impossible, remember, that we have billions of people, having trillions of experiences, that will produce millions of new ideas, living on this 4.5 billion-year-old planet.  

Please leave me a comment about your thoughts regarding things that you would like to see in the future that are thought to be impossible today.