On today’s segment of “history and time are meaningless concepts but still resulted in something very weird”: The first manned flight was in 1903. Forty-four years later, Chuck Yeager flew a jet faster than the speed of sound; 22 years after that, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Before 1930, no one even knew for sure that Pluto existed, but six months ago, we sent a satellite by it and took pictures. Speaking of space, your average smartphone holds more memory and has more processing power than every computer used on the Apollo 11 mission – combined. Mind boggled yet?

The advancements that have been made in so many areas of human discovery, particularly over the last century, are downright terrifying sometimes. Especially when you consider that “advancements” can be applied not only to good, helpful things like the polio vaccine or pasteurized milk, but also to the fact that the time between the first aerial bomb and the use of the atomic bomb is roughly 34 years.

Three-and-a-half decades for humans to figure out how to throw things on the people they wanted to hurt from safe up in zeppelins, and then to progress to the deployment of the most deadly weapon in human history.

Which is quite an accomplishment, when one steps back and considers exactly how much of that history has been spent in warfare. Most studies place it at around 92 percent. To get more solid numbers – of the past 3,400 and a bit years, only 268 of those have been entirely peaceful. Humans. What can you do? As a species, we aren’t particularly alone in warring with ourselves – there are any number of animals who get possessive over territory, though that’s really more on a singular basis. And ants, of course – it isn’t uncommon to observe the residents of one anthill brutally decimating another.

We’re just particularly sustained and stubborn about it, I suppose.

Back to the subject of technological advancements – I’m 16. I remember digging a VHS tape out to watch and having to put it through “rewind” because no one had done it before putting it back in the box. Now, I can’t even remember the last time I saw one, let alone watched it. I remember when the Wii first came out and every kid on my block was over at the house of the one person who had it. I’ve got half a dozen of the, “back when everyone used a phone with a cord” kind of stories – and I’m 16. My parents have hundreds more.

The world is accelerating at a fantastic yet terrifying pace. I can’t decide which one seems a better way to describe the thought that I’ll get to see at least another half-century of development.

— Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy who can frequently be found listening to music, reading, wrestling with a heavy cello case, or poking at the keyboard of an uncooperative laptop.