Global statistics tell us that only 18% of the worlds population has ever flown in an airplane. For those of us in the so-called "First world", it is a shockingly low number. Alas, as of the time of this writing in 2017, it is the case. I am myself writing about it because this low 18% global number often leaves me wondering: What is it really going to mean, once it starts to tick upward? And of course, the other thing: What exactly is going to get the number ticking upward?
I have written about this before, many times, because it is often on a poor boys mind, but in my opinion, there is a general rule of thumb for all things mankind has ever invented, and this includes airplanes and airports: Nothing is all that fun or even all that meaningful ,really, until the poor get a chance to jump in and play the game as well. In other words, since right now only the richest folks in the world are the ones riding on airplanes, and especially the ones piloting them, we have yet to see them really effect the worlds "culture" as much as some people might mistakenly assume they have. The sad truth about airplanes is that they are still rather mysterious for the poor of the world: We do not understand them, we have no intention on ever piloting one ourselves (for the most part), and we also tend to, the rare chance we get to fly, get rather frightened of them. Airplanes are, in 2017, pretty much still a sort of "novelty" experience for most folks, as far as I see it. The average person is not flying very often....
But what about 50-100 years from now? Or even further after that? What might happen with airplanes and flying as the clock of time keeps ticking? Well, I am personally convinced that, if one wants to know what will happen with airplanes in the future, one need not look any further than to what happened with boats in the past. In fact, I find it very strange just how little this particular subject of the boat ever seems to get referenced in our modern time period, but when you study the history of the boat, frm the beginning of human history to our own time, you see that they have gone through some seriously impressive changes that it seems nobody is even slightly impressed by any longer.
Most people don't know much about boats, I suppose, because in modern times there is no reason to know about them. They faded out of view. For a long time, though, they were the biggest thing going. Boats were arguably our biggest invention as human beings , in my opinion, until we created the train. The train of course was outdone by the automobile. And then the automobile was outdone by the airplane. Hence, you see, boats and the absolute sheer genius of them has slipped pretty far back into the rearview. The other thing that has slipped very far back is the specific evolution of the boat. It is the evolution of the boat which I think is so important to examine because I feel, essentially, that the airplane will take the same evolutionary journey...
Keep in mind I am not an expert on any of this, but what I find very interesting about boats is that the primitive version of the boat -- the canoe -- actually seems to look, at least to me, shockingly similar to an airplane. All primitive populations the world over used canoes and only canoes to get around in the water for thousands of years. This includes the Vikings, who were great sailors, and whose version of the boat was basically -- so it seems to me -- a bigger canoe capable of holding more passengers. Then, though, look at the boats that the Ancient Greeks and Romans figured out, when their societies got a bit more advanced. Again, I'm not an expert, but judging by pictues, it seems that the boat the Ancient Romans thought up, two thousand years ago, didn't have any rooms and it did not have any real "hang out" area.
Traveling on a boat in the Ancient Roman times wouldn' thave necessarily been any fun...just like traveling on an airplane now, for the poor man, isn't very fun either. There was no where to sleep. You had to be constantly aware of the fact that you were on a boat. Plus it was pretty easy to sink and was only capable of going so far, so fast. In the ancient times, no one discovered Subsaharan Africa, or the New World, for this exact reason. Their little boats could have never have dreamed of making such a journey. This is why, if you read the old stories from the ancient times, you'll often notice that they always just keep sailing for the same, nearby destinations over and over again. The Romans sail over to Greece, then to the tip of North Africa, maybe north towards England (maybe) but never any further. Would have been impossible. Circumnavigating the entire globe just sounds ridiculous from the ancient perspective. They didn't even know they were on a globe....
So, you see, a poor man in the ancient times, probably would have had ideas about boats, in the same way a poor man now has ideas about airplanes: Once you put fishing aside,t here really wasn't much money in 'em, and they were more trouble than they were worth to get to know intimately. After all, the poor man in the ancient times, or in the Viking age of the 1100s etc., could not have collected tons of passengers to sail them back and forth around the world! No one would have been interested. What was the use of the thing then? It basically had none in those times. It was limited, instead, to rather serious things: Military use, getting some fish, and serious voyages that politicians of the time and veyr rich folks would have needed to make, to reach other important places. Poor men had no use....
Fast forward, however, a bunch of centuries, from the 900s to the 1500s, and suddenly we enter into the great Sailing Age, which historians on Google tells me begins roughly around the 1570s, nearly a hundred years after Colombus and his journey with the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Now, personally, as a poor fella, I can't explain to you exactly what happened when the Sailing Age begins, but I can certainly tell you that I see the difference clearly enough: The boats got a helluva lot bigger, now they had big rooms to sleep in, poor folk seem to have started stealing them and figuring out how to sail them as well, and , last but not least, they basically look like huge houses -- mansions, even -- that we figured out how to get to float on the sea, just like those little primitive canoes,long before. Looking at this evolution of the boat, a man therefore can't help but wonder: Shall it not, eventually, be the same for the airplane? Shall the airplane not eventually become just like our boats did? Shall they not one day also be as big as houses and mansions, just floating through the air, instead of water?
Of course, from a modern perspective in the early 21st century, the idea that airplanes could one day be as big and as wonderfully spacious as a house, or a yacht, and still float in mid air and travel at speeds of 5-600 mph (like commercial airplanes do now) sounds absolutely preposterous. And yet, once upon a long ago, that's exactly what Caesar would have thought too, about boats, in 44 BC. He would have never been able to even conceive of a boat as big as the one that took my great-great grandfather Aniello, from Naples, to the shores of New York City, in 1906. This would have been positively mind blowing. He certainly wouldn't have been able to conceive of something like a submarine, either, an incredible invention... but another one that, in our own time, very few folks seem to be as impressed by as they should be. This lack of being impressed of course, is precisely what tends to cause folks to also not be able to properly visualize the future and what it might be. I always say: the biggest key to understanding the future is to understand the past. Once somebody understands this evolution the boat took over the course of millennia, imagining the course of history for the airplane no longer seems as difficult....
One thing I personally find really intriguing about science fiction cinema and stuff like that , for example, is the way it seems I have now seen spaceships that "are like houses" dozens of times, and yet I never seem to see these "airships" that just float above Earth, the way I'm describing. Doesn't that seem a bit odd? It's as though the science fiction of our own time is repeatedly skipping an entire period of "future history": It never bothers to imagine the air yacht and always skips straight to the big spaceship and space station that everyone will live on, as they cruise through the stars. In my mind, it seems logical to imagine that the air yacht will come before the truly comfortable spaceship. And what will happen when it finally comes, one wonders, say a century from now? Or maybe less? Many things will happen. Many things that, one imagines, will, again, presumably mirror precisely what already happened, during the Sailing Age.
This means that borders will be upset, wars will be commenced, piracy of the skies will occur, and of course, last but not least, many very dangerous battles will occur in the air above our heads, the same way battles occurred during the Sailing Age, out at sea. If you want to imagine what the "Airship Age" will look like, especially at what will probably be its peak, just switch all those stories you've heard about pirates like Blackbeard and Captain Teague and Company, from the ocean to the air. Sadly... depending how you see it... this next "Golden Age of Piracy" is probably still quite awhile away from us stll, though. For example, if the air yacht comes out onto the scene in 2100, it might be the case that the pirates don't manage to really get rolling until 2200, or even later.
Why do I say this? It is because I am again using the story of the past to help me predict the future, and when you read the story of the past, you see that, though Colombus sailed to find the New World in 1492, and though the Sailing Age commences, officially, in the 1570s, the Golden Age of Piracy , for some curious reason, doesn't actually get started all the way until the 1670's! A whole hundred years later. Imagine? Most people probably just think of pirates as being around all the way from the 1400s to the 1700s, even beyond. Who knows what they think. It's not the case though. Piracy has a very specific window of time: the 1650s to the 1730s. What happened in the 1730s to stop them?
Easy answer: The military boys finally got their grip back on the sea-- just the way they had had it before the age of piracy commenced. Of course why did they have the grip in the first place, back in the 1400s, before the Piracy age? Another easy answer: It is because, back then, there was no need to have a grip! For all the poor boys didn't yet know how to get out there and sail and, most importantly, rob the rich boys boats!
Pirates of the Caribbean is actually set right around this tumultous period in history of the pirates end: Jack Sparrow laments how "Small the world has become", and how he can no longer ever seem to hide or escape from the military ships, like he used to be able to do. In his younger years, it was easy to have the sea all to himself, and go anywhere ,be anybody, and never worry about getting harassed. Now that he's older, it seems the Black Pearl can never properly escape persecution; Everywhere he turns, another military ship pops up looking to burn him out. Much of the later films, im fact, deal with the idea that Jack may very well wind up being "the last pirate out at sea". Captain Barbossa, Jacks occasional buddy in the series, says some great lines about it that always come to my mind: "Still thinking of running, Jack?" he says, "Think you can outrun the world? You know the problem with being the last of anything, by and by...there be none left at all." Jack, however, has a rather curious response to Barbossas sad refrain .. and it is a response which seems to tie in quite well with what I am scribbling here in this document about airplanes and what not: "Sometimes things come back, mate."
Many people in our own time, however, probably find it hard to believe that the military, as we know it now, especially the Air Force, will ever one day "lose temporary control over the skies". Again, though, these same people are just mirroring what folks in the 1400s would have thought, if you told them that, centuries in the future, poor folks would take to the sea, and give the big bad military a serious run for its money, for almost an entire century worth of time. No one could have imagined, for example, that pirates would throw aside their own national interests, and their own ethnic "interests", and just haphazardly throw together random sailing crews made up of poor men from all sorts of countrys and ethnic backgrounds.
Think about the pirate gang, and how absurd it sounds, even from a 21st century perspective: These gangs did not function like our military functions, since the military functions,as a rule, based on country, and they also didn't function like many of our criminal gangs nowadays do, which we know often function based on ethnicity. Sure, sure, the Italian Mafia sometimes works and cooperates with the black Bloods and Crips, and the Latin Kings, and MS-13, but they only do this to make brief transactions, before they go their own seperate ways again. Other than the brief transactions, the street gangs in our own time, and their "crews" and "squads", no matter what country they're operating in, are all generally composed of people who are of the same ethnicity. Gangster stories in our own time period are as strictly aligned by ethnicity as most countries military's still are.
Now, imagine the pirate crew in relation to this. It was a literal gang bangin' squad that was out at sea, and basically just took everybody in. It was fairly commonplace to find a very diverse pirate crew. No one checked your citizneship before you joined a pirate crew. No one said "...hey, kid, this is an Italian only gang...a black only gang." There was none of this. Even language was pretty much out the window for the pirate gang. That was all reserved just for the dumb military. The pirates thought differently. The pirates , as far as I see it, were united by poverty, not by race, not by language, not by nationality. As I always stress, the Golden Age of Piracy was not merely the first time poor folks really got to see the world together -- without the aid of that god awful shit stink military --but it was also the first time the poor folks got to mix and mingle, as well, without war being the main point. The Black Flag of the skull and crossbones is often rather parodied in our own time...seen as a "joke". In the pirate age though, it had great meaning. The meaning was simple: "To hell with your fucking countries and your shitty flags. We got our own thang goin'"
--notes
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