Landrew’s Take on Technology

Remember that song when you were a little kid, “The wheels on the bus go round and round”?  If you don’t remember, here are some of the words to remind you: “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.”  I bet when you were super young you didn’t realize that this song is about technology!  And the technology part isn’t the bus, or the part about going round and round.  The technology part is the wheels!

The wheel has been around for a long time, but not as long as the circle.  Actually, wheel was invented when a caveman drew a circle and another caveman was like, “Hey if that thing was puffier, I bet it would roll down hills super easy.”  (This was all said in caveman language.)  Other stuff was invented from circles too!  In medieval times, a bunch of guys were staring at a picture of a circle and one was like, “Hey, if we made this things out of fancy material that would break if you dropped it, I bet it would be a totally sweet thing to eat food off of,” and that’s where plates came from. In the fifties, a bunch of musicians looked at circle pictures and one was like, “Let’s put music on these things, and make it so you have to spin it to get the music out,” and that’s where records, and eventually CDs, came from!

In fact, the invention of the wheel was so impressive, that now, when inventors try and make something really big and crazy, people say they’re reinventing the wheel.  I think this is sort of stupid!  I wouldn’t be that hard to reinvent the wheel, because it’s already invented.  You could just take a wheel, make some new designs on it and be like, “look at my new invention!”  That’s why I think we should change the phrase, “reinvent the wheel” to “invent something that is as hugely important to how things work on Earth as the wheel was when cavemen made it a while ago, probably using rock tools.”

If you don’t think the wheel is important, imagine a world where they were never invented.  There would be no cars or bikes or mopeds.  When you wanted to leave and sound cool, you couldn’t say, “Let’s roll!” because, without wheels, rolling might never have been discovered.  Instead you would say, “Let’s leg!” because people would either walk everywhere or ride horses.  Parking lots would smell like a farm because they would be filled with horses tied up to stuff.  Then if you went to a movie and it was awesome, you’d be really excited until you went out into the parking lot where the gross horse smell would make you forget the awesomeness of the movie.

So wheels have made for a better world, but I, for one, think that, if we keep using them, they’ll get totally boring and lame.  That’s why it’s time for car scientists to really start trying to make hover cars!  Also, it would be cool if car scientists made cars with a button you could push and the car would change color.  That way, if you pulled into a parking lot and there was the same car as yours, you could press the button and feel like an individual.