In July 1969, the United States NASA successfully landed men on the moon with the Apollo 11 mission.  40 years later, it is interesting to note how much technology has progressed and yet at that time, mankind took a giant leap with Neil Armstrong’s small step as he touched ground on the moon.

Today’s digital watches have several times the computing power compared to the computers that were used on the Apollo 11 rocket and modules.  Yet the Apollo 11 computers were able to perform real-time calculations that enabled the ship to navigate accurately the path from the earth to the moon and back.

In those times, computer memory was measured in kilobytes but now we routinely install a few gigabytes.  Storage devices could only store only a few hundred kilobytes but now storage capacities available to ordinary computer users can be in Terabytes (1 million Megabytes).  Computers used to run in terms of  kiloherts but now go up to 3GHz (3 million kilohertz).

Does this mean humans should now be able to reach much farther places in space?

Unfortunately, while we may be able to make machines that can travel far at a very high speed, we are still limited by the the physical limitations of survivability of the human body when subjected to extreme conditions.  But nothing is stopping us from sending robots and probes to other planets such as Mars.  The advances in technology allowed humans to virtually visit the red planet from the safety of earth.  The Hubble telescope in orbit around the earth has taken high resolution images of the farthest places in the universe.

So while we may physically be unable to travel much farther away from the moon, technology has allowed us to travel virtually and take a look at images of worlds beyond our solar system.  It would be interesting to imagine where technology will bring us in the next 40 years.