I was a mere child when the first satellite was launched into space, and America's technological edge was successfully challenged. We watched, with unabashed envy,as the Russians put the first man into orbit, and John Glenn was second...

Then I watched with pride as time went on, and we regained an edge...as we were the first to orbit a manned ship around the moon...and then, with grainy images like an Ed Wood sf film, I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

Firsts.

A unique time in history.

I watched as the Internet grew, a modern day incarnation of the noosphere proposed by Tielard De Chardin---a community of mind. It's hard to see it in the bickering of newsgroups, or the porn that covers half the Net---but if we are building towards a "community of mind" it must also include all those things that we have in our own minds...and often repress.

We are all ourselves, but at least with the Internet, we have the primitive beginnings of something...bigger. A collective, responsive mind that reacts in ways that our children's children will build on...

In a few decades, we'll be voting on the Internet, debating and passing laws on the Internet (or its successor), making decisions that truly change our lives...

Not in person, but through a collective merging of minds. It's a first that happened in my lifetime.

I watched as the first cloned sheep, Dolly, was made, and the human Genome project was born. I was born the same year that the genetic code, DNA, was cracked---1953---and although the Raellians patently have a false claim, I know it's just a matter of time before cloning and genetic manipulation will become the norm, not the exception.

I fear it a little; that we might alter ourselves to such an extent that we'll never find our way back to us again. Yet there is so much we could fix...perhaps someday stamp out autism, Alzheimer's, and other maladies that bring us heartbreak...

It's a humbling power; but it's ours to decide on. And it occured in my lifetime, in another first.

I watched, fearful, waiting for the final war, as the Cold War escalated, and a mutual-deterrence policy aptly called MADD had us aiming enough nuclear warheads to destroy the USSR's cities three tiems over. I watched, as it was eventually discovered that such a war would bring about a nuclear winter...and in amazement watched as one power dissolved, and another more-or-less stood down, and the world moved back from nuclear disaster.

I watched people use a little wisdom, and move back from war, lest they destroy themselves.

If that's not a first to be thankful for, I don't know what is.

What first would I like to see before I die?

An actual, unequivocal contact with another civilization in the cosmos.

That is a first that would give our biology, our sociology, and our psychology its Copernican Revolution---when we can find out how another civilization managed its climb to technology.

We would doubtless have a great deal to learn from them...and hopefully, we can give something back, even if we were the ten-thousandth such culture they met.

That's a first I would dearly love to see.

Maybe someday.