Conjunction 

Did you see it? On Monday a bright planetary conjunction occurred just after sunset.  The two largest gas giants in our solar system lined up closer than at any time in nearly 400 years, and it’s been roughly 800 years since they’ve done so while visible at night.  There are some fantastic photos of the event all over the internet so don’t worry if you missed the celestial marriage, it was well documented. 

Conjunctions are all over the place these days.  Take the synchronicity required for publicly funded and privately developed vaccines to be created for the coronavirus.  Operation Warp Speed set out to produce 300 million doses by January 2021 (at one time an unthinkable goal) and is pretty close to hitting the mark.  More conjunctions are on the horizon which will shape both the future of the American economy and way of life. 

Stay with me here, but flying cars are coming.  Even the Jetsons took place in 2062, so technology has time to fulfill the cartoon prophecy.  Firms have already partnered with NASA and the FAA to develop an air traffic management system to coordinate flights.  It takes more than public-private partnerships to pull this off.  A conjunction of technologies is required to develop this service.  For instance, faster processing power to facilitate machine learning to run complicated flight simulations, newly developed materials are needed to create components both light and durable enough for flight and safety, and 3-D printing to generate the components out of these new mediums.  Then an artificial intelligence is needed to fly these new machines which are more like drones than cars or helicopters, and adequate electric storage will be needed to keep them flying long enough to be profitable to service providers. 

This is just one example within transportation which will likely materialize via technological conjunctions.  Additional modes of movement are also under development. But then think about other areas of our lives.  Communication, commerce, food, and medicine are all benefitting from technological conjunctions. 

Like seeing Tuesday’s celestial event, timing is key.  All the underlying technologies likely to influence our future have been accelerating for years but are now beginning to move at paces which garner our attention.  We’re lucky to have been able to witness the “Great Conjunction” of 2020 and even luckier to see the technologies on the horizon.