The acronym was MAD, # mutually assured destruction, which is presumably why it hasn't happened. Even the dingbats recognised that nuclear war is unwinnable. That isn't to say that Chubby Chops from North Korea, or some similar future psychopath, won't, when cornered, decide to take everyone with him, but for now the threat seems muted. There seem more urgent things to disinvent.
My first thought for undiscovery was oil. It's odd to think that we've only been using oil to any great extent for a century or so. But what change it has wrought in that short time, what power it has given to bad actors who found they were sitting on # oil fields, what wars it has sparked, what military reach it has given to belligerents - before oil, wars were local - and what pollution it has engendered, to the point where it is altering the climate irreversibly.
At the same time how could I not be aware of the machines that oil has enabled, machines that have made life easier, machines that have made land more productive, machines like the Honda 50 motorbike I got when I was 16 and that shucked open the world like an oyster and made me happy? An oilless world would be constricting.
My second thought was the internet. It's a wonder, the embodiment of collective human intelligence. And nothing in history has done more to foster stupidity. The internet has given stupidity a foghorn. It has enabled the stupid to find each other and to agree on their stupidities, but more importantly it has enabled the dishonest to find the stupid and to tell them lies. The internet is the greatest propaganda tool of all time, uncensored, direct and intimate. Do its virtues outweigh these vices? I don't know.
But then I thought of flight and on this I am unambivalent. Flight has been a disaster. The Wright Brothers were wrong.
People had always looked at the birds and dreamed of flying. Only gods flew. The sky was heaven, the limitless kingdom, unrestrained and unattainable. And then we attained it. We realised the dream, once again little more than a century ago. It is always dangerous to realise a dream.
What misery has fallen from aeroplanes - from the London Blitz to the Dresden firestorm, from the napalm of Vietnam to the demolition of Nagasaki. All of it delivered on the innocent from a place too high to hear the screaming.
Air travel is often said to have shrunk the world. It has done no such thing. It has merely swollen ignorance. Before aeroplanes, to travel was to go from one place to another via other places. The journey between was the education and the pleasure and travail. The aeroplane has got rid of any of that nonsense. It has turned the world into a sort of pick-and-mix Disneyland where you just fly to destinations in search of, oh my god, experiences. In turn those destinations tart themselves up to the level of Disneyland attractions and sapid reality disappears.
Time was when it was bold to travel. It was a risk to leave the known and go to the unknown with eyes as wide as saucers. It was not meant to be easy. Flight has made it easy and dreary. Look at the faces in the international airport. These people are about to cross the world and they are bored. It is a travesty of travel.
We are creatures of the land. We belong there. I have asked myself what we would lose of value if the aeroplane was disinvented and all that I can think of is the flying doctor service in the outback of Australia. Sorry about that, but it's a small price to pay for the greater good.
