Upside Down Under: Star Trek on the Prairie...

There is no doubt technology has changed the way we live. Even in the past 20 years, there have been phenomenal changes that make living on the prairie more bearable, and in some cases enjoyable.

Think about medicine for example. it used to be that you had to go to Minneapolis or Denver to have heart surgery. Now, most of the major hospitals in North Dakota will do heart surgery. If you had cancer, it was too late. Today, there are numerous treatments available in most hospitals and some clinics across the state.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes is in telecommunications. I can still remember when my brother and I went with our parents to our uncle and aunt's house. We didn't have a telephone, but they did. It was a party line and if you picked up the receiver, you could often hear people having a conversation.

Now, there's broadband just about everywhere in the state that gives way to high-speed Internet. And I don't know if this is coincidence or not, but can you imagine if we didn't have Internet during the pandemic. There wouldn't have been any working from home. Things may have been vastly different.

I myself have taken advantage of having Internet. If the weather was too snowy to travel, or if I had a meeting or sporting event someplace, I could just head back to my house instead of driving up to Kenmare. I filed numerous articles right from the desk in my house.

How about Wi-Fi? Most of us take it for granted, but it hasn't been around that many years. Some call it the golden age of wireless. You don't really need a computer. You can access Internet on your phone.

And when you go outside of your Wi-Fi's radius, you can still stream a song, a movie, a website as the data is being bounced off cell towers. One of the things I like to do when I'm driving around North Dakota is listen to WSBZ-FM, in Panama City, Fla. Because North Dakota doesn't have any smooth jazz radio stations, I have the app for WSBZ as well as the WAVE in Toronto.

Digital TV revolutionized how we watch television in North Dakota. In last week's article, I mentioned there were only five TV stations in the entire state in 1956. There are now so many TV channels, you could watch all day and all night and never go through all of them. It's remarkable.

And that includes international TV. As an example, right here in my house in rural Ward County, I get three French channels, one from Germany, one from Qatar, one from Thailand and one from Australia. And I don't have cable or satellite. These channels are just available on our SMART TV.

One channel is RT, which stands for Russian Television. It has a channel in English and one in French, but the flagship Russian channel isn't available. It's interesting watching it because it reminds me a lot like Pravda. You might remember Ed Schultz, who was the sportscaster at WDAY in Fargo? He signed on with RT toward the end of his career.

All five of our grandchildren were with us over the New Year's weekend. My wife has this thing about letting them stay up until midnight so they can usher in the new year like everybody else. But we did something different this year, because we can. We tuned into ABC News 9 early on the morning of Dec. 31 and watched the midnight fireworks live as they lit up the sky over the Sydney Harbor Bridge. So we told the grandchildren we brought in the new year twice in the same day.

If you think back 30 years, none of this stuff was available, or if it was, it was so new none of us were aware of it. We've advanced technology more in the past 30 years than in the previous 100 years.

There's one other thing that still baffles me, but I know it works. We were on our way back from Mayo Clinic and it was late because we were trying to make it home in one day from Rochester. We pulled through Rugby shortly after 11 p.m., and everything was closed. As we drove west of town, we were both getting drowsy so we stepped out at the Tunbridge exit to walk around a little and get some fresh air.

When we got home, my mobile was missing. And after talking about it, realized it had slipped off my seat when we stepped out of the car at Tunbridge. I turned on my computer that has an app called Find My Mac. I set it in motion and sure enough, it pinged my phone right to that intersection where we stopped. I contacted the Pierce County Sheriff's Department right away and they sent someone out and picked it up. I went back to Rugby the next day and retrieved it thanks to the Pierce County Sheriff's Department and the Rugby Police Department.

Technology! Where are we going to be in another 10 years?

(Marvin Baker is a news writer for the Kenmare News and formerly Foster County Independent.)