It was the year 1971, and ‘there’s no market for the mobile phones at any price’ was what the team working on creating the plans for mobile/cellular network, at Bell Labs, was told by the marketing team after its market research.

45 years later, you end up reading how scientists have discovered the potentiality of a habitable planet in a star system lightyears away from your home; however, you’re not sure how that helps, and you have questions you couldn’t figure out answers to by yourself; but, there’s a way you could immediately get your question across to the experts in the field — all without having to get up from your place. It is the same technology that was rejected as having no potential that has facilitated ( among other things ) this instant access to, and sharing of-, knowledge from millions of people who’d otherwise remain unaware even of each other’s existence, let alone knowledge.

Let’s travel back to 1951. Exactly 20 years before any work on the feasibility analysis of a cellular network would begin, was the world introduced to what was possibly the invention of the century: the transistor — one small device which would go on to shape the progress of technological advancements, and consequently, the reach of human endeavours; and yet, when it was invented, no one had the imagination to forecast the impact of this invention – with the exception of Mervin Kelly who introduced it as the beginning of a new era, and predicted that the telecommunications systems of the future would be like our nervous systems, but added “no one can predict the rate of its impact”; and he was the guy who had set the direction for creation of the transistor decade ago.

Not all knowledge that can be acquired needs to be, or can be-, always justified by an immediate application. A specific problem from a specific field isn’t necessarily solvable solely by solutions of, and within-, that field; most solutions combine a vast amount of knowledge drawn from various fields, and it is here that the value of knowledge for the sake of knowledge lies.

Every discovery answers some existing question, but more importantly creates newer questions which in turn lead to new answers, discoveries, and inventions, while raising newer questions still. Discoveries and inventions should not be stopped for the want of a problem because there’s no such thing as too much knowledge — not when the human race has barely begun to stand up and peek out of the cradle; maybe one day we’ll step out of it ( although there’d probably be hundreds, if not thousands, of years of countdown to that day ).