The Paradox of Surprise.

• Author: Ayres, Ed

For most of the hundred millennia or so that we humans walked the Earth before we got our hands on high-powered technology, things didn't change very fast. And when changes did occur, they must rarely have come as great surprises. Even the idea of surprise was probably only a dim concern throughout most of those millennia. You might have known, for example, that if you traveled over a certain mountain pass, you might be ambushed by robbers. But the surprise would only be in the timing of their attack (will it happen this time?). You would not likely have worried that you might be attacked with some kind of weapon you had never seen - or, even, that the attackers might be some kind of threat you had never known to exist.

Over the last one of those hundred or more millennia, that kind of certainty about the nature of uncertainty changed dramatically. When Hernando Cortez marched into Mexico, just after the midpoint of the millennium now about to end, he surprised the Aztecs with horses, steel armor, and guns, none of which had ever been seen in their world. the natives may also been weakened by an earlier surprise, in the form of smallpox introduced by a few previous European explorers. When the battles were joined, the Aztecs were reportedly terrified by the huge animals on which the Spaniards rode; they were bewildered when their spears bounced harmlessly off the invaders' chests; and they were astonished to find themselves mortally wounded by soldiers who had merely pointed sticklike objects at them. In the last century of the millennium, an even farther reaching shock occurred when U.S. airplanes flew over two Japanese cities, and tens of thousands of people were suddenly incinerated or vaporized - some leaving only ghost-like shadows on the pavement where they had been standing.

In the half century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, new and unaccountable phenomena have appeared with growing frequency - not just in war, but in commerce and everyday life - to the point that what once might have astonished us now barely catches our notice. We have flown space craft to other celestial bodies, created new organisms, fallen prey to inexplicable new diseases, and created fictitious worlds (via TV and cyberspace) in which millions of people now spend more of their waking time than they spend working or going to school.

Ironically, we have been subjected to so many new phenomena that we are inured to them. Paradoxically, the unexpected is now...