NOWADAYS, IT’S BECOME ______ COMMON TO OFFER GUESTS THE WIFI PASSWOR...

8,000 years for the idea to go around the world. Then, about 3,500 years ago, people called “potters” used round

wheels to turn and make plates. But it took hundreds of years before some clever person thought, if we join two

wheels together and make them bigger, we can use them to move things.

In the last few centuries, things have begun to move faster. Take a 20th-century invention like the aeroplane,

for example. The first acroplane flight on 17 December 1903 only lasted 12 seconds, and the plane only went 37

metres. It can't have been very exciting to watch, but that flight changed the world. Sixteen years later, the first

plane flew across the Atlantic, and only fifty years after that, men walked on the moon. Technology is now

changing our world faster and faster. So what will the future bring?

One of the first changes will be the materials we use. Scientists have just invented an amazing new material

called graphene, and soon we will use it to do lots of things. With graphene batteries in your mobile, it will take a

few seconds to charge your phone or download a thousand gigabytes of information! Today, we make most

products in factories, but in the future, scientists will invent living materials. Then we won't make things like cars

and furniture in factories - we will grow them!

Thirty years ago, people couldn't have imagined social media like Twitter and Facebook. Now we can't llve

without them. But this is only the start. Right now, scientists are putting microchips in some disabled people's

brains, to help them see, hear and communicate better. In the future, we may all use these technologies. We won't

need smartphones to use social media or search the internet because the internet will be in our heads!

More people will go into space in the future, too. Space tourism has already begun, and a hundred years from

now, there may be many hotels in space. One day, we may get most of our energy from space too. In 1941, the

writer Isaac Asimov wrote about a solar power station in space. People laughed at his idea then, but we should

have listened to him. Today, many people are trying to develop a space solar power station. After all, the sun

always shines above the clouds!