Today we celebrate the centennial anniversary of mankind's first flight. It's less well known that designs of flying machines - those with fixed flight and control surfaces and a propulsion system - go back even farther, by another entire century if not all the way back to Icarus (some designs being better than others!). The Wright Brothers soared into history's focus in a breakneck contraption built of muslin and wood, thrust aloft by little more than a lawnmower engine and a lot of guts. Their four brief hops that day left broad heavy prints behind, immeasurably influencing a world of wonders to come.

Since then great feats built on their achievement, certainly including the heroic flight to (and return from) Tranquility Base at Luna. Is it possible to underestimate the impact of aviation on our history? Intercontinental flight travel is now considered routine (if not still supersonic), and I imagine any number of children's toys outperform the original apparatus. Thus do our indomitable dreams become reality - and Star Trek dreams of a time when space travel requires the attention given contemporary considerations of flight.

Developed in secret due to the pressures of competition, it's my understanding only Orville and Wilbur themselves enjoyed the experience of that first machine. Plans evolved quickly into a growing industry. A private development like so many great inventions, flight originally involved risks assumed by individuals and not government or society. After reaching an unavoidable degree of maturity the technology was then quickly adopted by government sometimes to deliver the mail, or sometimes for unsurpassed reconnaissance, yet often simply to deliver death. There's no question that global conflict altered if not accelerated the course of aviation development, including related technologies like rocketry and jet propulsion.

The premise of "Enterprise" sets the travels of NX-01 about a hundred years after mankind's first warp flight, roughly the same temporal distance from this writing as the anniversary event. Considering how well stupid 20th century humans did, why did it take Archer the elder et al. so long to get as far as they did? Maybe a lack of internal conflict retards the evolution of such technology, but alternatively it may depend in some manner on just how many crazy risk-takers are available to work on the problem. In that sense the explorer's spirit breathes in Enterprise seen in excellent episodes like "First Flight." Facing the risks took us to the moon during only our first century on wings. Let's hope the second continues to bring similarly spectacular horizons ever closer.