This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Today is my birthday. I'm 64 years old. I didn't expect to live this long. By all rights — and lots of wrong choices — I should be dead by now.

It would still be my birthday even if I were dead. Most lives are historically measured by how long we lived — and what occurred during that time.

Most of the time it seems like the world hasn't changed much during my life. It's only when I stop and focus that I realize just how far we have come.

In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and gasoline was 20 cents a gallon. Meanwhile, the U.S. didn't have a highway system, color TV had barely made its debut (and cost about $1,200) and the transistor radio was just coming around.

Yesterday, I rode to work on FrontRunner while I watched a color video and streamed music on a phone only slightly smaller than a sandwich.

I also answered my mail on the train. When I was a boy, scientists envisioned that we would be delivering mail by rockets now. They weren't even close to being right. Today, I can send mail to some guy in Japan in a half a second.

It's not all good news. The first issue of Playboy appeared in 1953, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. Although shocking back then, Playboy was tame compared to what was coming.

My father was born in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression. His concept of ray guns and machines was limited to Buck Rogers comic books, but he would eventually buy my mother one of the first microwave ovens.

Gas was 10 cents a gallon when my father started to travel. That's good because it took a lot of gas to go anywhere. It also required money to park when you arrived because the parking meter had just been invented.

In his lifetime, the Old Man has watched medical research go from the polio vaccine to the mapping of the human genome. Not only was the mouse trap perfected during his lifetime, but so was the genetic ability to grow human ears on the backs of mice.

Vietnam wasn't even a country, much less a place he ever thought about — until it turned into a war he would serve in.

My paternal grandfather, Delbert, was born in 1894 in a southern Idaho town the size of my backyard. The pop-up toaster was invented around the same time, and considered a technological marvel. So was aspirin.

Grandpa was 9 years old when the Wright Brothers first flew. Sixty-six years later he watched men walk on the moon via technology that hadn't even been dreamed of — except by lunatics — when he was born.

He was 12 when the U.S. Navy built a base at Pearl Harbor, and 50 when the Japanese bombed it, forcing him to send his sons off to help kill them.

I wonder what my grandchildren will see in their lifetimes. If human achievement continues at this rate, there's no telling what they'll witness. Limb regeneration? Human colonization of another planet? Light-speed travel (at $412.73 per year)?

It would be nice if they were alive to witness the greatest and most incredible human achievement of all — the ability to just get along with one another.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.