There are some technologies I would bet my life were impossible if I didn’t have the evidence right before my eyes.

Go to the moon? No way, physically possible, none of my college physics has been violated, but the engineering would just be too complex. And 40 years ago? With hot-water heater tech and slide rules? Absurd. Impossible.

And what about search engines? A few weeks ago I looked up my grandfather’s name on Google. He was a man of some brief and local celebrity in his youth, but he died 30 years ago. He has an extremely common Spanish name, hundreds of other people named Mateo Rodriguez are all over the net.

I found a web page reviewing a new book about his profession that sampled a few pages of the book, one of which contained a one paragraph reference to my grandfather where his name was mentioned just once. And when I bought the book, on the next page, I found brief remarks about his brother and father, which the author did not even realize were related to him because Rodriguez is such a common surname.

How is this done? I know it must be about a lot of minimum wage people reading boring stuff and making up lists and lots of soul-killing manual data entry, and a lot of digital text comparisons, matches, searches and sorts. I understand that it is physically possible, like Apollo, because I understand the science. But it seems so incredibly complex and involved that how this system is organized and is still so accessible and easy to use is simply astonishing.

I remember when my grandfather heard about the moon landing. He had told me when I was a kid that space travel was impossible because there was no air in space a rocket could “push” against so the concept violated one of Newton’s Laws. The space program convinced him otherwise, but it also destroyed his confidence in what he knew about the world.

But when we landed on the moon, he was crushed. Not because he resented the feat, or hated the idea, but because he was so astonished by what he had witnessed in his lifetime, how so much had changed so fast. I think that realization totally shook him to his core. It was the end of his world. I don’t know for sure, I didn’t ask him about it, but looking back now I think I could sense from his reaction that he felt himself lost, isolated, a survivor of a vanished civilization as remote and forgotten as that of the 17th century plays he had memorized as a young actor.