The title of this column is that of a book written by Joshua Cooper Ramo, which is about flying aerobatics. As you read on, you will find that aerobatics have little to do with this column. But I like the phrase ‘no visible horizon’, since, I think, it accurately represents the electronic future of us all. We just cannot predict where it will end up.

When I was young, I went to work in the Okavango swamps, in Namibia, in a camp called Xaxaba. The camp had a shortwave radio that connected to an operator in Maun, Botswana, and no other communication means. I was there for six months.

When I got back home, I found that, in my absence, Prime Minister BJ Vorster had resigned following a scandal where he had authorised government payments without informing Parliament. What I noted was that this information, of nationwide interest, had not reached Xaxaba by word of mouth or any other means. Word-of-mouth information transmission is surprisingly swift – important news generally takes about a day.

In earlier times, messages travelled at the speed of a galloping horse. Today, we have the Internet. But the squares on the chess board have moved – now we have fibre-optic links. Claude Shannon worked out that the speed of information transmission was proportional to the baud rate (bits/second), the bandwidth of the communication channel and the logarithm of the signal to noise ratio. It hardly matters that the nonscientific will not understand this – what we should know is that fibre-optic bandwidth is double that of copper (CAT 5) and the signal-to-noise ratio is very high.

All this means that fibre makes communication way faster. This has a number of consequences. Firstly, the use of video conferences will go up rapidly. It makes no sense to fly 19 hours to the UK or two hours to a regional city when you can have a video conference. There are video conference facilities in many offices but now it will be common to video conference simply and effectively without the glitches one gets on Skype, for example.

This means that air flights will reduce in number by a great degree. Naturally, streaming video will be much faster and it will also be possible to do real-time analysis of various engineering studies. Right now (at my practice, Machoy) we do studies of the acoustics of buildings, whereby we run the program and study the result. In the near future, we will be able to log on to the cloud, enter the program and examine, in real time, the effects of various acoustic finishes and the effect of moving sound sources – for example, the noise of aircraft taking off in real time.

Right now, we have noise contour map animations of noise from a race track, but these are created by creating a series of noise contour maps with a car in different locations on the track and then running the maps sequentially like a series of cartoon panels. This will all change.

It is quite possible that medical imaging will change to allow for real-time movement analysis of various parts of the body.

Given a high bandwidth, it will be possible to have fast, very high resolution survey and detection of camera-recorded ground images. This will be of great assistance in all security applications.

Optic fibre is here. Fibre is coming. In ways we really cannot predict, many things will change. I do not know what changes but, an overused phrase, I am excited.