When I was a kid studying American history, I lazily divided topics into one of two categories: color and black-and-white. For me, color events were things like the Vietnam War, the moon landing and Watergate – that is, recent events – and not really “history.” I lumped every American history event from 1492 until the early 1960s into the same “ancient history” category, including Christopher Columbus, George Washington, the Civil War and both World Wars.

In 1973, World War II effectively seemed no more recent to me than the Great Depression or Plessy v. Ferguson. Time relativity to a ten-year-old is naïve like that. I was born less than 18 years following the end of World War II, which puts a little different perspective on the duck and cover drills we did in elementary school.

I can’t even imagine what the timeline split looks like where Germany succeeds in developing an atom bomb in 1944.

Perspective shifts over time. Now I’m in my 60s, and 1945 seems so much more recent than it did when I was a teenager. Sixty-one years ago, I was born. Sixty-one years before that, soldiers who fought in the Civil War were the same age as I am now.

I can’t fathom what life will look like 61 years from now. But I doubt it will be a simple, linear extrapolation from today – it never is.

It’s easy to think of the past as something behind us and the future as a straight road. But history has a way of surprising us, and technology often leaps ahead in ways we don’t expect. When I read about objects flying over military bases, moving in ways that defy the (known) laws of physics, I don’t assume they’re visitors from another world. I figure they’re probably our own devices – cutting-edge technology as unfathomable to us now as the fission properties of uranium-235 were to most people in 1945.

I hope we’re building something like Oak Ridge today. Not a literal “Secret City,” but an investment in technology that will protect us, deter those who seek to harm us, and — perhaps most critically — stay ahead of what the world hasn’t yet imagined. Some of the defense technology we know about already sounds like science fiction. You’ve seen those outdoor light shows with hundreds of drones in synchronized movement. Now imagine thousands of similar drones, weaponized and autonomous, tracking targets on a battlefield. That’s not future tech — it already exists. Smart bullets, too – .50 caliber sniper rounds that self-steer in flight to hit a moving target.

If this is what we know, just imagine what we don’t know. In this way, Oak Ridge isn’t simply a place; it is a mindset.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.