Mortal Values

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Sep 072007
 

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – September, 2007 (pdf)
As we go about our daily lives, we are given to forget the things that make our daily lives possible. Part of the reason that we live in peace and comfort is the fact that billions before us died, so they take up less space and generally cause less trouble. Many of them died from natural causes, but others died from supernatural causes, like being killed by some a–hole.

Human life and civilization depend on the death of human beings, so as civilized people, we must cultivate a balanced and moral understanding of the value of human life and death. We must strive to be enlightened humanitarians while still satisfying the need for some people to be dead. Nature will certainly satisfy some of this need, but we are industrious creatures, and to grow and expand, we must provide for ourselves.

Our needs as human beings are only met when we have power over the life and death of other human beings. To protect our right to fulfill this need, we protect our right to bear arms with passion and ambition. In a technologically advanced society, the only way for a population to protect itself is with inexpensive and readily available weaponry. To maintain social equality, the ignorant and lazy must have the right to easily purchase powerful firearms to protect themselves from the hyper-educated intelligentsia and their homemade electro-laser cannons.

Handguns are a simple and efficient equalizer. Handguns give power to the weak and weak-minded: real power, not like the pen, voting, knowledge, or any of that crap. Small, light, concealable, and fun, handguns allow any man, woman, or child to intimidate, maim, or kill as nature intended.

With total equality achieved through mass armament, we must still protect human life and encourage people not to kill each other unnecessarily. Modern civilization has created a mechanism to protect human life from rampant cycles of violence and retribution. The solution is as simple as the problem: Kill people that kill other people. We do not apply this solution indiscriminately; we reserve capital punishment for the most heinous offenders and people we need to kill to prove a point.

Capital punishment should be considered analogous to antimurder or unmurder. It is as antimatter is to matter. The two are tangible and real but annihilate one another, releasing extreme forces. Capital punishment acts as unmurder by discouraging murder while effectively canceling its overall effect on society.

Because of strong unmurder legislation, we have a much lower net murder rate, if we calculate murder and unmurder together. If we include those killed in police raids or by prison rape, we have mathematically eliminated murder in our society.

This mathematical balance is threatened by the growing popularity of suicide. It is especially attractive to those enduring extreme suffering who are so very close to a natural, moral, and legal death.

Suicide is analogous to double murder. It counts as the deaths of both a victim and killer, but it cannot be reconciled by retributive unmurder. The only way to discourage suicide is to legislate its immorality and severely punish those who assist in the process. State-mandated punitive death should be the only legally permissible form of death available to those who aren’t already dead or going to be.

We have the tools to kill each other and the laws to kill each other for doing that. If we apply them wisely, we can maintain a civilized and moral understanding of life and death.

Compassion for all human life is the true measure of our moral values. We are a great people, and the way we run our society today will teach our grandchildren’s grandchildren the value of human life and show them the path to the future. When they arrive at that future, they will appreciate that we are dead and take up less space and generally cause less trouble.

Blinded with Science – Super Collider? I barely know her!

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Sep 072007
 

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – September, 2007 (pdf)

Science solves problems and gives us the answers to questions. We ask questions when we want answers. When nobody asks a question or has a problem, science should keep its pi hole shut.

Science has lots of legitimate work to do. AIDS and cancer need cures. We need renewable energy sources, such as more coal and oil. Science still has to figure out if the chicken came before the egg and why the hell that bird is still jaywalking for laughs. By all rights, science should have provided us a teleporter by now, and probably a holodeck, or at least that brain plug from The Matrix.

The study of fundamental science is losing its way and needs guidance. There are already countless books of physics research that nobody reads or cares about, and yet, every year, more are published. Some of this research has cost us billions upon billions of dollars and has achieved little more than becoming boring NOVA series. Physics is beginning to pull at strings that aren’t just theoretical; they have real purses attached to them – men’s purses.

The Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, was a big-ass potato gun some physicists thought up and tried to build in Texas in the late ‘80s. They claimed their device might uncover some secrets of the universe. The concept was premature, and technical difficulties prevailed. The price tag was initially $4.4 billion, but jumped to $12 billion before the project was well under construction. The whole thing was scrubbed in 1993.

The initial cost was approved by Congress for the purpose of  showing the USSR how much smarter we are than they. After the pinko commies (note: “pinko” and “commies” both passed the Word spell-check) had their little breakup, we didn’t need to flex our brain-cocks anymore, so we put our junk back in our pants and went back to Los Alamos to build some wicked nukes.

Though the SSC had an initial goal that included a clear national security interest, the concept of the “big-ass potato gun of secrets” lives on in a more malevolent form. Like most malevolent things, it’s living in France.

An international consortium of mad scientists chose France to build a lair for their evil doings. Together they are building what has come to be known as the Large Hadron Collider. When completed in 2008, this massive crack pipe will smoke particles at a blinding 14 TeV. That energy level is sufficient to make an electron crap its pants. This theoretical electron-pants-crapping may lead us down a slippery brown slope of knowledge and understanding which could threaten our faith and beliefs.

Scientists blaspheme regularly. From Galileo to Hawking, they have said and done things that don’t jive with what we believe, and that’s not the way science is supposed to work. Science is magical, and it can be anything we want it to be, so long as we believe it in our hearts. Analysis and logic are our weapons in a war of faith, but today, science stands ready to fire on ignorant civilians.

The mad scientists in France claim that their big-ass potato gun may finally reveal the Higgs boson. This wacky little critter is said to be the carrier of the mechanism which gives all particles mass. For this function, it has been called the “God Particle.”

I am not a Catholic, but I went to a Mass once, and nobody there claimed to be God. I’m already boycotting the French, so I’m not buying it.

Science is in great need of direction. Nobody asked science anything about God, yet science is trying to explain the very act of creation itself.

We need science to do our bidding and only do stuff we say to do. We need teleporters, and lots of them. We don’t need a scientific community which thinks its intelligence and diligence gives them the right to do stuff we didn’t specifically tell them to do. We need a scientific community whose members know what’s good for them, or we’ll take their lunch money and flush their heads down the toilet. Make my teleporter already, you stupid nerds!

Blinded with Science – Trekonomic Incentives

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Aug 032007
 

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – August, 2007 (pdf)

There was a commercial once where the guy who wascaptain of the space station on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine said, “I want my flying cars.” He was talking about why we hadn’t moved further technologically than we had at that time. He sounded serious, but it was because he was being paid to sell credit cards or insurance or something.

I don’t want credit cards, insurance, or flying cars. I’ll tell you what I want, Captain: I want that damn space station.

We went to the moon before half the people reading this were born. That’s right, folks: believe it or not, we went there. We walked all over that bald, bucktooth cousin of ours and showed it what city folk can do out in the country. We figured out that it was cold on one side, hot on the other, and really dusty.

We learned in the process. We learned about the universe and surviving in space and whatnot. We united the human race in purpose for a singular moment in history. It was a pretty good ride. After about five years, we went back home for good. That’s the story of our farthest manned exploration of the cosmos. That was nearly 40 years ago.

It took us about 40 years to get from E = mc2 to Hiroshima. It only took about six years once we really got started on the bomb. Later that century, it took us about 20 years to go from DOS 3.1 to the Xbox™. During that time of vital development, we flew the exact same space shuttles. The time from the inception of the Mercury program to the conclusion of the Apollo program spanned about 15 years; that’s about the same amount of time between our wars in the Middle East. We can do a lot in a short time if we have the incentive.

The lessons of history teach us that our efforts are most united by two things: war and money. The past 40 in particular have taught us that technological advances come from the same incentives. Since we cannot count on an alien attack, if we wish to explore space, we must find money in it.

Making space exploration a public priority isn’t an easy sell, because there is little incentive. It takes a great deal of imagination to think of space exploration as a benefit to humanity. It doesn’t really seem to benefit anybody except  the guy in the spacesuit floating around out there, and he could be out drinking if it wasn’t for the stupid mission.

Space exploration would be a hard political platform to run on, and as an issue, it’s special-interest at best. Guys in spacesuits who’d rather be drinking don’t even constitute a special-interest group. Politicians have learned to stay away from space issues as a talking point, because other than the occasional mention of a mission to Mars, it sounds a little frivolous and kooky.

Furthermore, anything that is of benefit to humanity as a whole can be seen as a threat to national security. Politicians focus on running the government, and that takes money. Politicians spend our money to make more money to be sure we have money to run the government and make more money…for the economy, of course.

Many believe that NASA has been a drain on the economy since its first mission. Only a few, really nerdy people derive any satisfaction from the pursuits of this agency. The gains from the space program are outweighed by the fact that it costs us valuable tax dollars that could be better spent on defense contracts, campaigning, political favors, outright bribes, and other expenses that grease the wheels of democracy.

NASA also creates problems, such as the knowledge that huge meteors and comets might someday destroy human life on earth. This knowledge is counterproductive to economic growth, because it is a threat to security that cannot be  shocked and awed into submission. These abstract fears are not conducive to the political process.

Any political group who worries too much about a cosmic apocalypse might as well get tinfoil hats and hang out with L. Ron Hubbard’s crew. God is in charge of the apocalypse, and if He wants us to prevent it, He will provide the economic incentive to do so.

The Ansari X Prize was a boon to space exploration, because it gave us a tangible incentive to think about space: money. Financial incentives were offered, and we achieved more in space than we could ever have hoped with socialist ideas of exploration for the benefit of science.

In 2004, SpaceShipOne was launched in low orbit and claimed victory for all mankind. For this achievement, some rich guy claimed the $10-million prize. Nearly $100 million was invested in research towards this goal.

The Vostok 1, piloted by Yuri Gagarin, completed the same feat in 1961, but Yuri didn’t win $10 million, and the research was done by commies, so it didn’t benefit their economy. It took only 43 years for us to find the means to promote space exploration with direct capitalist incentives.

Science observes that space and time may be infinite, and so, the universe may contain infinite means for human survival within it. There is a hidden danger in this interpretation. To regard the universe itself as an infinite material and scientific resource simply violates the principles of supply and demand. We need demand to run the economy, and with an infinite supply of anything, we lose all demand and the economy crashes.

We must set limits on ourselves regarding space exploration. If we do not, we may find ourselves exploring space with no money to spend once we find somewhere that will take a Visa.

Commercializing space travel allows us to pursue spaceborne technologies with a mind towards concise goals. Goals like getting me that damn space station. Government-funded research and other socialist abominations can lend themselves to wasteful and frivolous studies not pursuant to economic goals. Commercial space travel will allow us to harness the infinite cosmos to sell more expensive vacation packages and support vast service industries that will fuel our economy.

It may also provide us raw materials and scientific data, but any available resource will be properly fought over to establish ownership. These future wars and conflicts over resources in space will give us new technologies to go deeper into the universe to seek more and more wealth to fight over.

I want that space station, and I’d join the Federation or the Alliance or the freaking Empire to get it. I want that space station because I want to see the universe and hire really smart people to go study all of it and tell me what it’s all  about. I think a space station out in the Gamma Quadrant would be a good start.

I’d need money to run the space station and hire all those smart people. Fortunately, a space station is also a great source of revenue from tourism, commerce, and people paying to not be exposed to the vacuum of space.

To provide even more economic incentive for space exploration, I present the Gimme Space Station U Prize. The winner will be the first person to get me that space station, and the prize will be $50 in MySpaceStation Bucks and a gift certificate to not be exposed to the vacuum of space.

 

The Curses of Science Fiction

 Writing  1 Response »
Jul 062007
 

originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – July, 2007 (pdf)

Our society censors television and rates movies to protect itself from the civilization-crippling force of curse words. These words carry meanings that imply unnatural taboos such as intercourse and feces. Civilized people do not have sex or defecate, so the use of non-scientific vernacular to describe these despicable acts is an insult to language itself. Despite the selfless efforts of enlightened regulators, malicious writers and producers have found ways to circumvent the common and well-described standards set forth by the FCC.

Science-fiction series give writers a loophole to work with, and they have exploited it with vigor. Because science-fiction writers create a world beyond our own common experience, they may also create languages for those worlds as they please. Clever writers have found ways to subvert common decency by using words similar to curse words that share meaning but are phonetically different enough to allow their use on broadcast and cable television.

Klingons had the decency to curse within the context of their own language. Today, we face fictional creatures that twist the American language into a hyper-dimensional doomsday weapon against us. FOX’s series Firefly was finally cancelled because of its rampant use of the term “goram,” which is an obvious distortion of a damning curse against God Himself. If you spend more time in front of the television than at church, you may remember God as the guy Morgan Freeman played in some movie.

The blasphemous sci-fi series Farscape was finally cut because “frell” was used as a derogatory term analogous to intercourse. Farscape also had the audacity to invent the word “dren” and use it as a graphic description of alien and human waste.

Battlestar Galactica remains on the air despite the use of the word “frak,” which is clearly a distortion of a word referring to sex. This word has been used on the series to describe intimate human-Cylon relations, which is specifically forbidden by the PATRIOT Act.

Our ears, our imaginations, and our eternal souls are under attack. There is no doubt what is meant when a Galactica Viper pilot screams across the wireless, “Frak your frakking mother, you frakked-up toasters.” The translation is simple: “Have intercourse with your sexually active mother, you sexually deviant toaster.” Of course, the translation into specific and concise terms makes this statement entirely innocuous.

If the producers of Battlestar Galactica wish to remain on the air, they should refrain from such inflammatory phrases as “Frak a duck with a railroad spike” and stick to more civilized wordings, such as “Penetrate a duck sexually with a a railroad spike.” Meaning is always less meaningful than delivery.

Language has many nuances and caveats; it is dangerous to use language carelessly. Blaspheming Morgan Freeman and referring to sex and defecation in common and ignorant terms diminishes our humanity. We allow our children to believe that sex and defecation are common and normal human functions, and worse, we weaken their faith in Morgan Freeman. We must remember that words like frak, frell, dren, goram, and grok are all shameful curses, even if they are cleverly disguised. If you can correct that last sentence, you are as big a nerd as me.

The Calculus Conspiracy

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Mar 022007
 

It’s commonly believed in the academic world that Sir Isaac Newton was responsible for developing the mathematics of calculus. This is a lie that has been covered up for nearly half a millennium. I’m here to speak the truth and to expose the Great Newtonian Lie for what it really is: a conspiracy to deny the rightful owners of calculus their due respect.

It may ease your indignation to know that, though we do not credit the rightful owners of calculus with its development, we do reward them financially for their efforts. Of course, when I speak of the rightful owners of calculus, I am speaking of the Brooks/Cole publishing company and their star author, James Stewart.

Stewart, working only with quill and ink in his parents’ garage, perfected the radical new arena of calculus called Edition 5E. 5E is not just any college textbook; it is filled with new pictures, graphs, sample problems, and a riveting new preface. The only imperfection in this new edition is that Stewart, in all his modesty, does not rightfully credit himself as the inventor of calculus.

I am not certain of the historical evidence for James Stewart inventing calculus, but the marketplace never lies. I found online that Newton’s Principia is free to download and print, proving it is a worthless document and was most likely plagiarized from Stewart’s work. Calculus 5E, however, is a respectable $120 – used. From this price, we can accurately deduce that it is superior in form, function, and weight. Calculus is a rapidly evolving science: The calculus you learned last year from the Fourth Edition is obsolete now, a dead language like Latin or Canadian. The only way to keep up with the eternally shifting planes of calculus is to accept the Brooks/Cole orthodoxy and purchase a new text each semester, or just drop out and give up.

If you are poor and you cannot afford Stewart’s book, there is simply no way for you to learn calculus. You should accept that you were born into a lower-class life, and you need not burden yourself with education.

You may be tempted and deceived by so-called “open-content” textbooks available on the web. Free, open-content textbooks are free and open-content for a reason: They are lies; otherwise, they wouldn’t be open-content.

Anyone who would develop a textbook filled with public
knowledge and release it to the public at no cost and for no
personal gain is a menace. Knowledge that isn’t paid for in
cash is knowledge not worth having. Anyone who openly
disagrees with the preceding statement is merely confessing
anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, and anti-American
sentiments. The American patriot Sir Isaac Newton knew this
well; that’s why, when he went to college, he was happy to
buck up the $120 for Stewart’s book.

Also, I didn’t want to say anything, but Osama Bin Laden likes open-content textbooks and says James Stewart is the Great Satan, so…you know.

 

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – March, 2007 (pdf)

Lament for the Challenger

 Writing  2 Responses »
Jan 281986
 

01.28.1986 – 11:38 EST

Childhood memories are blurry at best for me, this one has an edge though.

I remember we all gathered in an indoor school common area around a TV for the shuttle launch, 2nd through 5th graders, about 50 kids in all. I think I was in 2nd grade. I was already a budding young astronaut, ready to be the next Shepherd or Aldrin, already having an affinity for the unsung (or moderately less sung).

I don’t remember caring much about the teacher-in-space program as I was already into astronauts. I thought it was cool, but didn’t really see any of my teachers as candidates, and I knew teaching still wasn’t the best track to getting that ride up and out.

I remember the countdown, not understanding much then it seemed very routine and easy. I knew of the dangers of spaceflight, at such a young age they seemed abstract and akin to fantasy. To be exploded on launch, depressurized in a vacuum, or instantly frozen by the void, all delightful horrors that excite children when they are so distant that they can be conjured and forgotten at will.

It seemed impossible that sophisticated adults could create a fallible mechanism on this scale. I knew adults made mistakes, even disastrous ones, but not these kinds of adults. Adults that build machines like these are living mythological beings to a child who early idolized Edison (though to be fair our common first name may have been an initial draw).

The launch was merely an event, formulated drama and suspense, but no real danger. Everything was under control and in the hands of the men and women I wanted to be and be among when I grew up.

Some cheered as the shuttle cleared the tower and climbed into the sky with grace and confidence. The main engines translucent blue razors of thrust cutting the air while the SRBs stacked cloudy pillars beneath the ship, heaving itself upwards along them as rails.

I’d seen launches on TV before, but sharing this with so many enthusiastic people my own age, kids cheering for a spaceship, at once I belonged in this universe, on this planet, at this time. I think it is one of the very rarest feelings in all of existence.

There was no sound from the explosion. I remember finding that odd at first. Explosions always had sound, especially on TV. Nothing, no concussion boom, no camera shake, no screaming, not even an obvious change in the PAO’s emotions as he stated the obvious, that something had gone horribly wrong with the flight.

The TV was quickly obscured by the teachers, who huddled around it so the students could not see, but they continued to watch. I supposed their gut reaction was to shield us from the horrific images of the explosion, but they should have known it was useless and only made us more confused and upset. Those horrible images would be iconic in moments and we would be bombarded with them in the media for months. We would know the wicked tendrils of that contrail from any angle, any perspective, for the rest of our lives.

That exhaust trail created the perfect anthropic nightmare, a fear beyond biblical. It was a hand, but not the hand of God. It was our creation, grown beyond our command. A hand of impossible strength and effortless reach, unleashed, unlimited, uncontrolled by any mind or master.

In full view of the world this unbound hand lashed out and struck them down. It took our best from us, at their best, doing the work that only the best can do. It took them in front of our eyes, all our power, all our strength, all our will, impotent to even delay or comfort their death. The cloak, scythe, and cold darkness of the reaper seemed almost a mercy in the face of this new specter, this obliterator of heroes.

It was over for the gathered students that day. I don’t remember any real discussion of the topic, as I recall we went about our day and there was no more official word on the matter outside the continued offering of condolences and prayers to the astronauts and families over the following weeks. The flag was flown at half-staff. The kids talked about it, but not much, the world still turned and in a short time it just wasn’t news in the media or on the playground.

I still probably cared than most kids, but I had some disillusion about the whole thing. I was hurt, I’d been somehow betrayed and let down. Of course that sounds horribly selfish. I was upset about the loss of the astronauts but I was in 2nd grade and I my foundations of faith in the capacities of adults, and therefore the human race, were thrown into question. Fortunately a 2nd grader is spared compulsive existential analysis by the facts of girls, bullies, opportunities to show-off, be humiliated, and the persistent demands of existing in the biological form of a 7 year old human child.

Something big had broken and it didn’t seem like anybody knew exactly why, how to fix it, or how to make sure it never broke again. That didn’t seem right. I watched the news and heard periodically about the investigation, the o-rings, the cold. These problems sounded small, things that would only go wrong with some half-ass junk-yard rocket some kids built in some movie. NASA had checklists, mission-rules, geniuses, lot’s and lot’s of meticulous geniuses who would rather die than let a stupid little problem get onto the pad, let alone threaten a mission or the lives of the crew.

The building had fallen and the adults weren’t even clearing the rubble.

What really freaked me out is when I heard people saying that the disaster brought the need for manned spaceflight into question. Since when do we just give up like that? How shameful. Sorry to resort to a war analogy here; but to loose a single battle, and immediately surrender all the ground you’ve won in a lengthy campaign? What cowardice and foolish strategy. I always disliked hearing the people who used the death of the Challenger crew in their argument against manned space-flight. No imagination, no spirit, they defy the lives, goals, and intentions of the men and women who’s deaths they exploit for their argument. Shame on them.

Yes we need robots, but human beings solve problems, offer perspective and insights, and have souls carry the need for discovery and enlightenment, among other things.

Anyway, a lot of this is retrospection. I’ve had some time to reflect on these events and their impact on me and my generation. I don’t remember sitting in my room in 2nd or 3rd grade thinking “Man, the Challenger disaster has shaken my faith in adults in some abstract way and this will probably have a profound, though enigmatic impact on me and my whole generation’s attitudes towards space travel.”

The disaster faded, even for me, just faded away. That’s no sin, everything fades, disasters should and must, else such vivid persistent memories would incapacitate us. What is a sin, is that we let the greatness and our boldness towards space fade also.

Every school-age child in American watched the Challenger disaster together. The teacher-in-space program was designed to increase public awareness in science and space, and it worked. Schools across the nation took time out of students schedule to show them what you could achieve if you worked hard in school, became educated, and pursued a dream in space, you could get there. The Challengers crew of 7 included an Asian-American, an African-American, and two women. One of the most diverse crews that had yet flown. The flight was about education, and inspiration, and hope.

The loss of Challenger and her crew did not have the be the end of the story. The teacher-in-space program ended with the death of it’s first participant, Christa McAuliffe. How could such an insult be allowed? I am sorry Christa, I’m going to see if I can help turn that around for you. I know you would have wanted their to be a teacher-in-space on the very next flight and there damn well should have been.

What if that had happened? What if 2 years later there was another teacher-in-space aboard STS-26 and we got pulled out of class to watch that teacher fly. What if we had been brought together once again to watch the phoenix rise, as we were together when it burned? What if adults had shown us that failure, properly assessed and understood, is merely a step towards achievement. What if they had shown us that the we celebrate our fallen heroes with boldness and renewed readiness. What if we’d seen this together, a generation that could have seen a miracle pulled from a disaster, watched and celebrated together. We didn’t, it ended with the disaster. The opportunity has passed. This is more a lament for that fact than anything else. We were too afraid of the worst to make any allowance for the best. There was no teacher-in-space and the program was ended.

The next 3 crews were all white males, And it was 7 before another African-American flew. I don’t remember gathering for a launch in school ever again. I remember official school gatherings during the first Gulf War about how to behave in the event of a terrorist school takeover, I remember being taught to put a wet rag over my face in case of some kind of chemical attack. I remember school gatherings about drugs, about violence, about dress-code, about cheating. I remember a school sponsored concert featuring an imported European boy-band that was asked to leave the stage after grabbing their crotch too much. I remember a school event where students paid to see their teachers ride diaper-wearing donkeys and attempt to play basketball. A teacher was thrown and broke an arm and the event was cancelled.

I remember lots a lots of ridiculous school gatherings, so many that I cannot fathom any excuse why time could not have been allotted to watch a single shuttle launch in my remaining 10 years of elementary, middle school, and high school education.

There must be some profound and resonating social effect from the fact that the Challenger disaster was watched by so many students together, and that the flight represented what it did in education and diversity. It seems a kind of collective psychological event that should be addressed, actually should have been addressed, and I’m probably not the first to think or say it but I haven’t heard much discussion so I just wanted to write down my thoughts about it.

I’m 32 years old now (2010), that’s about the youngest you can be and still have seen the Challenger disaster while in school. So the age group that watched the launch in school together is between 32 and 42 today. On the front end of this age range, those who went to college would have hit the job market or grad school around 1990 and then the last of us would around 2000. I don’t have any statistics on this, but it seems like these decades correspond to the rise in a breed of young, aggressive business, financial minds pushing the boundaries of the markets. The kind of pushing that led to bailouts and housing market collapses, and crazy derivative market systems. It also seems that this is the same time-frame in which many tech-savvy software and internet engineers made bold stakes on the profitability of web-based business models too early, and suffered the dot com crash. I’m not suggesting this was a direct and inevitable result of a generation watching a spaceflight disaster together. I don’t know what I’m suggesting. I guess it just seems to me that a lot of these people were simply aggressive, capable, and driven, and they happily applied themselves to the things that society had demonstrated favor towards.

In the 1960’s young people with engineering, mathematical and scientific minds saw men built mighty rockets and do things only imagined in comic books. They heard of the failure of Apollo 1 and the gruesome death of the crew, but they saw the perseverance and creativity of the engineers, they saw the bravery and heroism of the astronauts, they saw the steely resolve and meticulous care of the flight crews. They saw the failure turned into great achievement. They saw, and believed, that they could be a part of such a thing if they applied themselves.

They became my parents generation and they were probably disappointed in their own way when they spent all that time getting science and engineering degrees only to find the funding was available for military research but not space.

I think a lot my generation just decided not to go for those degrees at all. Why bother? Math is hard. Why should I get a technical degree? The real money’s in business and intellectual property and if you get good at that you can hire nerds or computers to do math for you. Or maybe humanities, or music. We all know we’re going to have to get meaningless jobs for awhile before we sell our first big album or novel anyway so who cares what the degree’s in.

Well obviously that last part was a bit of a self-indictment. Obviously I’ve made some choices in life that have steered me away from my early dreams, only to find later that those were the most honest dreams I ever had and maybe the only ones that weren’t rooted in vanity. But now it feels too late or too foolish to chase them and that I need to find the elemental spark in those dreams and light up a fucking Saturn V with that shit or I’ll go to hell because getting out into space is the only fucking thing that matters and we’ve got such an infinitesimally small chance to be something greater than a fucking evolutionary spasm. That chance is so small and it’s slipping away in my fucking lifetime and I’m watching it and I can’t fucking stop it.

We could bear thoughtful witness to a universe full of beauty. We’re just opening our eyes to it and I cannot stand to think that an eye once opened to such awesome wonder would ever choose to close or cast away from the glory of creation, for fear, for anything. If such an eye can choose to close then enlightenment is a lie, there is no wheel, there is no soul, there is no creation, it is clockwork without a maker, and without even a clock-face, only gears turning gears. Fallen together by impossible chance in infinitely meaningless time and space, some thermodynamic mistake. If this were the truth of the universe and I had the power, I would destroy that clock to spare its cogs and gears from suffering another meaningless turn. What a sick idea. To be a gear, turning the next and the next, but measuring no time, part of no apparatus, only gears on gears on gears, turning, eternally. Useless. I cannot accept this.

The universe is beyond my understanding I am certain as I am alive that it has meaning, and purpose, and therefore humans in it must have meaning and purpose.
For now, with our limited capacity for enlightened thought – I offer a very simple understanding of the purpose of the universe and human beings in it.
The purpose of the universe is simply to kill us, destroy everything we create, and wipe out everything we know and love. I personally have no problem with that, at least the universe isn’t petty or prejudiced.
My problem is entirely with humans, because we are about to start sucking really bad at our purpose. Our purpose is to not let the universe annihilate us for as long as possible.

That’s about as philosophical as I have to be about the whole thing. We survive, or we don’t. I prefer survival. I have faith in the existence of meaning, so for now we can just worry about surviving so we’ll have more time to work on meaning later. So, back to shuttles.

So we approach the last shuttle launch, and for all we know the last non-commericial manned American space-launch. I’d like young people to be able to have that memory, I’d like best if they were allowed to share it. I think sharing those memories as a generation is more powerful than we can predict. I think the shared memories of the challenger have had profound effect and will continue to.

God bless the crew of STS-51-L, their families and loved ones. And God bless those who grieved their deaths, but still know that their work was, and is, worth dying for.

Challenger – STS-51-L – Crew
Commander Francis R. Scobee
Pilot Michael J. Smith
Mission Specialist 1 Ellison S. Onizuka
Mission Specialist 2 Judith A. Resnik
Mission Specialist 3 Ronald E. McNair
Payload Specialist 1 Sharon Christa McAuliffe (Teacher in Space)
Payload Specialist 2 Gregory B. Jarvis

Remember

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Apr 271979
 

This is something I want to try to help myself remember and if it helps anyone else I think that’s worth going ahead and laying it out here, though it’s a little private.

My life seems to be composed of little cycles. Recurring patterns of relief and disappointment, inspiration and discouragement, clarity and confusion, courage and fear. In the midst of these, at the low times, when you’re so aware of the patterns of the cycles intellectually, but only feeling the part that your in at the moment, it’s so easy to start chanting that old mantra…

When is it going to end? When is it going to end?

My blessing of a mother helped me to understand something a little better very recently and I really want to try to remember this in a way that might stick, or at least pop up sometimes when I need it.

You always know exactly when it ends, dummy.

It ends at the beginning of the next cycle.

RetroBlog

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Apr 271979
 

04.27.1979 – 00:01

Most of the stuff I’d be interested in blogging about predates the internet, and me. Also I’d like to keep the current posts more about things that I’m doing, not just thinking.

So this is my retroblog. A retroblog is whatever I say it is, or was whatever I said it was.

And this is it.

One Small Step

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Jul 211969
 

07.21.1969 – 02:56

“That’s one small step for a man… one giant leap for mankind.”

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about putting my boots down in that dust. I could do without the immortality of historical recognition. Like Alan Bean, I be just as happy to be the 4th or the 104th. I just want to look out from another world. More than that, I want to believe that people like me might look out from a thousand different worlds.

I’m a pretty imaginative guy and I think that’s pretty far-fetched. 24 men, of the billion or trillions or quadrillions of people that have lived and died on earth – 24 have seen the universe from another world.
Many have ruled Rome, many have won superbowls, many have climbed mount Everest. Few went to the moon.

We’ll never really love this Earth until we know what it’s like to miss it. Carl Sagan tried to tell us.
I pray we survive long enough to have that experience, then we survive the experience. Then maybe we’ll be something…

Also – conspiracy theorists- Bring it. We did it and it was the best thing we ever did. Deal with it.

We went to the moon. We landed. We got out and walked around. We even brought a crazy dune-buggy and took it for a spin. Ask the engineers who designed it, ask the machinists and mechanics who built it, ask the crews who fueled, inspected, tracked, and recovered it, ask the astronauts who flew it.

Better yet- build a spaceship, take it to the moon, and see for yourself. We did it. We did it with technology that didn’t exist when we declared we would do it. We did it in the middle of a war. We did it with less computing power than most people carry around in their pocket.

We could do it again. Now. It took 10 years last time. I say we could bring it back online in 3. If we had any balls.

The Eagle Has Landed

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Jul 201969
 

07.20.1969 – 20:17

“Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.”
“Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

God how I wish I’d been alive for that moment. Even more though, I wish that I didn’t care so much about that moment because I believed it was only the first of many feats of engineering, science, manufacturing, administration, and political will. Instead I am possessed by the fear that is may be the last and greatest of such feats.
Not to say there have been no great feats, only that there have been none so ambitious.
I shouldn’t be naive though. I realize the motivations for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs were based in fear of being dominated. And I realize that even at the time the interest for manned space exploration fell off sharply after the historic achievement of Apollo 11. The will to finance war and destruction outpaced the will to finance human advancement even at the peak of that advancement.
Apollo provided the incentive to develop and hone many of the technologies we depend on today, even many military technologies. But somehow we cannot justify the expense of such ambitious programs.

So the Eagle landed, the entire human race looked up and saw human beings had lifted themselves into the sky, survived the vast and deadly void, and occupied and claimed a hostile world with apparent ease.

Were we challenging God? No more than an ant on a tabletop challenges mankind. We reached out to show our gratitude and new humility at the eternal greatness of creation. For a moment we offered our greatest minds, our bravest spirits and most able bodies in thanks to creation. So that we might better know the will of God. God means many things to many people, but to know and serve the will of God is the basis for all who believe. Whatever you believe, the universe is there, it is, it was, and it will be, and however it got there, we have been blessed with the gifts honor creation in a way unlike any other creature we know. We reach.

Whether by creator or by chance, we were placed in a universe that only respects survival. If we are to show gratitude for our creation, we must take every action to preserve and extend the survival of the compassion, intelligence, and greatness of the human spirit.

So let’s crank up the funding for new propulsion, life support, and in situ resource utilization, warm up the Saturn V’s while we’re waiting, and get sapient.

Also let’s just take 2/3 of the military budget and funnel that straight into education. I promise, Mexico and Canada aren’t going to attack and the Atlantic and Pacific make great neighbors.

As for terrorists- it’s not easy but I have a plan.
1) stop killing people. the less people you kill the fewer want to kill you for killing their family and friends.
2) apologize for the people you did kill, and make sure the countries you killed people in have shit load of jobs and educational resources available to keep people from thinking about all that killing you did.
3) if you absolutely cannot stop yourself from killing people, go to North Korea, or Wall Street. be selective though.

—
“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

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