While I come back to reality, envisioning an expanding universe, where the first light, and other wavelength data from the far reaches, is slowing fading from view, making me uncertain as to how old or how large the current model of the universe may be…

I push out of my thoughts the noise of daily living.

No nagging/patronising sister in-law.

No aging mother in-law.

No contact with my kind, thoughtful wife.

In the moment, all I have is family, but at the same time, if I only concentrate on my family, then other thoughts, more universal, get lost.

Before I die, I want to see us populate another planet with anything living, preferably us, but I’ll take a slime mold or bacteria with a metabolic rate so slow it reproduces every 100 Earth years.

To get back to me, I may have to sacrifice contact with my family.

I am not the everyday family man kind of guy.

I have predetermined standards of living that are a little more than caveman and much less than cosmopolitan.

What is the basic necessity that will get me where I want to be, relatively happy, but also making progress in promoting our species’ capabilities for exploring the solar system?

I’m tired of being dragged down into the slow, methodical, plodding along of biological data processing tied to my family.

Sure, I married for better or worse and all that, and marriage is the only public participatory social contract to which I feel most obligated.

However…

Not like I’m going to have kids.

My nieces and nephews will remember me while I’m alive but I’ll be largely forgotten after they’re dead.

My wife has her mother to care for.

My sister has our parents to care for.

They’re both fairly decent caretakers.

I’m not the caretaker type.

I thrive on technology assessment and nature conservation, no matter how at odds they may seem.

Enough telling.

Time for doing after flushing interruptive thoughts from my chatterbox brain.

What can I do with an SDHC card that I haven’t thought of before?

Good question.

What do the darkening edges of the universe, the known unknown, have to do with the cosmic microwave background?

We really want the data from the particle accelerators.  Really.

But I’m a patient man.

I can wait, even if I don’t want to.

In the meantime, I swing the spotlight of my thought focus process onto other conceptual objects.

A mobile phone is a portable processing unit.

A pocket camera is a portable processing unit.

A livescribe pen is a portable processing unit.

What do they all have in common?

More processing power than an Apollo space module?

I constantly remind myself that the RCA 1802 microprocessor in the box next to me powers, if I remember correctly, the circuitry of the Voyager spacecraft twins, which have reached the outer limits of our solar system.

The Outer Limits!

These are cold, hard facts, my friend.

No arguments about religion, politics or sports.

Something solid, something I can sink my ohm meter probes into!

Here I am, again.

Again…

And again…

Back to the drawing board (albeit a virtual simulator on a computer, not an actual drafting board, finepoint graphite pencil and paper).

Power in the palm of my hand.

Literally.

A WiFi card reader under the flap of artificial skin on my wrist, conveniently hidden by a watch.

Slip an SDHC card into the reader, pump my fist a few times to charge the kinetic battery system and press a couple of places on the top of my hand (a special sequence, of course) to boot the processing unit in my arm.

A current version of a cyborg.

Remotely connected to my supercomputer being operated by the ever-eager programmers dispersed around the world.

[I wish they’d spend a little less time in anarchic behaviour, but that’s the way they are, “hacking” websites and email databases by figuring out easy-to-guess passwords that most barely computer-literate users pick.]

Do you know how much our world economic flow depends on computer processing power?

Online shopping is a small part.

But ubiquitous mobile phone usage touches almost every part of our social lives, which in turn are tied to economic activity.

Thus, this tiny SD card is the lifeblood of how we are controlling what you’ll do next.

I promised you a novel, though, didn’t I?

Let’s get back to the story and I’ll let you in on the Committee’s plans later on.

I hope you don’t mind waiting to find out.

If I can wait on the Fermiantigravitroniclevitating particle accelerator or the other monstrosity, the LHC, to give me much-needed data, you can wait to find out what we’ve decided you’re going to do next.

In person, I’m an average guy.

If you only knew the truth.

But that’s why we’re here together, isn’t it?

Exposing the emperour’s new clothes in this tough year of 2011.

Oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you.  They revived me after all.

The guy who had taken over my position on the Committee, the warhawk, is out on special assignment.

I’m back in charge, as reluctant a Committee leader as there ever was one.

Don’t worry.  I’m taking care of you, even if I have to kill some of you to save the rest.

With seven billion to manage, that’s the way it works.

See you again soon.

Here’s the next section of “Are You With The Program?”

In the next blog entry, that is!