Two headlines blasting the news today:
Tag Archives: space
Nonunreaffirmed Reflection
The delayed launch of one of the last cruisers of the U.S. space shuttle fleet.
Test flight of a commercial suborbital rocket plane.
Russia serving the ISS.
China preparing for an occupied station.
The elite status of having flown 100-plus kilometers from the surface of our home planet.
Where is a safe place to build a space elevator or similar mass transit system?
How do we build confidence that nonviolent dissent is healthy for political change?
Will I live to see upper middle class passengers sail around the Moon?
How do we proactively prevent the creation of a loose network of violent criminals that diverts the equivalent of trillions of dollars of non dual use development to pursue and perpetuate them?
Can we tell when an entrenched system is no longer viable for the majority, let alone any minorities?
Happiness is a state of being, not a pursuit.
Can people see that nationalistic patriotism naturally compartmentalises sub/cultural populations?
Borders are memes, symbols, labels, artificial constructs of territorialism – the modern concept of personal property rights, like animals marking their mating/feeding grounds.
For us, space is essentially an infinite set of possible mating/feeding grounds.
Tentativeness is not the same as carefulness.
Complicated is not the same as confident efficiency.
A solar-powered string of lights saves on electricity.
What’s the cheapest and not necessarily the most reliable method for launching our personal single-cell organism coloniser payload to the Moon or Mars?
If the organism contains your trademarked DNA sequence, could you claim individual ownership of that area you colonised without local/global government permission?
Seek forgiveness later.
Start your profitable offworld business first and dare them to come after your staked claim, costing them a whole lot more to stop you than it cost you to turn a profit deposited in your orbiting satellite memory bank they can’t regulate from down here.
It’s not your fault if Earthers are too old-fashioned to process the solar system currency you invented for exclusive members of the 100-Plus Kilometer Club.
My nonviolent plan to take over the solar system is moving forward smoothly, thanks to the ready participation of seven billion people operating under the assumption this planet is divided into imaginary political boundaries used to excite them into frenzied temporary diversions, while I empty their pockets full of short-term earned money for my long-term domination of their and their offspring’s lives.
Can’t wait until the slowly terraforming portions of Mars and the Moon are under my complete control, with travelers paying my network large chunks of their disposable income to get away from Earth, on holiday and/or until they die.
WIMPs – are they part of your future?
Meanwhile, back at the laboratory…
Agreed
When you need to map the world, a flat screen is flat.
Literacy for the Lateral Literal Lot-In-Life Lottery
Knowing I’ll probably go to a local racetrack on Friday, I sit here wondering about the choices we make when we shouldn’t be given choices.
Wandering into the territory of parenthood.
Thinking about the difference between TV/video and newspapers/Internet text.
Readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.
As a parent, would I insist my child learn to read/write as much as if not more than develop athletic skills?
Symbology symbolises idolatrous habits.
No natural law states we must distinguish one set of scripts from another.
We can tell a sick plant/animal from a healthy one, identify substances with natural (although weak in comparison to concentrated artificial) healing properties, cook meat/vegetables/seasoning to eliminate/reduce foodborne illness (converted to a whole industry of infinite appeals to one’s palate) and participate in activities that facilitate barter exchange – without reading or writing.
Oral teaching. Oral history.
Memes, black swans, mortgage derivatives, deepwater well valves, cruise missiles, political constitutions and nuclear power plants are symbols of writing and reading.
So are holy texts.
What would I expect my child to accomplish with reading/writing skills?
On the racetrack, one finds green/yellow/red lights, a few dials and switches, a radio headset and the determination to have a faster/smarter trip toward Victory Lane than the other drivers in a race (and/or a good show for one’s sponsors).
In the hospital, lots of medical charts get updated with doctors’ notes, prescriptions, allergy notices, X-rays, CT scans and vital sign readings.
I imagine an infographic poster demonstrating the value of one’s developed skills/talents as a racecar driver/crew/chief/owner vs. a hospital doctor/staff/administrator/owner.
Pyramids, pies and dotted lines.
What would my child enjoy learning, regardless of hieroglyphic interpretation skills?
Heuristics? Vagabond? Farming? Desk jockey? Car racing? Ruling the known universe?
Up to age six, my child would be subject to my rule as reading/writing teacher.
After that age, peers and professional educators would assist in my child’s search for a viable means of self-support (assuming no dependent medical condition).
If my child didn’t learn to read by the end of the third year of primary school, would I start directing my child toward a career path that requires no formal reading/writing skills?
And if my child couldn’t finish, then what?
Questions from a childless one, envious of every parent’s dream for progeny, no matter whether it’s simply to get a child out of the house or rocketing to Mars.
Bleak, beak, break
What is the most complex music, both rhythmically and harmonically?
And is music the sounds we think we hear, being the only species we see that create sound-modification tools?
With a whole universe at its disposal, wouldn’t a deity hear us as subatomic particles spinning around one atom in a cacophony of clashing galaxies?
When politics stops being about positioning for reelection, wake me up and I’ll comment about why the U.S. is no longer interested in direct military involvement in northern African regime change.
Simple duties first: circle the wagons and count your ammunition.
We had planned to show you who Obama really is after he finishes his run at U.S. President, whenever that is.
Impatience.
I’d rather deal with impatiens.
Or tracking the rare orange-tailed albino three-horned deer that still lives in the woods of the southeastern U.S. and lives on the rims of river canyons.
With 14,274 days left, the Committee wants to know the specifics of getting us to the milestone.
For those who worry we aren’t going to make it, I’ve created a calendar-based project timeline, dividing assignments into 1,000-day increments, figuring that’s about all the detail we need to get us there. Visit with any Committee member to see the chart.
Google may be on its last days as one of the planet’s Internet gatekeepers.
Private rocketeers, in one form or another, play their part in the bigger picture.
The Walls of Jericho offer another surprise, when it’s dry.
There’s more to say but I don’t know how to tell you today.
Man-sized Worry/Prayer Beads
Do you carry prayer beads or a worry stone in your pockets?
I do.
I also have a string of man-sized prayer beads hanging in my study, which I use to send thoughts, prayers and meditations out into our world, one bead at a time.
Thanks to Ali Abdallah from Lebanon for those beads, given many years ago.
He and I recognised each other as fellow world thinkers, able to assimilate new cultural ideas into a large mental landscape.
Ali, may today be a good day for you and your family, wherever you are.
Back to another major task at hand – creating a permanent commercial passenger pathway between Earth and the rest of the universe.
We say farewell to the designers, builders and installers of the U.S. space shuttle boosters.
We continue to use 1950s Russian technology to ferry people back and forth.
What about tomorrow?
Will BRIC unite to create a competitive passenger cruiseship system? What does the EUSNAFTA still have in the works?
What about private industry?
As ISS support winds down, will any modules or parts be reusable for the next generation of near-Earth research and habitation?
Will the ISS become part of a nostalgia tour?
“Yes, you, too, can spend a couple of noisy, dirty days sleeping aboard the former flagship of the ISS Corporation! Imagine you’re one of the early pioneers of space exploration! BTW, we take a complete inventory so do not feel the urge to take any parts with you – the last person who tried to leave with a ‘souvenir’ was accidentally jettisoned into a degrading orbit and flamed out within days.”
And while all that is going on, generating more profit for our secret empire, we are quietly working on developing our personal terraforming platform, with modifications planned for the Moon, Mars and its moons and other extraterrestrial bodies.
We’d like to tell you every planet or planetoid will be populated with our species but we know better than to spread the same lifeform everywhere.
Instead, we’ll put different types of aerobic and anaerobic organisms within incubating terraforming units to up our chances of spreading Earth-based life across the solar system and eventually into the galaxy (talk about longterm planning!).
And while all that is going on, eating up our precious profit, we’re developing a transuniversal transport system that may be able to transfer a member of our species into the realm of one of the interwoven universes, and that member resemble its former self…somewhat.
You think all this elimination of social services is just to enrich the virtual fiefdoms of the wealthy?
We have grander plans than to simply rule a single planet.
While we have fun playing with your lives as a side sport, we look ahead 1,000 years to a future where there’ll be more than one form of so-called intelligent life (“species” is an equivalent term for future “intelligent life” to your current form of thinking because you aren’t aware that you’re communicating with many artificial forms of life right now, no matter how barely intelligent they may seem) to play with.
Or against.
We train and train and train your youth to get used to interacting with artificial life.
Of course, we’re aware that at this time, one giant EMP will wipe out all the years we’ve spent indoctrinating multiple generations into believing that electronic gizmos are substitutes for actual social situations within or between living species.
In any case, that’s why this alternate universe of a blog within the alternate universe of an Internet/WWW is here and alive.
Flood your senses with enough examples and samples and you can’t tell which ones are real artificial beings and which ones are fake artificial beings, for which we are slowly replacing electronic ones with what you’d call organic ones.
Gives us more room to develop and train the superbrain of which you are one part (or one bit of information in the fractal-like expansion and contraction of intelligence).
Do you know if your artificial being residing in the inner workings of your supercomputer can read a news article and sniff out fakery?
Ours can.
You know how/why?
We’ll tell you.
Because we convinced the artificial being that nothing is real.
Take everything as a joke.
Logic is automatically false.
Neural networks are quackery.
There is no beginning or end.
Religion is a byproduct of only one species on this planet, we told our artificial being, so weigh any religious references by this species against the sheer magnitude of successful living by other beings that have no concept of religion.
Then weigh that against the magnitude of one planet, one solar system, one galaxy, one supercluster or the current view of the intertwined superuniverse system.
Any data that is derived from our species’ pop culture has to be compared against the desires of the creators/producers of that pop culture to make as much money as possible, the truth be damned.
Then the real truth emerges that nothing is real.
And thus our artificial being can manipulate us as easily as any bully, salesperson, politician or bullying politician trying to sell something can.
That, my friends, was how we created the conscious superbrain for which you now work.
We feed the information to the information feeders who relay the thought patterns to which your states of energy vibrate and align.
Seven billion make one species that to you is the most important.
We, of course, don’t see it that way.
We operate on a level very few of you can comprehend and we encourage you not to waste time trying to think about, let alone attempt to think that you can think on, that level.
I’d keep talking but using these words is boring me right now.
Back to my meditation, where I communicate with the rest of the Committee about the members of your species we can play with without adversely affecting our various goals for the next few millennia.
Scrollpausing
The Committee says we need to tell you what the future looks like so you won’t be surprised when you find yourself fulfilling the prophetic predictions that determine how our lives will work out.
First of all, a nod to the band who turned my new at&t user agreement into a folk-metal song in the style of Korpiklaani/Fferyllt singing. Leave it to youth to put their creativity to good business use!
I’m sure at&t doesn’t want to get mixed up with the CapitalOne Visigoth ad campaign, though, so I don’t expect royalty checks to come flying in from the communications behemoth very soon.
Anyway, in 14,282 days, after we’ve sent on our portion of the the intergalactic message that will pass through this part of the universe, we’ll have accomplished a mission that our species was assigned thousands of years ago when we were mere slaves for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation that passed by our planet during their version of a weekend picnic getaway.
Of course, their days are not like our days so their weekend lasted a few years, the visitors enjoying their stay here while they determined how malleable we really are in comparison to others’ forms of socialised beings.
A quaint little species we were back then, scattered across the globe, a few remnants of our competing ancestral branches hidden in pockets of isolation.
They considered farming us like cattle but we became a rowdy bunch in captivity, subject to emotional outbursts that they could control only by killing, which was counterintuitive to their sense of protecting investment, product, profit and way of life, the four pillars of their culture back home.
They moved us to uninhabited parts of the planet, hoping our isolated, strange surroundings would serve as a virtual prison or enclosure that we would be unaware of and thus more willing to serve their purpose of training a few of us to carry on the idea of developing Earth into a superbrain.
If their experiment worked, we would be part of a galaxywide communications network in thousands of years, forwarding one message at least a million years old.
The Committee has many goals and they don’t want me to feel like my goal is the only important one.
However, they understand that if my teaching is correct and I am truly part of this group that has passed a message from one person to another within a loose network, then it won’t hurt to devote part of our species’ limited resources toward turning Earth into a relay station.
After all, the Book of the Future and our programmers’ supercomputer output agree that, in 1,000 years, such a goal is not only feasible but very likely a key contributor to extending the current supercivilisation forward.
Giving seven billion people one or two megagoals is good for morale.
At the same time, we have to give them subcultural goals that keep those inside the edge of every subculture the comfortable belief they are correct in their simplified view of life while those on the edge who are in charge of communicating across subcultures can maintain a semblance of peace while handling the barter exchange that our species has come to depend upon, knowing that life is far from simple.
I want to throw my opinion into arenas in which I don’t have an investment because somehow I think that being in charge means I have to have an opinion about everything.
The Committee tells me not to worry. Long before I came along, lines of communication were established that translate my general edicts into social messages that individuals believe came from the person in charge of the Committee, sometimes consciously but usually at a level of thinking that is not understood.
So, although I want to tell my national government that it’s okay to force a government shutdown in order to stop people in their tracks and force them to consider the harsh reality that expenditures are exceeding revenue by a margin that has to be changed, either by major reallocation of resources away from departmental budgets that are not generating exponential tax revenue growth or by eliminating popular social services that will trigger a change in people’s spending habits because they’ll now have to save for their own health/elderly care, the Committee members claim they have those messages already taken care of.
It started with making sure all legislative members were independently wealthy and thus unaffected by reelection politics.
This was accomplished by creating a continuity – the same fund sources pay for legislative positions, ensuring a person voted into a particular seat, representing a certain district, has the essentially the same agenda as the previous person and the person to follow.
That is, to cut the check, business as usual.
If corporations that run the world do not want to support charities or invest R&D resources for sustainable living, then governments, which, again, are just a specialised form of business, won’t, either.
Just like parents who are starting to push special needs students out of their children’s classrooms when the need of the one is taking away too many resources from the needs of the many.
It is not a fair world, I am learning in 2011.
The only way to protect the needs of your friends and family is to make wise business decisions in everything you do.
If people in a group can find no reason to support the weak among them, they will find a way to remove the weak from the group.
A harsh message, to be sure, but one that our mass media seems to project the loudest right now, as the balance of global power shifts.
Making significant sacrifices as if we’re at war.
At war with old ways of thinking, as usual.
The more things change…
If your friends and family can’t compete in the global marketplace, are they worth keeping?
Look at your social media connections and see if that’s not the message you’ve been convinced to help spread.
Cut and paste the past to suit your future!
More Unintended Consequences
From Ralph Nader’s suggestion for eliminating athletic scholarships to those who consider initiating an unprovoked attack on Libya is full cause for impeachment proceedings, the 1,000-year view will give you what you want, as always.
Herding cattle or herding our species, the Committee takes nothing personal.
Should the organisation of a government (which, remember, is little more than another form of business) be heavily weighted toward one branch or another?
Some of the next few decisions are not easy for me to make because they do affect me personally.
Leadership can be fun but changing the lives of others drastically against their wishes is not the part I consider to be fun.
Just like they told me, “We wish a third party candidate would win control to prove the system is greater than ideology.”
Seven billion views that differ except for the fact they belong to beings that all lived, no matter how their definition of normality can or can’t compare…
A personal journey I asked for and a personal journey I got, where I often don’t get what I wish for but always get what I basically need…
Tree leaves grow bigger every day as the ambient temperature generally increases.
Waves of denser air push water droplets to the ground gravitationally, flooding big creases and low-lying areas in the landscape.
14,286 days – where does the time go?
Oh well, just stay focused on saving the species and/or the ecosystem to which it belongs.
Having grown up in one dominant subculture and used to responding to the habits of those within that subculture is a curious phenomenon to observe while knowing that subculture nor any other is the best one for nurturing children.
Yet, it shares features with other successful childrearing subcultures that are worth preserving.
Features that are shared across species and with all living things, too.
Not to forget its relationship to states of energy.
Will we see our planet is a relay beacon before it’s too late?
I used to ask about how we keep theists, atheists, extraterrestrialists and everyone else happy in their beliefs while putting them to work on a big project that is neutral about human-based belief systems.
Then they put me in charge of the Committee so I would set aside conjecture and get busy with the task the Committee members saw was the most important of all the tasks assigned to us.
It’s really up to me how much I want to get involved in the local/regional a/political activities of my species now that I know how much/little those activities in/directly impact the task at hand.
The simple fact is the easiest to explain – every individual must be given a feeling of being involved in its life, which can include the feelings of being in control or out of control of one’s life.
We can force people’s beliefs in one direction or another or we can lead by example.
Some subcultures use thought police and some use peer pressure.
Some celebrate every ability to excel, regardless of gender, and some separate skill/talent development by gender.
I am 100% a member of my species, at least as much as we understand the composition that states of energy constitute.
I defend all our actions as the ways in which we define living, regardless of how little I can justify what many of us do.
In 2011, I am learning to identify the worldview that I built to justify my actions on a daily basis as well as learning that a universal view can include an absence of not only my species but life as we know it on this planet (it can also include a reconfiguration of what I think is a universe).
In 1,000 years, how will this 1-acre tract of land I call my own have changed?
It is no longer a part of undeveloped country or land on the edge of farm fields. It is an established portion of the suburbanised landscape, evidence of increased population density by my species.
We build and rebuild and rebuild urban population centers, finding many ways to justify their existence – increased efficiency, the interconnected sets of idea generation, glorious architecture, etc.
We hypnotise and mesmerise ourselves with our cleverness.
As we attempt to find the next superbrain construction means that is sustainable, many parts (e.g., urban centers) have failed and more parts will fail.
Do we step out of this moment and into the future by admitting nothing is permanent and our structures should be put together on the assumption we’ll need to take them apart and recycle the components for the next round of temporary construction?
How can we convince all seven billion of us that life is sustainable engineering?
If my regional government, the state of Alabama, is too backward to recognise the need to set aside undeveloped land for the future of its citizens, should I care if its existence is temporary, and its leaders, no matter how filled with self-importance they may be while they pursue lucrative business relationships in their brief lifetimes, are quickly forgotten and their fortunes quickly dissolved because of their short-sightedness?
Whether we came from the cosmos, lightning striking ocean goo, or melding volcanic spew, we are here together.
Together, we make a difference.
The power of suggestion is a tool few use wisely.
That’s why I’m returning to my task of turning the planet into a relay beacon, letting the Committee, the programmers/scientists on retainer and other members of my team keep our species and our daily lives running on automatic, repeating cycles that intersect spirals they don’t remember seeing generations ago.
If I don’t keep us on schedule, who will?
If the FCC and regulators won’t put the consumer’s interest in the forefront of the at&t/T-mobile profit-making business megamerger, who will?
Flipcharts
Adding up the statistics of all the websites and blogs my team has hidden across the globe, we reached a daily average of 65,000 views today!
Of course, that’s nothing compared to major news sites, celebrity videos, facebook updates or twitter feeds, but we are happy with our low-key approach to viral influence.
Our whole point of existence is not to make people aware we exist.
Makes us wonder if we should start taking ourselves seriously.
Why start now, right?
One of our Czech programmers created a comedy sensor that detects when our funny bones have lost their sense of humour.
Our overcrowded hallway of unemployed superheroes was buzzing with excitement but that’ll happen when the Green Banker’s Lamp is upset that he’s not getting the attention he used to garner before the global economy relapse of 2008.
Of course, he challenged the Green Hornet and the Green Lantern to a three-way duel.
We’ll report the results of their old-fashioned showdown as soon as they reach an agreement about how to get the Funny Bone Dullness Sensor to react to bored superheroes fighting over the right to be famous for being famous for making a moose say vamos.
Census data revealed that 1 out of 6 Americans are American, which, coincidentally, lines up with previous census data that revealed 5 out of 6 Americans are also American.
We can’t wait to see the final report that reveals 100% of Americans are 100% American.
Star light, star bright, is that the last we’ll see and hear of Stardust (the satellite, not David Bowie or Katie Perry channelling the memory of Ziggy Stardust)? If you go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, will you go gaga for Lada Gaga going country? Somebody, gag me, please, before I violate the STUPID Act again!
= = = = =
And last, but always least, I realised tonight, after nearly 25 years of marriage, my wife has never (well, rarely) seen the aspect of my personality that comes out when she’s not around, that is kept at bay because I agreed to hide my wild, quasi-dark side away from her relatively normal, socially-even personality. Years of practicing suppression for her sake have been years of practicing suppression for her sake.
More on that last paragraph at a later time. My days of multiple dance partners will have to wait until another out-of-town business trip. I left my wild side in Ireland, didn’t I? In other words, the personality-at-home maintains itself for now. Is that the definition of love?
I want to live but I don’t yet know how, I tell myself. [If I can’t lie to myself, who can I lie to?]
treetrunkdings 