[ExI] Spaceflight: The only valid case for waiting

Tue Sep 29 01:46:52 UTC 2020

> On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat

>…Spike frequently reminds us that modern times has more good moments than most of history... but he has to remind us frequently because modern time is so bountiful with distractions… Mike Dougherty

Hi Mike,

Ja, and of all cool things: a notion I have had for a long time is that the dark matter (or some of it) may be small-ish black holes that formed very early in history, a few hundred thousand years after the big bang.  I do confess I don’t understand how that can happen, but if I suggest that they just did somehow form, very early then they would be far enough back there to account for what still looks to me like missing matter.  If they were small-ish black holes and we ignore for now that we can’t explain how those formed, then they wouldn’t be big lensers and wouldn’t even be easily detectable.  I hear that theory is enjoying a revival.  Cool!

Regarding thinking we would have flying cars by now: well, we do.  We have had flying cars since the 1950s, helicopters.  When I was a teenager thinking about the future of flying cars, it occurred to me that no matter what, we are not going to repeal Newton’s third law, not now not later: there is going to be a reaction, and it will create a lot of breeze, kick up a lot of dust, guzzle a lot of fuel, just as they always have since the 1950s.  If we manage to make the rotors smaller, then they hafta be even more violent.  They would create a miniature hurricane.  That isn’t going to change, not now, not later.  So, cheer up: we have flying cars now.  If you get in a bad accident on the freeway, you might be hauled to the medics in one of them.

Vacations on Mars: no.  Since a long time ago, we knew there is no practical shortcut to interplanetary travel.  Walter Hohmann really wasn’t kidding: there are no practical shortcuts.  Any trip to Mars would be one hell of a long vacation: unlikely less than a year and a half, assuming you don’t mess around down there very long.  I’ll take a nice sea voyage to Hawaii please, get back before squatters have moved into my house.

Truly this is a most glorious time to be alive.  Consider the ancient vision of heaven.  It wasn’t floating around forever on clouds singing hymns and strumming harps.  Their vision of heaven was a time and place where babies don’t die and people live to be older than 100 years, where people build houses and are not driven out of them, raiders don’t come and eat the crops they planted.  Isaiah ch 65:

>…There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed.  And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.  They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands…

When you think it over, we aren’t that dang far from that now: infant mortality still happens, but we manage to save most, nearly all of them, and now people generally live into their 80s or so, plenty of them beyond.  I talked to an old friend yesterday who is 88, he sounds good still.  A bit slower than he used to be, but otherwise sound.

OK then… Flying cars, check.  Cool cosmology, check.  Less burying our children, generally fewer funerals than before, getting a lot like ancient writers vision of heaven, check.

So… why not celebrate and thank evolution?  One explanation: marketing.  There are so many who make their living convincing us that we don’t really have it made until we buy their silly product or elect their candidate.  But regardless of their breezy nonsense, we have it made anyway.  

So… recognize it and embrace it.  Celebrate humanity’s success.  Feel gratitude for having been born this late in history.  Be happy, celebrate being alive in this glorious time, feel the powerful emotion of gratitude to those who went before us and made all this possible.  They suffered, now we don’t need to.  Be happy and be thankful.

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200928/aaf1b71d/attachment.htm>