What is the topic du jour? I’ve heard so many clever ideas brought up in the past week that I don’t think there can be a genuinely good thought for another week or so. After all, the cosmos need to recharge after such bursts of creativity. It ain’t easy being a seemingly random assortment of gases, solids, liquids and plasmas. Is there mercy on the grandest of scales for the smallest of mistakes? Is it possible to calculate the difference of an inch from over a billion light years away? There will always be questions that seem unfathomable or even stupid to us humans, either because we’re seemingly too intelligent to even ponder such things or because we lack the proper attention spans to give a complex yet stupefyingly easy question the full consideration it deserves.
To think of how small we truly are in the scale of what we know as the universe, and then to scale it down to the size of an insect… there is no average size for anything. The environment breeds everything inside its parameters, because otherwise something would be thrown off balance and another change would be made to offset it. Of course, this process could take centuries, millennia, millions or even billions of years, and we have to let old school evolution take care of the job for us, unless we have devised a way to artificially speed up the process. We come across as impatient, don’t we? The faster we get results, the faster we want results a second time. Once we experience something that rewarding, something in our brains tells us that we can do better, and we constantly work to break our last records, regardless of how little the improvement is.
If we still had horse and carriage technology in the first world, we would have to settle for journeys across state lines instead of simple commutes, but we would accept it and plan our lives accordingly. Modernity speeds things up while creating a dependency on those newfound luxuries. The bible thumpers tell us this in the basic template: “Sin will grab hold of you when you try to fill that hole in your heart that only God can fill.” Not just any God, mind you. You need a Judeo-Christian God in order to properly fill your heart. Now that we’ve become a global community, isn’t it time for us to consolidate our faiths into one global religion? Since the whiteys have kept their churches on top for so long, they’re definitely in the running for keeping their religion, but perhaps if all the brown people embraced a common faith, they could finally end the land-grabbing entity known as Christianity. This would take a few generations, and possibly wouldn’t reach a happy conclusion within a five hundred year span, with bloody wars and endless propaganda on every corner of the globe’s shrinking landmass.
By that time, the extremist liberals on the east and west coasts of the US will have drowned from the rising sea level, and perhaps the good folks from the landlocked part of our fine nation will step up and defend their inherent rights as God-fearing white people. Their audience will be as small as ever, but they won’t care because they can only think about one thing at a time, and their pursuit of a completely Christian world leaves them virtually no memory in their brain to contemplate who would actually listen to their rhetorical bullshit. As a matter of fact, they probably wouldn’t even think about figuring out what rhetorical means, because they take every statement at face value, unaware that sarcasm or innuendo even exist. To harp on a milder note, however, American football should receive a large boost in ratings because of its affinity with conservative white people, and country music would become its own art form (which would make it even easier to completely dismiss, because it’d be all conveniently smushed together into one place, not touching anything else with its grubby paws, thank God).
All of these things bank on the notion that our future will be based upon Earth. Maybe by that time we will have overpopulated the planet so much that Soylent Green isn’t even a viable option anymore, and we begin to eject people into space if they commit crimes (which would actually be a huge boon to the prison system, because the flow of jailbirds would be much lighter, and the ones who end up in prison wouldn’t be so bad anyway, since the really bad ones have already been shot into space). Perhaps we’ll have come up with a method for transporting humans safely at or near the speed of light, and trips to Mars will be commonplace, even necessary, as the red planet becomes the solar system’s Ellis Island. People will be forced to change their last names to fit in with the Martian crowd. The general rule for Mars dialect is to pronounce every ‘e’ in its hardest sense, like in cheese or feel, so there would be a lot of names ending in that sound (Julie, Donny, Abercrombie, etc.). Will we need a new constitution for our new planet? Will we be able to terraform it enough for us to be able to stand on its surface without an oxygen tank? Will there be entire cities consisting of one race or one family (like when the mob owns a city and nobody questions that fact except for the new alderman from out of town who understands the situation but still pushes his ethics upon the mob with negative results)? All of these questions will be answerable within my grandkids’ lifetimes.
How do I know this? Well, based upon the current technological trends, by 2100 we’ll have figured out a way to manipulate our DNA so much that we can transform into anything we want at the press of a button (with a really cool device that holds the complete DNA sequences for every living thing), and by 2050 there is the possibility that anybody with some cash can purchase a simple clone to do work around the house. How the hell would we not be able to go to Mars with that kind of stuff happening? The collective human race would smack its forehead if its space program progressed that slowly. Granted, there’s rarely enough money to adequately fund an accelerating space program, and people are always bitching about how their kids need food and an education, but it’s a big key to our future to figure out how to go places really fast, because we’ve made a damn mess on Earth that we should run and hide from for a few million years so that the ecosystems that were there before our industrious ingenuity can thrive again and brace for another wave of insensitive, possession-driven lunatics.
Hopefully by the time a few million years have rolled by, we humans (if we still exist or haven’t merged with any number of alien species) will have learned a thing or two about responsible planet ownership, and our actions will always include caution and thought. I’d like to say that’s probably how it’ll pan out, but there’s no way to know if we’ll ever become intelligent enough to become benevolent. There’s a certain point where a being loses its lust for things and sensations and realizes that it belongs to the universe, and its duty is to occupy space with its body while other bodies also occupy space, some of these bodies interacting with each other, but most moving away from each other in random directions, and everything that used to seem valuable or desirable washes out with every other speck of matter, because when you go small enough, it becomes very difficult to distinguish what matter really is, even to the point where you can’t be sure if our science got the heart of the matter when it was able to look that closely at things.
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Originally posted on Wharved: 12/18/2011
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