Month: October 2021

Now, I’d just be content to hitch a ride off this rock to someplace else.

Anywhere else.

It’s not this planet that’s the problem. This world is a beautiful place. The indigenous flora and fauna are spectacular. Except for one species. Even amongst that species there are some very nice individuals. As a group though, the species, Homo sapiens sucks!

Yeah, we’re a bunch of semi intelligent, semi evolved apes. We’ve done some clever things. Our music, art, and literature, explore some interesting existential concepts. We have an interesting imagination and all. But when you come right down to it, we’re not as spectacular as we think we are.

We’ve barely left our world. We’re driven by silly tribalism, religion, and fear. If we were in a zoo we’d be seen as creatures too fascinated by our own poo, to see even a slightly larger picture. One thing we’d miss, might be that we were the subjects of clever psychological experiments.(Hat tip to Douglas Adams) Or perhaps miss the fact that we were in a zoo at all.

Give us shiny trinkets and we’ll be entertained for decades. Give us differences in religion, appearance, or politics, and we’ll entertain ourselves for centuries.

Perhaps it’s a function of growing older, lately I’m less and less concerned with trinkets, religion, politics, trends, or appearance.

All I find myself longing for is simplicity and peace. The view of cities from a distance makes me very glad that I’m not living in one. Being alone and disconnected from Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest of the social media platforms provides me more happiness than my participation in those systems ever did.

I’m no longer concerned with what people think of me, and am happy reading, working outside, or thinking my own thoughts. There are days now when I don’t speak more than a few words to anybody. I go for weeks without seeing anybody other than my dog and significant other.

When I scan the news, with few exceptions all I feel is pity, or sit shaking my head wondering how stupid can people be.

I would gladly pack a few belongings and board a starship to get away from my fellow Homo sapiens. I might occasionally long for the company of other humans if I left. I suspect however, that the next planet or beauty of the universe would be enough to make thinking about distant humanity not worth my time.

Lately I’ve found myself thinking along these lines…

All civilizations fall. If you change your focus just a little bit and look at our planet and all it’s inhabitants as a whole. Divisions disappear and you realize that our technology has unified us in what is essentially a single civilization.

Homo sapiens is not ready for that.

Instinctively Homo sapiens realizes this truth, and is actively destroying this planetary civilization whether they admit it or not.

One need only look at the growing tribalism worldwide. A tribalism that directly or indirectly states, “My beliefs must be ascendant above all others.” What comes next, we can extrapolate from history.

The “Dark Ages” lasted 500 years. During that time, almost everything that had been known was lost. Homo sapiens devolved back into small bands of people drawn together out of mutual need.

Imagine the collected works of Shakespeare used as firelighters, because no-one could read anymore. In 200 years or less, everything that we take for granted will likely become legends repeated around a fire pit.

Will the next dark age last only 500 years? I suppose that depends on how much is lost, what is remembered, and in what context. If some kind of “Green” religion took hold I could see the next dark age lasting 1000 years or more.

Imagine a religion that said something like, “Thou shalt only burn the oils rendered from the fat of thine sheep, for light in the darkness. All other light, save that of the sun, is an abomination before god,” or “Thou shalt only walk upon thine own feet. Any other conveyance is an abomination. Thou shall not sit upon thine animals, nor shall ye ride upon thy wagon, for this is a sin and thee will surely be damned to hell for all time.“

Adherents to a religion like that might take 2000 years to even begin rediscovering technology. If a belief like this were dominant, it’s reasonable to expect that heretics wouldn’t last long. It’s also reasonable to assume that any community with a different view would be burned to the ground. Such is the power of religious fervor.

Religion isn’t confined to God, Allah, Buddha, or any other pantheon of gods. Religion is about belief. Belief in anything.

Belief in and of itself isn’t the problem, it becomes a problem when a belief takes on a life of its own. When beliefs are practiced and never questioned you have a religion. The consensus of all knowledgable people once was that the Earth was flat, and the entire universe revolved around Earth.

Folks who questioned that “Fact” were murdered as heretics. Even when scholars had evidence to support that the Earth was round, and was not in fact the center of the universe, they were hesitant to discuss it with anybody.

Religious leaders in those times, insisted that the world was flat and cited their holy texts to prove it. But nowhere in those holy texts did their god ever say, “By the way, the world is flat and you’ll fall off the edge if you go too far.” Also, nowhere in those religious texts, does God discuss the blueprints for existence or the universe.

There’s the disconnect. Superstition became entwined with religion and the two formed a foundation for persecution and more importantly, a framework of control. Another example was the belief that if someone was sick, they were sick because of demons or evil spirits. Ever wonder how many epileptics were burned at the stake? Just sayin…

I suppose what’s tired me of humanity is that so many “well educated” people are so unlikely to ask questions. It’s not about the vaccines, or the death rate, versus the case rates. My tiredness isn’t about the politics and obvious efforts of politicians to aggrandize themselves by attempting to control all aspects of people’s lives. Those are factors, to be sure.

The main thing is that so many people refuse to see or interpret the facts before them. So many people have abdicated their personal responsibility to learn in favor of a 20 second blurb about the world around them from a talking head on a screen. They don’t question what they hear, then these folks call themselves “well informed”.

At a family event recently, one of my relatives was haranguing me about vaccines and COVID. I’d ignored him on the matter for three solid days.

Finally, I asked the questions, “Would you take your umbrella if there was a 2% chance of rain? If there was a 98% probability that you’d win the lottery wouldn’t you bet the farm on it?”

After several other family members present busted up laughing, the matter was closed. This particular family member stomped off and said nothing more about COVID. The sad part is that he is, or was, a scientist. In point of fact a lot of my knowledge of scientific proofs and objective evaluation of fact, I learned from him. I found it very disconcerting that he of all the relatives was not asking logical questions and thinking for himself.

He’s not a bad person, I choose to believe that his haranguing was coming from a place of care and concern for members of the family. That’s admirable, but his method was all wrong because he wasn’t providing proofs or facts. He was simply repeating the same message CNN had been spouting for more than a year.

Perhaps my expectations were too high. I’d expected a scientist to be armed with facts and proofs. I would actually have welcomed that. I’d have asked questions and asked to look at, and evaluate the data as he’d taught me to when I was a young man.

I suppose I’m still dealing with the shattering of my illusion that this family member was about the reality of scientific process.

Science can teach you a lot. Often, science will teach you that your preconceived notions about the world are wrong. Pure science challenges your beliefs. It doesn’t take sides and cares nothing for your feelings.

E=mc² Works. The equation is dispassionate. It contains no inherent moral judgement. It’s up to the individual to decide if they will use the resulting energy for destruction, or to generate power that lights a city.

Superstition on the other hand is nothing but beliefs. In a revival tent, those that the faith healer can’t heal, didn’t believe hard enough. It’s the unhealed, who are at fault. They’re told to go home and pray on it then come back next week. “The donation box is by the door, leave as much as you can and god will know. Perhaps he’ll heal you next week.“

That’s the way this past couple of years appear to me. It’s like we’re all living in a revival tent.

The problem for me is that the revival tent has been growing around us for a decade. Science, truth, facts, are being replaced by beliefs and superstition. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve reached apogee in this phenomena yet.

I don’t want to be on this planet when we do.

Here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine yourself with your car, manufactured goods, and all your digital devices suddenly appearing on a street in Barcelona during the inquisition.

Witch! Demon! Unclean Spirt!

You’d be dragged in chains to the grand inquisitor before you even had a moment to take stock of what had happened to you. You’d be summarily executed too.

Imagine the same scenario, but this time you appear in 1947 near an army base. You’d find yourself in a military prison. You’d be under “protective custody” and interrogated about the technology you were carrying. The military would recognize your car, as a car, with internal combustion engine but 99% of the circuitry they couldn’t conceive of, nor could you explain. You’d die in prison as a national security asset or risk. Imagine trying to explain your navigation system, or iPhone or computer. Even a Chromebook has more computing power than all the computers extant on the planet at that time.

Now imagine that scenario but you move forward 100 years.

We like to think that the future is all bright and shiny. We’d like to think that appearing in Los Angeles in 2221 we’d be accepted as a quaint relic. Our antiquated technology would be museum pieces and we’d have to learn everything that happened in the intervening 100 years.

But suppose instead we succumb to superstition and abandon true science, individual thought, and freedom.

What would be the outcome?

Would it look like Spain during The Inquisition, or would it look like Kandahar today?

I don’t want to know. I sure don’t want to live it.

Which leads me back to wanting to hitchhike off this planet. I’ve lost faith in humanity.

I seriously think that at our current rate of decline, we’ll be using candles for light and fire pits for cooking inside 200 years.

If I could hitch hike, I figure a quick jaunt to Betelgeuse and back, should be just about right to miss all the messiness on Earth.

There I go, trusting in Einstein’s math (Science) that states time slows for a ship traveling at or beyond the speed of light relative to Earth.

For me, 5-10 years might pass. For Earth, maybe a few hundred years pass.

If I come back and the planet is still a hot mess, I could head out to Alpha Centauri with side trips to other star systems that are interesting.

Either way, I get to keep on learning new things.

I don’t want to live in a world where knowledge is suppressed based on its potential to upend politics, religion, superstition, or beliefs.

If I was to find a way to leave, I’d do my best to grab digital copies of our Science, Art, Music, Literature, and History. I’d stick it all on some kind of storage media and take it with me. I figure I could trade copies of my archives for food or transport while I was away. If I returned the Earth, I’d have an archive that could help fill in the blanks.

We all know history, is being rewritten. It might be nice to have a collection of unedited data for comparison sake 1000 years into the future. I’m under no illusion that our history as recorded is pristine. But for comparison it might be useful.