God help me, I love titles for freshman papers at uni.
In actual English, it doesn't have quite the same glimmer when its a dusty view of nothing. That's suitably futile for a freshman but why, why?
A: because, li'l chipmunk.
The title is in response to politics and not in any specific sense of he said / she said but rather in the perpetuation of an endless now ... only bigger. And guess what, in the future we have a whole lot more of now ... only bigger.
The obvious lament is nothing ever changes and part of it is clear since people want a stable game or we might as well move to California to play mambo kings on roller boards while the Earth shakes.
Being comfortable in the familiar is good but too much comfort and we get fat. Then we just argue with each other a lot. Then we get eaten by wolverines. Who knows.
The missing part is why are so few are blowing the dust off the future. We can see the Super Scientists doing a splendid job of finding some supremely cool stuff but they're way off in some distant land of Really Brilliant People. It's cool to know they exist but there's a great distance.
People usually want the sensation of going toward something even if it's an illusion and the idea of playing just to break even is not attractive at all except for the few on the top who get a few more gaudy trinkets out of it while the others sink.
The most extraordinary irony in the present time is those who typically would look most to the future (i.e. younger / middle ages) make up a large part of the largest cry to 'get with the program' of one candidate or the other, neither of whom has any particular commitment to anything really progressive. The ones who would ordinarily be acclaiming progressivism the loudest are in fact doing their best to shout down any consideration of alternatives to the endless now.
These are strange times, my brothers and sisters (he said solemnly, oh, so solemnly).
(Ed: yah, yah, it was a dark and stormy night so now what? Get an umbrella?)
Well, it's not really my now what as I'm much more of a now was in my present circumstance but the view of the now when is clear, seemingly more so than in many.
Note: 'simply put' is an expression which makes me want to punch the speaker. If you have to simplify something to say it to me then take your brilliant ass somewhere else before I get the shotgun.
My view is simple, tho, as I want America to do cool things because my assumption is other places will also be doing cool things, if for no other reason than America isn't screwing with them. We could talk all night about what constitutes Cool Things and that talk would be intrinsically a Cool Thing simply from the fact it happens when it's so rarely seen otherwise.
(Ed: they call that 'pie in the sky,' Astro Man!)
You can also call it consideration and, wtf, that may invent a light bulb, it may invent a country; you don't know until you consider it.
For your hypothetical, how about President Flash Gordon pulls a Kennedy about walking on the Moon. We have to build a starship. The initial reaction to Kennedy was 'what possible bloody reason is there to walk on the Moon just to get some bloody worthless rocks.'
Apart from lifting the spirit of the country, maybe no reason at all.
So President G makes this proclamation and people of Earth decide, yeah, well, that sounds kind of cool so let's build one of those.
And it really doesn't even matter if it works. The first time probably won't work but eventually it will.
(Ed: too big a leap to go from pols to sci fi!)
Consider how much you may be programmed to believe that but scientists at NASA and elsewhere have been exploring how to push spacecraft to light speed. It really doesn't look like sci fi when the research happens now so that goes back to the pulverulent view of things.
Nope, that wasn't sci fi but this is.
Due to the complexities of travel at or near the speed of light, the outbound spacecraft will land on some other planet long before we know of it. From our standpoint, an outbound starship is on a one-way mission because of the apparent compression of time for them relative to us. However, that compression means we will effectively be 'seeding the future' since those colonies, assuming any survive, may, from the Earth standpoint, be many, many years ahead of us.
We will be sending out the 'best of the best' as that's been our way with astro people so likely current research starts on the new planet as soon as they can build the facilities to get started. Some they will likely take with them. It's conceivable they solve the complexities of faster-than-light travel faster than we.
Play that one through to find what magic pops out of it. In that context, we may very well appear to be the ancestors but hopelessly ancient in our knowledge relative to the people 'we sent out in a bottle.'
In actual English, it doesn't have quite the same glimmer when its a dusty view of nothing. That's suitably futile for a freshman but why, why?
A: because, li'l chipmunk.
The title is in response to politics and not in any specific sense of he said / she said but rather in the perpetuation of an endless now ... only bigger. And guess what, in the future we have a whole lot more of now ... only bigger.
The obvious lament is nothing ever changes and part of it is clear since people want a stable game or we might as well move to California to play mambo kings on roller boards while the Earth shakes.
Being comfortable in the familiar is good but too much comfort and we get fat. Then we just argue with each other a lot. Then we get eaten by wolverines. Who knows.
The missing part is why are so few are blowing the dust off the future. We can see the Super Scientists doing a splendid job of finding some supremely cool stuff but they're way off in some distant land of Really Brilliant People. It's cool to know they exist but there's a great distance.
People usually want the sensation of going toward something even if it's an illusion and the idea of playing just to break even is not attractive at all except for the few on the top who get a few more gaudy trinkets out of it while the others sink.
The most extraordinary irony in the present time is those who typically would look most to the future (i.e. younger / middle ages) make up a large part of the largest cry to 'get with the program' of one candidate or the other, neither of whom has any particular commitment to anything really progressive. The ones who would ordinarily be acclaiming progressivism the loudest are in fact doing their best to shout down any consideration of alternatives to the endless now.
These are strange times, my brothers and sisters (he said solemnly, oh, so solemnly).
(Ed: yah, yah, it was a dark and stormy night so now what? Get an umbrella?)
Well, it's not really my now what as I'm much more of a now was in my present circumstance but the view of the now when is clear, seemingly more so than in many.
Note: 'simply put' is an expression which makes me want to punch the speaker. If you have to simplify something to say it to me then take your brilliant ass somewhere else before I get the shotgun.
My view is simple, tho, as I want America to do cool things because my assumption is other places will also be doing cool things, if for no other reason than America isn't screwing with them. We could talk all night about what constitutes Cool Things and that talk would be intrinsically a Cool Thing simply from the fact it happens when it's so rarely seen otherwise.
(Ed: they call that 'pie in the sky,' Astro Man!)
You can also call it consideration and, wtf, that may invent a light bulb, it may invent a country; you don't know until you consider it.
For your hypothetical, how about President Flash Gordon pulls a Kennedy about walking on the Moon. We have to build a starship. The initial reaction to Kennedy was 'what possible bloody reason is there to walk on the Moon just to get some bloody worthless rocks.'
Apart from lifting the spirit of the country, maybe no reason at all.
So President G makes this proclamation and people of Earth decide, yeah, well, that sounds kind of cool so let's build one of those.
And it really doesn't even matter if it works. The first time probably won't work but eventually it will.
(Ed: too big a leap to go from pols to sci fi!)
Consider how much you may be programmed to believe that but scientists at NASA and elsewhere have been exploring how to push spacecraft to light speed. It really doesn't look like sci fi when the research happens now so that goes back to the pulverulent view of things.
Nope, that wasn't sci fi but this is.
Due to the complexities of travel at or near the speed of light, the outbound spacecraft will land on some other planet long before we know of it. From our standpoint, an outbound starship is on a one-way mission because of the apparent compression of time for them relative to us. However, that compression means we will effectively be 'seeding the future' since those colonies, assuming any survive, may, from the Earth standpoint, be many, many years ahead of us.
We will be sending out the 'best of the best' as that's been our way with astro people so likely current research starts on the new planet as soon as they can build the facilities to get started. Some they will likely take with them. It's conceivable they solve the complexities of faster-than-light travel faster than we.
Play that one through to find what magic pops out of it. In that context, we may very well appear to be the ancestors but hopelessly ancient in our knowledge relative to the people 'we sent out in a bottle.'
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