contemplating some changes...

I've been reading Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Singularity is Near, along with several others, including The FairTax by Neal Boortz and John Linder and The West's Last Chance by Tony Blankley.
And I've been thinking. I've been trying to avoid writing too much about anything because I've been thinking so much and I've come to realize that writing is not so much a release of information as it is a distraction from organizing information in your mind. Oh the occasional flash of brilliance appears without thinking about it, simply letting your mind do the talking, but usually, it's just the same old same old. I tell you a story, you read the story, and there we go, that's that.
We're approaching an epochal moment in the history of the human race, and not just epochal in terms of its magntiude, but of the significance to every human being. We are on the verge of being able to ensure that barring some hostile alien invasion force, no longer will we be carrying all of our eggs in one basket. I look at the trivial nature of politics and I shriek in horror that I find so much of it fascinating, that this ho-hum national undebate that is going on because of Harriet Myer, I just cant' believe I let it consume my time the way that I do. Reading what everyone is saying, thinking about the President's strategic goals, wondering if Karl Rove had a meeting with some Indian tribe and maybe smoked the peace pipe...all of this is unimportant to the task at hand: getting ourselves off this god forsaken planet and into infinity.
Oh blah blah, it's too early in the morning for that Star Trek crap. People flying around the galaxy, colonizing thousands upon thousands of star systems, the human race multiplying and bringing order to chaos. But, what about the speed of light? And what about all the damage we've done to this planet, forget about all those others, and don't we have enough problems down here without needing to bring them up there?
Whine, bitch and moan.
I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of hearing that the Pakistanis and the Indians can't agree to just draw a line down the middle of their disputed territory. I'm tired of worrying about whether or not there will be enough Europeans in the middle of this century to maintain their marginally Western characterisits. I'm tired of worrying about when China will invade Taiwan and what will happen to me because of it. I'm tired of the Palestinians, I'm tired of the Kurds, the Shiites, the Sunnis, Robert Mugabo, Mexican immigrants, Canadian incompetence, I'm tired of waiting for the right Supreme Court nominee to bring the constitution in exile back, I'm tired of defending Dubya by arguing that it's better than a Democrat would have been, of ungrateful South Koreans and Phillipinos, I'm tired of the whole damn planet and I'm really sick and tired of having my fate determined by individuals who aren't living my life. Oh, but we live in a free society, you can choose what you want to do! More whining. Sure, I can choose within a certain context what I want to do with my life, but I cannot determine what the rest of the human race. There are enough people on this planet who want my way of life to end and the only way to really guarantee that nothing like would happen would require the kind of warfare unimagined in the 20th century, the kind of total, uninhibited by ethical constraints (think about what Ann Coulter said right after 9/11 and I'm paraphrasing: We need to go into their cities, kill their leaders, and force them to convert to Christianity or die themselves.) Short of that, or a genuine self-purge by Muslims, I fail to see how this little "problem" that we have so aptly named the GWOT (rather than officially declaring war on all state-sponsors of terrorism and their affiliates, mandating us to finish this to the bitter end, officially as in an act of Congress, which is the way that war is supposed to be declared and yet another reason to view Dubya as having betrayed the conservative movements trust) is going to go away or that we are going to derail it without removing the three big remaining supporters, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria and without doing so, we are doomed to the inevitable failure that will result as soon as a Democrat is elected President.
So I want off the planet. It's official. Not that it was ever really in doubt for anyone who ever really knew me, but the fact remains that nothing is going to change because change is illusory. What really happens is that the people experiencing the world change, and thus, because they are different from the people who were here before, they believe that things have changed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you could send an email a hundred years ago, hell more than a hundred years ago. It was called a telegram and it got there just about as fast as it does now. Of course, unless you had a switching station at your house you couldn't do it from home and you couldn't expect an immediate reply, but the effect was the same. And the same is true with a letter, you're just sending bits of information, simply at a much slower rate, and the same is true with language. Things have only sped up and now we have the 24 hour news cycle that must be filled with all the meaningless meanderings of an age that thinks that two hurricanes hitting within a few days of each other is "news". That's old hat my fine fellow. News is supposed to be new.
I would trade all of the planetary pleasures the Earth has to offer to be working to terraform Mars right now. Being able to breathe freely on the surface without a suit on, forget about it. Sunbathing, forget about it, except maybe through special glass that filters out what the Earth's atmosphere does for me. Being able to visit historical spots and enjoying viewing what awe inspiring wonders the human race has created. Tut-tut, I need none of that. Forced to live underground, carving out a tiny little sphere of existence on a harsh and alien surface, armed only with my wits and bravado and my nanobots and genetically enhanced body of course, but there, carving out of my tiny little sphere a place where one day people will walk without suits and breathe the air freely. Somebody dig up Robert Heinlein's body and get to work on reanimating it because we need to get moving today. Forget about building oil refineries, our new nuclear power plants. What if the goal of the United States was for it's citizens to become the first citizens of the Solar System and to say to hell with the rest of ya! You guys figure out how to live with each other. We thought we had something pretty good going on down there, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOO you had to bring in your international treaties and non governmental organizations and people like PETA and the Sierra Club and the infanticide maniacs and all the other bullshit that comprises so much of what passes for civilization these days. How long do you think it would be before everyone was at each other's throats, because that's how it was for most of human history. Everyone was at each other's throats. There was no PC. There were no mixed messages. Why can't everyone see how ridiculous (except that I see that on Amazon there's a fantastic book I'm thinking about buying....).
Of course, for those of you who do know me, I talk the talk, but would I really be interested in leaving the planet, pretty much permanently, because Martian gravity is less than Earth's it would be unlikely that I would be able to return, ever. I could visit worlds of similar or lesser gravity, but never back home, my muscles would not be able to handle the stress, much less my bones (although there is still substantial debate on how resilient the human body is; we just won't know until we try). As it says over to your left, nothing like recognizing that we're all hypocrites. People so easily mock our flaws, but it's our flaws that I think are our best feature. Without flaws, we would never know virtues, and without flaws, we could never truly appreciate how diametrically contradictory existence is, and that's really the key. We have the technology to do all these things, we could build a fleet of nuclear powered ships to begin traversing the inner solar system and ferrying materials and people to Mars and the moon and the larger asteroids, of which Ceres, might contain more freshwater than our entire planet does!
And yet, the closest I'll probably get to space is any one of the numerous video games that I sometimes entertain and occassionaly challenge myself with.
And that saddens me. To think that we are capable of so much, yet doing so little. To know that the capacity for greatness is there, yet it just holds back, waiting, watching, wondering, ultimately we are more content with dreaming ideas than we are actually doing them. Imagining a great idea is comforting, trying to build it in this world, terrifying, because the threat of annihilation, of retribution, of vengeance plain and simple, of being drafted to fight the Chinese, any of these things, it is what must be overcome and it is what must also be avoided. How to balance on a two edged sword. The answer is jump off the sword you fool.