Carl Sagan: In the last ten thousand years—an instant in our long history—we've abandoned the nomadic life. We've domesticated the plants and animals. Why chase the food when you can make it come to you?
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band's, or even your species' might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas..."
Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.
Born too soon for space tourism.... Oh well, next life....
[The Wanderers: Full screen, speakers up and...]
Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at January 30, 2016 9:13 AM
Sadly not in my lifetime.
But first, What is to be Done with the leftist and telephone sanitisers amongst us who would have us firmly anchored in the mud?
The odds for the beginnings of a working through of this one in my lifetime appear to be improving.
Nor in my lifetime either.
But we'll live to see the first wave of settlers moving out to the Moon and Mars, I think.
The sticking point has always been the cost to put mass into low Earth orbit. Once you're in LEO, you're halfway to anywhere in the Universe, never mind the Moon or Mars or Saturn or the asteroids.
Reusable rockets are becoming a reality (see the recent exploits by SpaceX and Blue Origin), and those promise to bring the cost of putting men and material into LEO down to about the price of flying them from New York to London.
Space elevators would bring the cost down even more. The space elevator depicted at about 1:30 is closer to reality than you'd think -- the physics of it were worked out in the '60s, and the materials to make it a reality are being tested now. We'll probably see a test-of-concept installation by about 2030.
I'll be 88 years old in 2050. I hope I can make it there with my mind intact -- it should be an interesting world, and hopefully NOT in the sense of the ancient Chinese curse.
Hale Adams
Pikesville, People's still-mostly-Democratic Republic of Maryland
Posted by: Hale Adams at January 31, 2016 5:27 PM
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Posted by: detroit red wings hoodie at February 6, 2016 12:28 PM"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated to combat spam and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.
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