Monday, February 20, 2006

Where Your Are

How often do you step back and see where you are? Its easy to see what is around you but above you the atmosphere disperses into the still quiet void of space and bellow you past the rocky outer crust is a mass of molten rock that makes up most of the mass that holds us to the surface with its gravity. And then there is time. In recorded history we are at the peak of technological wonders freed from the toils of looking for food, finding shelter, and avoiding disease. On the geologic time scale we are the long distant relatives of all life on the planet molded through millions of years of natural selection. Vast stretches of time where life grew and died generation after generation, but no people, nothing of what we see today. But we are not masters of our fate. The future could be the extermination of everyone or a life so wonderful we cannot imagine it. The first step to figuring it all out is first not forgetting where you are ... and then where you want to be.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

The Unreal World

There is a place not made of atoms but of information. Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Politics, Literature, they all live in this place. All who visit the same place see the same thing, like one would view a lamppost on the same street corner. In this place nothing new is ever created, or ever changes, it is only seen, sometimes for the first time. This place transcends space, for if there are intelligences out amongst the stars they are exploring this same place, though with different minds and different eyes. Like nature this place is neither good nor bad. It is indifferent. As time progresses though, this unreal world will slip into the real with events both wondrous and horrific, discovered by explorers, settled by colonists, and lived in by all who follow.