Space Travel Forever

There are many times I wonder if humans will really ever visit space. By space I mean outside the Sun's atmosphere, which reaches out beyond the Earth. We travel in the tiniest amounts relative to the vastness of interstellar space. And we have never been even close to there.

We have unmanned probes -- Voyagers 1 and 2 which may someday reach beyond the bow shock of our solar system. And they have been traveling for decades. It is unlikely that any humans would be patient enough to travel that far with nothing to do but wait and wait and wait -- for nothing whatsoever. They would die before they got out beyond the Oort Cloud, or at least be immensely feeble and riddled with cosmic radiation.

But, lets pretend that we actually make some kind of device that can shield humans from any radiation, travel at sub-light-speed but still at relativistic speeds. Then what? We could travel for many more decades, raising a family aboard some tiny microcosm of our home, only to float endlessly toward unknown emptiness, perhaps passing by some star many generations later, and finding nobody home.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, aliens have decided to come out of the closet. They admit they've been visiting us for thousands of our years. And worst of all, they do not come from another planet in spaceships traveling across the galaxy like the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria. They merely cross the dimensional planes that separate us, by use of some kind of gravity warping machine or whatever.

We then must bid our brave generations of Space Travelers out beyond the Oort Cloud a final electronic goodbye, or perhaps a message that implores them to turn about, to return home. Please come back, to the only home there will ever be, forever.

In our science fiction books there have been marvelous machines imagined, designed and specified to quite extensive detail. But similar to the beautifully crafted Victorian Time Machine of H.G. Wells, none of them can really work that way. Perhaps I am wrong, which my imagination wishes to be so. Perhaps the physics of multidimensional travel  is nearly equivalent. To travel beyond our own 4D environment to some other plane would be no less grand and no less distant than traveling through empty space forever.

But, if aliens came to greet us from such planes of existence, they could at least guide us toward a worthwhile goal, and not just let us grope in the dark. Yet that must be exactly what the aliens did, for who knows how long, before hitting just the right combination to locate our living planet. To them, or at least to the first ones who accomplished such a feat, it must have been far grander than winning the lottery.

Sun Down

I have been a software guy for about 40 years. I also know the hardware side of things, and have invented many things (of which I now own nothing.)

Sun was a computer vendor that I admired during the days of very, very bad IBM PC's and toy Apples. They had very nice workstations, very nice software, and many intelligent employees. They developed so many things it is hard to remember them all.

But I would have to say that Java is the one thing that strikes me as a very big loss now that Oracle has consumed Sun and all of its IP. Although, technically, Sun owned Java, it had never charged for it as a programming language. There may be products made from Java that were for-pay, but even those are frequently free of charge.

I actually don't like Java, except for a few aspects of its abilities. I know it, I write programs with it, but there are a lot of things about it that prohibit me from using it for serious work.

Number one, it is always interpreted, or compiled into an intermediate byte code, for whichever machine it runs on. There are ways to optimize Java, sort of, but its very nature as a "hidden object" system makes it work very hard on the inside so that the programmers on the outside don't have to explicitly allocate and free memory, or worry about what happens after a function is disposed of, etc.

C is extremely the opposite of Java (except for most of its syntax). Everything is right out front. Getting all tangled in your own rope and hanging yourself with C is quite common. It is exceptionally close to machine language, so it is more easily optimized for whichever platform it runs on. But it must be compiled, in advance, before it can execute.

C++ is sort of a cross between C and Java. It allows you to hang yourself and shoot all virtual copies of yourself in their virtual feet, as well as pretend that you know all the big words which are used to describe the components and object mechanisms like overloading multiple inherited protected methods. But C++ also has the hidden object problem, only made worse when some system like .NET tries to mix C++ and C# and Visual Basic and J# ad infinitum into the same bag of worms.

But, as much as I like the bulls-eye, sniper rifle effect of C, and as much as I put up with the haughty, but effective maze of highly optimized C++ objects -- I will still miss Sun's Java. It isn't that I won't use it anymore, or that it will disappear altogether as a language. It isn't so simple as that.

When Sun owned Java and the world trusted Sun, it was like a bright and shiny day. But now that Oracle has bought Animal Farm, you know that the dogs, chickens and horses are not going to be treated as equal as the pigs. And now the very word Java is like the word Dark. The Sun has set, and I hope that the night is not a dreary darkness, ruled by Larry, Prince of Darkness.

Oh, Bother

There are many things that bother us in life -- insects, diseases, money problems, love problems, other people in general and a host of other bothersome things.

I doubt that there will ever be a time when there is nothing to bother us, Perhaps after death, in a peace beyond peaceful, there will be no bother. But then there will be no awareness of it, so it is not helpful. If there is "life after death" then there will always be something to bother us, or torment us, as the case may be. I would imagine that even Heaven would have something bothersome, such as eternal light, or too much singing, whatever.

In this time of our lives, we who have been blessed or cursed with life during these times must endure the effects of overpopulation, of over-reliance on chemical pesticides in our food, of pests that can't be eliminated at all. There are politicians who lie more vehemently than ever, with propaganda more insidious than ever, with more pleas for violence and destruction.

We must endure the financial collapse, the loss of our life savings to perpetual thieves who run the stock markets and banks. We will become slaves for those who love to enslave. We will starve while the thieves gorge themselves. We will die while the thieves restrict all medical services for themselves.

Although this is what is happening, it was once thought that we were the luckiest generations. We live in a world of technological profundity which has never been known before. No emperor or king ever had access to the comforts of life that even the most modest homes provide, with plentiful clean water, communications devices to reach to all points of the globe, cleaning devices that can keep our homes spotless and bugless. Sure, the kings might have had 100 wives or whatever, but that is little different than having 100 girlfriends to wine and dine with our V8 powered golden chariots and splendid silk-like clothing bought for a few dollars in Walmart.

But all that is disappearing -- reserved now for the very rich and powerful. The rest of us will seemingly be disposed of -- the not-so-pretty girls, the not-so-useful old, the not-so-lucky of us all. Our luck has run out, and the seas will become oilier, and deadlier, to the point where, someday, the rich will have to eat food made by machines from bacteria and fungus -- the most resilient lifeforms of the Earth.

Of course that future is not certain. It may be that when the majority of us die that the minority can once again live in the splendor of overabundance. When the value of human life has increased from 1-in-a-billion to 1-in-a-few-thousand, perhaps we will treat each other better. When I say "we" I don't really mean "me" -- I'm certain to be not long for this world. I only mean the survivors -- those of us, and those of the animals and plants, that survive the great dying.

There have been many exterminations of life on this planet. Perhaps only a modest percentage of the total will survive, with some events worse than others. A huge asteroid being worse than a few volcanoes; a sudden heat wave perhaps worse than a sudden cold snap. And life under the sea has less direct exposure to the events that kill most everything on the surface.

Even an event that completely kills everything, and evaporates away all the water, might leave behind spores that could live again should enough water return, even if only under miles of nothing but rock.

It would be unfortunate if such a thing happened because of nature, from the effects of stars and planetary alignments. Eventually the Sun will vaporize all life on this world anyway. But it is very sad that a small congregation of greedy thieves would subject an entire planet to destruction and starvation.

But that is what is happening now. It seems that our duty as citizens and mothers and grandfathers is to do everything and anything to prevent such acts of criminality from ever occurring. If the population must be reduced, so be it -- have less babies. If the food supply must be protected, so be it -- pollute the world less. If the way we power our cars and factories is killing the world, then stop it. Replace those old technologies with new ones -- which are sane and sustainable.

Yet, the criminals always seem to win. Then nuts in Iran, the nuts in our own government, the nuts in North Korea, the nuts that own all the oil, all the coal and all the chemicals. They always seem to win while the rest of us can only make them richer or nuttier.

The Ideas Of Dogs.

There are a million ideas that spew from the imaginations of people, and even of dogs and cows, to a certain degree. Humans are more able to convey those ideas than are other animals, but the ideas persist nonetheless.

I might have an idea in my business, "Would a robot that has art deco integrated into its metal parts have a market?"

Whereas a dog may have an idea "What would happen if I ate grandma's couch?" A cow doesn't look very thoughtful, as slow and cumbersome a beast they be, but surely there must be such ideas that "If only I could jump this fence, that luscious alfalfa over there would be mine!"

I'm not sure I can ever find out about these ideas, being so difficult to live the life of a cow or a dog, but I can imagine being much more incredibly ignorant than I am now and having only the barest consciousness of the world around me. Something like a fish. Although whales look fish-like in most ways, they are not, and are probably very likely to having ideas of their own, although with no hands it is very unlikely that they will ever implement any of them.

Dogs are certainly not high on the list of intellects, yet on a tall pole from microbe to man, their intelligence would be very high. Just not as high as chimpanzees, dolphins or a few other top minds on the Earth.

But put dogs in a pack and they seem to pool their limited minds into a super mind that can do just about anything short of design rocket ships or build houses (they still don't have the skills needed to manipulate finely detailed machinery). But 10 dogs has exactly 1/100th the fear of 1 dog. And all that yapping and barking that goes on in the pack -- "Let's eat Alice the cat!" -- "Let's go steal Farmer John's boots and chew them to shreds!" -- "Let's go near the School and sniff each other's rear quarters -- it seems to embarrass all those elementary school teachers!"

Yes, I know these are more like just my own lonely ideas -- not those of animals. But I can't imagine having such active and inquisitive personalities like dogs or weasels or squirrels and not having the slightest idea about anything.

Fire burn Og! Ouchie.

We are cavemen burning stuff. As humans, in certain parts of the world, we burned every tree, every bush, every blade of grass -- for who knows what petty reasons. On Easter Island it was involved in building a large number of giant stone heads.

England once was covered in forests and now must protect the last few that remain as though they are museum pieces.

In America, also once covered in forests, we are almost in the same shape, although now, instead of burning wood, we burn oil and coal. It is obvious what happens when that happens. And now in the Gulf of Mexico we can see what else happens, as if the Exxon Valdez was not enough.

If we can make it to space and beyond the planets with scientifically designed machines, we can get beyond this incredibly medieval destruction of our own home planet. Armageddon be damned. There is no excuse for this.