Skip to main content

Ah, remember when....?

So a week or two ago I was reading about Boeing's plans to get in on the commercial space tourism racket. You see, I'm one of those dorks who prays to the gods of the internets & cosmos & such that something like hyperspace/ftl travel could be possible within my own lifetime. Yeah, little known secret...and such a bloody long shot, by far, that I'll ever get to see another solar system in this lifetime....but.......

This isn't such a bad compromise, I guess. Even some space travel is better than none. Even just the possibility. It's almost like science fiction beginning to come to life before my eyes. Fantasies fulfilled, even.

It all gets me really really excited, and always has. Like, does anyone else remember the X Prize from a few years back? (Or who won it? or how lulzy it was that the $10mil prize didn't even cover the $25mil that went into developing the winning project? lulz indeed.) That whole thing had me totally jazzed for a while--and reading this article (the interesting bits at the beginning more than the technical shit at the end...) brought back those memories and feelings.

That incurable hopefulness.

All that business about moonbases or travel to Mars and what have you. Even as just a distant glimmer, it warms my heart some. It might actually happen. For all my cynicism and sarcasm, I can still get lit up by "mights" and "could bes" now and then.

Comments

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.