Blast From The Past (part two of a series)

(originally posted to MySpace 1/10/08 and appearing in the January 2008 issue of Changing the Times)

Predictions For The Future!

Breaking out my clear polyurethane fortune-telling ball obtained from a mystic gift shop outside Barstow, I'm making a few bold predictions for the coming years:

2008 (September 1st) Schedule for Britney Spears' next five emotional breakdowns released by her press agent

2009 Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan are revealed to be advance agents for an alien invasion. The United Nations agrees nearly unanimously to end all human conflict and honestly work to resolve religious, economic, and ethnic conflict throughout the world so that humanity can stand as one in preparation for the onslaught. France, however, uses its permanent veto power to stop the whole operation, because that's what France does. The rest of the world cooperates anyway, and tells France to surrender once the aliens arrive, because that's what France does.

2010 George W. Bush Presidential Library opens amid much fanfare. Visitors are disappointed to find out that every document in the library--even the menu for the inaugural banquet--has been completely redacted for national security reasons.

2017 Las Vegas finally changes its official slogan from 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas' to 'Enjoy your hooker!'

2020 Joint US/European mission to the Moon reestablishes a human presence on Earth's nearest neighbor. Last 'Moon Landing Was Faked' skeptic brained with a Moon rock by 90-year-old Buzz Aldrin, who then promptly signs up to lead the next mission

2023 After spending his entire professional life denying conclusive evidence of global warming, former Vice-President Dick Cheney dies of a heart attack while vacationing at a popular beach resort on the shores of Antarctica.

2029 (July 20th) On the 60th anniversary of the first Moon landing, a lunar colony will be established near the Moon's south pole, where the probability of finding ice in permanently dark lunar craters and obtaining solar energy from permanently lit mountaintops is greatest.

2029 (September 1st) The first Wal-Mart on the Moon opens in time for Labor Day sales!

2032 Former Vice-President Al Gore dies. Internet goes offline for 24 hours in commemoration.

2036 (May 20th) The last known US World War II veteran, a Marine who fought at Iwo Jima, Saipan, and Okinawa, passes away quietly in his sleep. His life is commemorated during a state funeral.

2036 (May 23rd) through 2045 (August 15) Television and Web outlets are flooded with documentaries commemorating the 'Greatest Generation'--some of them repeated from 30 or 40 years earlier. Some of these documentaries are very insightful and provide first-hand accounts from both Allied and Axis veterans, or fair and objective analysis by professional historians; anything involving the Holocaust is treated with the utmost of respect and tact. But 90% of these are simply attempts by media figures (most of whom have never served in any war, much less WWII) to cash in on an historical event. The use of virtual reality allows viewers to perceive events with never-before realism. By the end of this period, every man, woman, and child in America will feel as though they've fought World War II personally and will want the whole thing over with.

2038 First landing on Mars

2041 First Mars base established

2043 Former President Bill Clinton passes away at the age of 97, becoming both the oldest former President and the President to live the longest after his term in office. The USS Bill Clinton is launched later that year. Appropriately enough, the Clinton is a submarine...

2044 First strip mall on Mars. Wal-Mart looking to buy out the property.

2050 As the number of elderly people with sagging butt implants, wrinkled and distorted tattoos, and stretched-out piercings in the nation's nursing homes and hospices increases dramatically, hospital gowns that close completely in the back will finally be introduced.

2063 Archives finally released relating to Kennedy assassination, Watergate scandal, and Roswell incident. As suspected all along, Bigfoot did it.

2064 Aliens abort their plans for invasion after they receive transmissions of reality programming and political campaign spots from Earth and conclude that no intelligent life exists on the planet.

2076 The US Tricentennial is celebrated. Puerto Rico still undecided on statehood although much of northern Mexico and the Canadian Maritimes have been annexed.

2084 The World Cup is held in Baghdad and the United States wins soccer's biggest prize for the first time. Soccer experts predict the rise of the sport in the United States within the next decade (as they have for the past 120 years)

2092 After the last open space not consisting of a golf course is finally paved over for freeway expansion in Orange County, California, the board of supervisors finally agree to discuss possible light rail construction.

2099 The usual apocalyptic cults that surround the turn of a century or millenium pop up. However the availability online of all the books and predictions written a century ago by the same groups completely destroys their credibility. Still, some hardliners insist that these documents are simply fabrications designed by the Forces of Evil and Darkness^TM to confound them in their efforts.

January 1, 2100 The last of the hardliners finally realizes that the calendar is just an arbitrary thing set up by human beings and that God isn't operating according to anyone's agenda but His own.

A Blast From The Past (part one of a series)

(originally posted to MySpace 3/12/08; reposted with updates in italics and parentheses)

Never Meet Your Heroes

I’ve been busy lately reading a biography of one of my big heroes when I was growing up, Carl Sagan (Carl Sagan: A Life In The Cosmos, by William Poundstone). The man was a gifted teacher and a brilliant original thinker, and it may be a while before we see a talent like his again. I can honestly say that Sagan’s work helped foster a lifelong interest in science, and I admire his work greatly.

Which is more than I can say for the man himself. Behind the public figure who was passionate about science and about the social responsibility of scientists was someone who, by all accounts, was incredibly self-absorbed with an ego that needed constant attention. Sagan was a lifelong womanizer and marijuana user who seemed to pay cursory attention at best to his children from three different marriages. If only his personal life could have lived up to his public image.

(Actually, I should amend this statement: during Sagan's formative years in the 1940's and 1950's little if anything was known of certain learning disorders. It is possible that any number of issues--ADD/ADHD and Asperger Syndrome among the leading candidates--may have prompted Sagan's combination of erratic personal behavior, atrocious social skills, and prolific scientific career. His marijuana usage may simply have been an attempt to calm a restless mind enough to focus. Given the alternatives available at the time, mainly lithium salts and tranquilizers, marijuana seems a progressive form of therapy. His biographer was very careful to note that Sagan's usage of marijuana was discreet and at Sagan's own request not publicized. However, the fact that Sagan was never able to reconcile with three of his five children, and doesn't seem to have made a great effort to be a part of their lives, speaks volumes.)

But then again, I look at some of the other great scientific minds of the past few centuries. Stephen Hawking apparently gets around pretty well with the ladies, too. Imagine what he’d be like if he weren’t stuck in that wheelchair! Albert Einstein ditched his first wife (who by all accounts was at least his intellectual equal) to hook up with his cousin and ignored his children. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Isaac Newton not only never married (having once absent-mindedly used the pinkie of a potential spouse to clean his pipe!) but bragged about spending his entire life as a virgin (he lived to be 84).

(Some biographers have claimed Isaac Newton was a closet homosexual on this basis. I disagree--homosexuality was, if not completely acceptable, at least tolerated amongst Newton's social class in 17th century England. The playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe was a confirmed homosexual and rough contemporary of Newton's, and a man of Newton's reputation and later political power would have little to fear from such accusations. In other words, if Newton were gay he'd have no reason to have to stay in the closet. More likely, Newton was one of those individuals who felt socially awkward around women and never mustered the courage to actively court a bride, a much more complex matter in his day than ours. I can totally relate! Read James Glieck's biography of Newton for a realistic perspective.)

Galileo was at least good to his family--during his Inquisition trial he was supporting a deadbeat son, two daughters in a convent, and several in-laws and grandchildren despite being in his seventies and in rotten health. But this was balanced by Galileo being a serious asshole toward everyone else who couldn’t advance his career (and, to his detriment, a few who had the power to end it).

(By contrast, Johannes Kepler, who faced similar problems with the Lutheran Church as Galileo faced with the Inquisition, was an exemplary person in all aspects of his life, even going so far as to put his reputation, livelihood, and physical health and safety at risk to help defend his mother against false accusations of witchcraft. A superior mind and a superior soul can inhabit the same body after all.)

It all goes to show that a superior intellect doesn’t necessarily equate to a superior man. For that matter, superiority in any one trait is usually balanced out by a deficiency somewhere else. As my father often reminded me when I was growing up, the only perfect man who ever lived got nailed to a cross for his trouble.

(Recent events have further proven to me that mental superiority and moral superiority are not always found in the same package. Of course, I doubt the superiority in any sense of the individual I'm thinking of.)

In a way, though, this is a hopeful sign. If the best and brightest among us can be human beings--sometimes deeply flawed human beings--then any of us can aspire to greater things despite those traits we (or others) think hold us back. In other words, there’s no excuse for not doing your best at whatever you try. Just don’t forget the people in your life when you’re doing it.

ADDENDUM: When looking for the exact book I’m reading to put in the ’What I’m Reading’ block, I noticed that a 1973-83 Honda Civic Shop Manual was authored by Carl Sagan. My first thought was ’Damn, he was talented in a lot of areas!’ Then my rational mind took over (Carl would no doubt approve) and insisted that it was probably not the same person.

Welcome!

This is the fourth blog I've started in the past three years. Why, you may ask? I tried to start a blog on LiveJournal but I was not satisfied with their format. I then migrated to Yahoo 360, but that didn't seem to get much traffic and in any case the Yahoo 360 network doesn't appear to have been successful.

I then yielded to the Dark Side and signed up with MySpace. Despite their frequent technical glitches I found the MySpace blog to be very easy to use, although having to set up a Photobucket account in order to add pictures to my entries was a minor pain. I don't think however that my intended audience visits MySpace that often, and I've mainly found it to be a vehicle for transmitting warmed-over viral videos, dirty jokes, and teenage gossip. Mind you, teenage gossip spread by actual teenagers is only a minor annoyance. Teenage gossip spread by women in their thirties is another matter entirely.

Yes, my family has drawn its very own cyberstalker. Unfortunately this individual has the added feature of being someone we know in person and who lives in the same city as us. So my wife and I have both set our MySpace profiles to private to keep her from eavesdropping on us or misusing the material on our sites. As for anything she may do offline, we'll let the authorities handle that.

So, why am I doing this? As an active member of science fiction fandom, I want my fellow fannish friends who have elected not to join a social networking site to still have access to the book and video reviews and original content I was posting at MySpace. I'll probably move a lot of my older entries over here, and keep this strictly for my fandom activities.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the blog! Be sure to leave lots of comments!