The other night, I pulled up a chair in my backyard, propped my feet up on the edge of the tampoline, and puffed on a honey bourbon cigar. And, of course, I peered up at the clear night sky and pondered my place among things.
Knowledge can be cruel
How do you think a fish in an aquarium might contemplate their situation if they had the same intellectual ability as the average person?
I think of the late Jack, whom we buried at sea. He could certainly recognize objects from a certain distance from his fish bowl. He’d wiggle his fins when I would place my finger near him. I hoped he was saying “hello.” Or maybe he was flipping me off for not getting him a larger tank. Another mystery in the list of mysteries I’ll never solve.
How deeply saddened he might have been if, with human-like intelligence, he could gaze outside the confines of his bowl and see the vastly different environs surrounding him and come to the realization that he could never, ever do anything more than simply observe with his primitive fish eyes.
Am I being too heavy-handed with the metaphor, here? Please tell me.
Will we ever go out there?
What if we humans pulled together and somehow found a way to venture beyond our own planet and moon? Hawking said he thinks we’ll have to colonize space in order for our species to survive.
But we’re too busy fighting, fleeing and fucking around in our lives to get the resources together to pursue such a venture. You see how we’re so damn wrapped up in our phones and getting outraged at what people who don’t agree with us say online. Yep, I do it too.
Maybe we’ll just wait until the circumstances are much more dire than they seem to be now. Then we’ll at least try to see how we can get out there, right?
I’ll be an old man, or perhaps dead, by then.
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