So a whole moon passes and I contribute four of my own words. To my cohorts here at HDP, I submit…. il miglior fabbro. But alas I am stealing again. Hopefully I didn’t come off as a total geek after starting things off with a quote from the editor of Scientific American. I know, this time you were probably expecting something from Star Trek… Truthfully, the only episode I have ever watched in it’s entirety is the one where Spock goes blind—immortalized in the great Galaxie 500 song SPOOK from This Is our Music. I am not a science fiction geek. Though I have been fairly called a geek about fine LED flashlights (check out the LED Museum sometime). Be careful.

I asked you to think about what John Rennie says: The evidence of the evolution of the universe is slipping away. Soon (cosmically soon of course) the isolated blobs of matter that hold future incarnations of intelligent life will be so remote that their “universe” will appear quite empty. Imagine what it would be like to live in a finite, wimpy universe. Our species has always looked up and out, always blown away by the sheer spectacle of all the possibilities. What would it do to the psyche of intelligent beings to look out and see that there isn’t much beyond their grasp? This is not to say that there wouldn’t be all kinds of possibilities put out there for the masses. I mean, here on Earth we still have a staunch creationist movement that mocks anyone foolish enough to believe that the earth is older than indicated in the bible. I just saw some creationist pastor on television (it was late, I was drunk) giving a canned lecture “debunking” geology, astronomy, cosmology, (common sense!?): “Nothing on earth is a million years old because Gawd had not got around to making the earth yet”….(applause from the gallery)…It kills me that folks will gulp the intelligent design like Kool Aid, but bristle at the thought that humans were actually preceded by dinosaurs…

Really, think about the effect of no infinity, no Galaxy far far away…nothing outside of the neighborhood. In a civilization that had reached our current level of technology ( imagine the leap of knowledge of the past 100 years. Shit, the last TEN years. Imagine where we will be in a thousand, in TEN THOUSAND!) the expansion of the universe would have been obvious, the neighboring galaxies in view, tantalizing—screaming out for a visit like our moon in the 1960s. Undoubtedly, if you believe in the Drake equation, countless others have risen and fallen over the eons JUST IN THE MILKY WAY. Is it not possible that we are one of the last positioned for the great leap out and beyond? The last who know enough to be motivated to want to know more?

SNOW MOON 2008 You asked for it.

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