So where are we tonight?

This whole thing with the Republicans having no Speaker of the House is unsettling. Reason to be nervous: another political system out of balance. Adds stress to the overall system.

There may not be a way to tell how much stress a system can absorb before exploding – the whole Heisenberg uncertainty thing. There may, however, be a way of knowing. Humans have become so clever at constructing the universe around them. I have been exposed to many intellectual shining “stars” comprising humanity’s history.  Our very existence shows you should never underestimate a puny little human.

A future bifurcation?: People who choose to meet the universe’s hostility to life in general with genetic manipulation (we design bodies specific to their environments), versus people who choose to improve their survival chances by merging with machines (upload the mind and away we go ensconced in armor built to function within incredible environments). Either way seems to me to be full of potential. Go anywhere, do anything. Mankind at a whole new level. Holy smokers, Marvel Comics come to life. Everything before this point would become the New Dark Ages.

We are so close to being able to make that choice. Will we really just piss it all away? Is it built right into nature that the surviving few will care little about the rest? Will they let us get there? Don’t they see the potential in mankind? (On the other hand it might be that they see us for what we are.)

I’m so depressed when I look at the universe through my glasses of pessimism. But, after all, I was a liberal arts major and I have been exposed to eons of mankind’s shattered advance and the part that savagery played in all those years. Stone-tipped spears to pistols on campus in the hands of pissed off self-entitled white boys. It seems to me we should be further along in cooperation given our tenuous grasp on life.

And yet those very paths of intellectual discovery that brought about my despair, also brought me into contact with philosophers, artists, writers, scientists and engineers who speak to my soul. Individuals who passed ideas from one age to another. Individuals who used ideas to advance us as a species.

We could soon be losing all of this. Again.