One Way Streets

 As much as I have disparaged religion, especially Christianity as it is “practiced” in the USA, I understand the motivation; at least some of them.  At almost-80, more of my lifetime friends are dead than alive.  I think about them, a lot, when one of them dies, but after a few years my memories coalesce into a picture so dim and two-dimensional that they become little more than stories that I either told or heard.  That can be a scary thing, if you are convinced that the universe can’t get along without your “contribution.”  Any rational look at the known universe makes it perfectly clear that the universe has no idea that there is life on this planet.  As Douglas Adams explained in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.  I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” 

The speed of light, alone, is incomprehensible to 99.999…% of us, at 300,000km/second.  So incomprehensible, that science fiction and space invader (UFO) fanatics invented worm holes to get around the fact that the nearest barely-possibly inhabitable exoplanets to Earth are “Proxima Centauri b,” about 4.2 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus or, more likely, Gliese 667Cc at 22 light-years from Earth.  Theoretically, faster-than-light (FTL) travel is impossible, thanks to the speed limit set by E=mc².  Humans are so desperate to believe that we have a shot at immortality and importance to something larger than our little spot of life amidst the vast empty vacuum of space that even marginally rational, non-religious people skip over impossible hurdles to fanaticize and romanticize our importance. That’s how desperate we are to “matter.”  

In common-use numbers, a light year is so incomprehensible that it is practical to use scientific notation to describe that distance, 5.879x10¹² miles (about 6 trillion miles) or 9,461,333,376,000km. NASA's Parker Solar Probe manages 430,000 mph (692,018 km/h), at its nearest approach to the Sun, which is “approximately 0.064% the speed of light.  430,000 mph is pretty inconceivable, but not even in the vicinity of the speeds necessary for practical travel to another habitable planet.

Clearly, most Americans can’t even get a grip on much smaller numbers, like a billion or, even a few million.  A substantial portion of the uneducated, barely-employed American public barely bats an eye at the incredible wealth of the richest Americans.  Not because they have any idea of how twisted our rigged economic system is, but because they are mathematically clueless.  Let’s take the world’s richest, most-perverted man as an example.  According to the latest estimate, Elon Musk is worth $369 billion.  The entitled, son of a South African gem mine owner is 53 years old and he started his adult working life when he was 23 years old, as an illegal immigrant on a student visa without a work permit.  He has been “working” for 30 years and, with tongue in cheek, I’ll pretend he worked at least 40 hours a week without vacations (choke, gag) for those 30 years.  That means he has spent 62,400 hours with his weird plastic surgeon sculpted nose somewhere in the vicinity of a grindstone.  Making all those assumptions means he has collected $5,913,461.54 per hour for 30 years.  As of March, 2024, the Social Security Administration found that the “(over 50 years from age 20 to 69)  . . . overall average median lifetime earnings of $1,850,000 for men and $1,100,200 for women” in the United States.  Musk has managed to game the system so that he has collected 3-4X the average American’s lifetime income every hour of his working life.  And that, for some reason, inspires envy, not outrage, because most Americans operate at barely a 3^rd grade intellectual level, which is exactly the education and intellect that the major news networks shoot for. 

Other than very limited travel outside of North America, I have no idea how aware the rest of the world’s inhabitants are compared to the US.  I admit that, other than Alberta, I have been impressed with Canadian citizens and haven’t found them to be as dimwitted, violent, and uninformed as my Midwestern rural neighbors. If the rest of humanity is as gullible as the US, humans are doomed to extinction and we’ll probably take this solitary green and blue globe with us.  And that is probably the closest to we’ll be to being significant in the universe: we wiped out life on one of the few planets where it existed.