Category: “Hmmm…”

I love his explanation of Liminal Spaces. Who among us has not experienced those feelings?

The first thing that came to mind in his description of Liminal Spaces were the settings used in the television adaptation of Steven King’s The Langoliers. (Roundly panned by King aficionados, but not being familiar with the source materials, I found it quite creepy.)

Thinking back over my own life, it’s amazing how many Liminal Spaces of the mental/emotional variety I’ve found myself in—and equally surprising the exact feelings he describes when being in physical Liminal Spaces.

William Shatner, in his new book, writing about his trip with Blue Origin:

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

That’s more than a bit of a surprise coming from the quintessential Captain Kirk.

So did this guy…

Prompted by a comment left by Frank on my last post…

“I make light because I am thoroughly depressed, angry, exhausted, burned out, and numbed by the entire lot of white/christian/conservative/republican/authoritarian/ nazi/hating/lying/cheating/insane/backwards/unreasonable/fucking assholes. And they are not just in this country…it’s a world phenomenon.”

I quipped back, “And this is why we can’t have nice things ANYWHERE.”

And probably, I began to think, why we haven’t had definitive proof of being visited by extraterrestrials.

I’m sure this has already been posited by minds far greater than mine as an explanation to The Fermi Paradox, but what if all species reach a certain point of development—on the verge of extra-solar space exploration—and poof! they blow themselves up over petty squabbles, god-myths, racial bias, and whatever else they might cause them to separate into an us-versus-them mentality like Man has suffered during most of his existence on this planet. As much as I’d like to think otherwise, maybe one of the hallmarks—nay requisites—of “intelligence” is aggression and competitiveness. I mean it took something to get to the top of the food chain, and having bigger brains certainly contributed to that.

Maybe we haven’t been visited—or, considering the vast distances, even heard from anyone else out there yet—is because intelligence never really makes it. Perhaps the galaxy is littered with the corpses of great civilizations that never broke out of their planetary shells, instead turning inward and destroying themselves only to rise and fall again indefinitely. Though not yet widely accepted yet in academic circles, there is certainly mounting evidence that just such a thing has happened on this planet; our current worldwide civilization was not the first—and will not be the last to inhabit this blue marble.

Or as Battlestar Galactica famously proclaimed , “All this has happened before and will happen again.”

Of course the other possibility for not having been contacted is that if you are an incredibly advanced, galactic civilization that has mastered most if not all of the laws nature and can manipulate them at will, would you want to make contact with a bunch of continually warring, willfully ignorant apes on a small rock in the backwaters of the Milky Way?

We realized the other day that since we live in a community property state, if anything happens to either one of us, the surviving spouse would become responsible for the deceased’s debts. That’s not a big deal for Ben as I don’t have that much of a debt burden, but Ben’s student loans would bury me – literally…and then they still wouldn’t get paid!

We were thinking of moving after I retire, but since I’m not sure either of us would want to deal with winters in the blue northeast, that basically leaves Colorado or Oregon out west.