I little less today
I got out and put in some more miles. Did a little less mileage, but kept a good pace. I probably could have done more, but I was just tired and was really struggling to focus. I’m already well over 40 miles for the week, which is a lot for me.
Meanwhile, instead of anything else, let’s talk about OSIRIS-REx. It’s a NASA mission to launch a satellite today, send it to the asteroid Bennu, land, take a sample, and return to Earth with it. Now, it will meet up with Bennu in 2018, and then it will be sometime in 2023 when the mission returns. I think people tend to not understand the vast distances we have to cover in space, and how slow we are with that.
I think that’s why so many people believe in “aliens” visiting. They don’t get the major investment it takes by a society to travel these distances, and how there needs to be very good reason if you are going to go to other worlds. In our mistaken belief that we are somehow “special” we think we would be special to some alien species. Got news for you, if we had something they wanted, they come, take it, and leave, and they wouldn’t mince about in the shadows, working with our governments against us, or whatever. They have no need for that shit, they can travel vast distances in short times, or they have the resources to build generational ships, either way, we are insignificant to them. You don’t like that idea, too bad.
There’s a certain balance that must be struck with humanity. We work on a philosophy that believes nature is inherently heartless, cold, greedy, cruel. Extending from that, being humans are natural beings, then we are entitled, and in fact programmed for this. In some ways nature is this way, but there is also an amazing order to it, there is an incredible complexity that makes it impossible to boil it down to some simplistic view of what it is. Then the argument must also be made, have we transcended nature as a species? We are not subject to the whims of weather, environmental changes, predators, drought, as we once were. These things can still impact us, but mostly they impact us because we set up a system of scarcity, and we are led to believe we can be uncaring to the plight of others.
But we are not natural anymore, we can launch ourselves off our world, control a ship, land it on another celestial body and return. We build houses and make clothing, we have tools and implements, we cultivate the land, and make things grow to suit our needs.
This being the case, we need to abandon our philosophies based on what someone’s divination of “nature” or “human nature” is or was. We need to look at things from a different perspective and the systems built upon these philosophies must be torn down. Stop lying to yourselves, stop telling yourselves the lies that make you comfortable. I see it all the time. People take words to mean what they want them to, they surround themselves with the ideas that bring them solace. But the world is not supposed to be comfortable. We’re here to improve, to make things better than they were, and being comfortable means you’re never going to move from where you are. Because when you are comfortable, why move?
Anyway, go OSIRIS-REx! We can do great things, if we decide to do it. We could be so much further along in science and exploration, if we realized those things are the only real things we can do in this world.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
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