floorpie

Speaking of life beyond the confines of our pile of dirt, what will it mean to the world if and when we DO find extraterrestrial life? There’s a lot of talk about how the very idea of it will be so mind-numbingly astonishing for humanity that we’ll all instantly unite against (or towards) a common enemy (or goal). The idea of countries will fall away and we’ll quickly enter a new renaissance in which we all come together as the species homo sapiens and work towards bettering and augmenting ourselves to enable greater participation in the happenings o four galactic neighborhood (you know, like interstellar HOA meetings and whatnot).

As much as I’d love to believe in the ideal that Star Trek envisioned, where money somehow doesn’t exist, you can just have anything you want or need by having the printer make it for you, and we’re all working and contributing to society out of the sheer shared responsibility of it all… I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I think it will all largely depend on what kind of first contact we make. Given the emptiness of our immediate surroundings, and the state and trajectory of technology, impressive as it may be, I think our first indication of life will be the impression of it. Meaning, the scanning of distant rocky world, evaluating it’s frequencies across the visible and invisible spectrum, ascertaining what it’s atmosphere is made out of, and making some logical leaps to determine that this distant mote of dust in the night sky MUST also contain life, because it’s air is a similar combination of elements as are, and we know that ours isn’t stable without the regeneration of trees and fauna breathing back and forth at each other, and plate tectonics churning and regurgitating used minerals into new over and over again. The scientists will proclaim that they’ve finally found life, and we will be briefly amazed and glance up at the night sky to wonder if they know about us, too… and then back to episodes of Love On The Spectrum (not a complaint).

Back when Copernicus was blowing minds with his heliocentric view of the solar system and reigniting the old Greek concept of the plurality of worlds, the idea that we, as a planet, weren’t all that special after all came to the forefront of the thinkers of the time. This idea persisted for a few hundred years and got into the brain of William Herschel. Herschel was an astronomer who discovered Uranus (hey-ohhh!)… but he also reasoned that if the Earth had its multitudes, then obviously the other known planets and moons did, too. He was so enamored with this idea that not only was he pretty sure he saw forests on the Moon, but he theorized that the Sun was nothing more than a very bright planet with a hot outer atmosphere shielding a more temperate inner world that you could sometimes glimpse through sunspots.

About 50 years later Thomas Dick took it even further and made estimates of planet-wide populations by extrapolating that the population density of the UK (where he lived) would be the same average population across any other celestial body (it was at this point that my brain exploded). So, armed with this mathematical certainty, he calculated that Mars had 15 billion inhabitants, Jupiter 7 trillion, and the rings of Saturn (expensive property but with amazing views) hosted 8 trillion happy Saturnlings.

I love thought experiments like this. To me they speak to humanity’s deep desire to just not be alone in this massive existence. Surely there are other beings out there… how could there not be?? We can’t be alone, obviously, and that other people stubbornly refuse to visit us is only a symptom of them being busy with their own internal strife and worries just as we are.

And man, thinking like this is so comforting… when I try to wrap my brain around the shear size of even just our own solar system, with it’s vast distances between planets and even vaster distances out to the heliopause that marks the official end of our neighborhood, then on to the next closest solar system, then galactic center, then other galaxies, and on and on and on and think of the trillions of stars and planets that we would pass along the way, and to not have even an inkling that a single one of them has any kind of being approximating life on or around it is just staggeringly lonely. If only everyone would think about it, maybe we’d get how precious each of us are to one another, and we’d support each other instead of clawing our way into tearing each other down.

The one thing that gives me some kind of hope, though… as silly as the idea of trillions of people going about their lives on the Sun is now, back then it was a fairly reasonable assumption. So, even though we’ve mostly proven to ourselves that we’re alone in this solar system, there’s a fair chance that we’ll look back on that idea with a laugh and a smirk too when we’re sharing a hot tub with the locals on Europa.

So I first wrote the title “echoes in the aether” and felt very smug at how erudite and clever I would look to my zero followers… and then I glanced down at my other post titles and saw that I already had the same idea last year. Mercifully, I can only see a limited amount of my posts without digging for them… I might otherwise see me repeating this same cleverness year after year ad nauseam.

I often (whereby “often” I mean twice a year if I’m particularly motivated) think about who I write this for. It’s certainly not for public validation because at this point there is no public viewing of this blog. Like the moon in the distant future, I once shown semi-brightly on the earth, and then gradually spun out into the darkness only to be glimpsed again if stumbled upon. Not that I was every very popular; but, I did have a readership, and, as meager as it was, it was also a who’s who in the early blogging community. I’m not arrogant enough to count myself within that inner circle of cool kids… but I was cool kids adjacent (just like high school!).

But now all of that has faded away, and even the cool bloggers have gone on to bigger and better things. So, given that no one reads this, and that there is no audience, why not just take the effort back in-house and write in a journal like a normal emo kid instead of having a website and publishing it to the cloud? The long and short answer is “I don’t know” and also “because”. And, as abrupt as this will seem, that’s the end of this post.

I’m in China (again)! I really don’t know how many times I’ve been here and I wish there was some way to look up your passport information and find out where you’ve been through the years. Yes, I know that your passport is full of little stamps that tell you exactly where and when you’ve been…but if your passport looks anything like mine, it’s an unintelligible mess of smudged stamps, overlapping stamps, stamps where the ink pad must have been dry, stamps where the entry visa is 20 pages away from the exit and you’re not sure if they go together, etc.

I’m fairly sure that, especially if including Hong Kong, I’ve been to this region at least 30 times…maybe more. If you expand the net even further and include Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, and Thailand it’s probably approaching 50…in the 40’s at a minimum.

The point is, I’ve been to Asia a lot.

Like a lot a lot.

But for all those times I’ve been out here, most of the time it’s been for work; which is an entirely different animal to coming out for fun. For one thing, I’m almost never going to tourist areas. I’m going to the REAL China… the China the China Board of Tourism doesn’t really want you to see. The China with the poverty looked down upon by 5-star Western style business hotels. The China that those other western road warriors know very well and have a gentlemen’s agreement to just kinda not really talk that much about back home save for the couple of crazy stories to share with the normies at parties.

It’s an uneasy truce.

One beautiful thing that travel gives you, even when traveling for work like this, is perspective. I always leave these trips appreciating what I have and marveling at the resilience of others. Being more open minded to other perspectives, and taking a moment to breathe and reflect.

You know that thing where Twitter was cool and then it sucked and then Threads was cool and now it’s boring? I feel like that’s all trauma-bonding, because Threads is actually great and only seems boring because it lacks the drama of Twitter. But the drama of Twitter (oh. Sorry, I mean “X”) is the problem with it in the first place! And, more importantly, remember when we didn’t even have social media and we could instead be stressed out with meeting up with actual people and doing actual things??

This rant brought to you by angst.

I’ve had this blog for over 20 years.

Again.

I’ve had this blog for over TWENTY YEARS!

It would be more impressive if I’d made entries every day instead of letting months (years?) go by without checking in; the achievement instead being more the financial stability to keep the $8/month going for so long. I don’t want to calculate how much this site has cost me over it’s life, or do the calculus of whether or not it’s been worth it. I think it has. I think it’s been worth it.

Back in long ago days, when this was an original Blogger blog, sincerely one of the first on the fledgling platform (I’m sure there were already thousands of blogs by the time I got into it in January of 2001 [Blogger started in August of 1999], but it wasn’t really popular after it’s first year and I was getting in on the ground floor), I had a few readers. My girlfriend at the time, Meg of Mightgirl.com fame, a couple of real life friends, more internet friends that I met through chat rooms (I think… the memory fades), and then some random people here and there. I probably had dozens or maybe up to a hundred visitors daily. Very very minor league numbers but they were actual people, actually reading what I pinged out into the great open expanse of the internet.

I used to make self-deprecating statements about how no one reads my blog and I just do it for my own amusement… which was partially true, but not really accurate, was it? People did actually read it. Not a lot of them. Not enough to make any appreciable difference in my content… but there were live eyeballs taking in data that I was creating.

Now, though, it really is no one. At least I think so. The last comment (from an internet friend I’ve never actually met) was from 2013. My updates have been few and far between, and more often than not they’re much like this one. “Can you believe how long I’ve had this blog?” “I should post more” “Crazy how this is still here, amIright??”. You know the drill.

So now that it really IS no one it feels very much like talking to myself without knowing what I’m going to say. It’s a weird feeling. I’m going to hit post on this and send this message in a bottle out into the still empty internet (for the internet is so vast, it shall always be empty regardless of how much we throw into it), and that will fill me with…what? Accomplishment? Resignation? A little dopamine hit thinking that osmeone might read it? I don’t know. It’s all just echoes in the aether…

You know what, though? I like writing and I miss doing it more often. I like a lot of things that I wish I did more often, truth be told. Writing being one of them, going to shows being another, laughing with friends, taking pictures, traveling. That’s not to say I don’t do those things, because I actually do all of them… I just wish I did them MORE. “And why don’t I?” I outwardly say inwardly to myself. I dunno. I really should just do the thing because life is achingly, surprisingly, tragically short. Do the thing. DO IT. It’s just a matter of priority, I tell myself; and it takes more than just a bumper sticker that says “Prioritize You”. What that bumper sticker should also say, in subscript of greater font size than the superscript, in bold and free of parenthesis. What that bumper sticker should also say, or more correctly primarily say to the point of just outright omitting the absolutely unnecessary first statement of “Prioritize You” because of course you should, that’s what we’re all here reading this bumper sticker down even and at eye level with the curb for. What that bumper sticker SHOULD say, and will say once I get a hold of my printing guy, is “DE-prioritize the other shit”.

Because that’s the real trick.

I have had this blog for 22 years. I have had this blog long enough for a baby born on the same day I started this thing to have grown up, graduated high school, taken a gap year backpacking around Europe, had his or her first kiss uncommonly late in life, gone to college, dropped out, fallen in love, broken up, become a NFT millionaire,fallen in love again, lost their fortune in the most recent crypto crash, and broken up again.

I really hope he or she is doing ok!

22 years. That’s just frankly obnoxious and I wonder why I keep it. I know why I tell myself I keep it: I have a list of the books I’ve read on here and use this to keep track. Never mind that I also have a Good Reads account and have since brought that list up to date, that’s hardly the point get off my back!

I also tell myself that I keep it because I host my main email through the same domain. Which I know how to transfer to another host so it’s really not a good reason and yet here we are.

Maybe it’s so I can scribble these kinds of stream of consciousness missives that no one reads every 8-12 months or so. Maybe. I don’t know. I wonder when I’ll post again?

In a stunning display of intense creative motivation, I am posting again… though this is really more of a postscript. For the spambots that follow me, I’ve been working on re-designing my photography site. It’s not done, needs speed enhancements, probably is rife with spelling errors, but by gawd, it’s up! It also has a link for buying photo prints, should you be interested. My joke has been that only my mom and myself will actually buy a print… but even my mom hasn’t, so I guess it’s all up to me.

Come visit me: www.dakfoto.com

Imagine my surprise and horror to discover that the last time I posted on this site was in 2017. Imagine it! No, seriously do it right now. Imagine my checking in on my site and chuckling at my own linguistic cleverness, looking to the date of my latest post, seeing 10.22.2017, going to the kitchen to make coffee that I have on hand but do not drink, making said coffee, letting it cool to a reasonable temperature, preparing a glass of water to wash my mouth out with afterwards because coffee is the devil’s hot bean water and tastes as such, taking a swig without swallowing, looking at the post date again, and doing a spit take of my coffee for dramatic effect. Just imagine!

I knew I hadn’t actually blogged in a while, but I would never have imagined that it was THAT long ago. I semi-frequently update the “read” part of this site, where I keep a running list of the books I’ve read; and, I semi-frequently read, so in my mind I felt that I’d been checking in on floorpie.net more often than I apparently had been.

I’m also surprised that, given the covid-19 pandemic, that there aren’t 2+ years worth of insane ravings on here. Where did all that energy go?? (seriously, where did it go? Can you tell me? It’s all a haze).

But I digress. Or not really, as I didn’t have a point to digress from in the beginning. Where does that leave us? I dunno. Will I be back more frequently? Doubtful? Maybe? Is my mind capable of long-form twitter posts anymore? Only time will tell!