ENERGY
June 24, 2007 Outer Banks, NC
I am a traveler in the mundane. Taking trips to nowhere on errands ambiguous. Days roll by like clouds receding to the deep blue horizon; never to be seen again – or maybe just reconstituted in some vapid day cycle. Like drops of moisture, each indistinguishable and evaporating with the light at eventide.
Days of drought leave the dry grasses to whisper theIr secrets in an arid wind. The words are lost but I suspect their meaning. You know them too but turn away.
The road shimmers with the heat rising. There’s a stop at an archaic brownstone filling station at dusk. The massive shelter presses the squatting stone columns and adds to the gathering dark. A purple grape Nehi soda and the orange Sunoco signs hover at the periphery.
Summer plods along. In the morning, a bank of fog sits upon the river. Oddly out of place and only intermittently visible over a low range of sunny hill tops.
The speed drops to 35 and then zero at the crossing. A man walks out of a diner with a little boy and a dangling cigarette. On another corner, an abandoned antique store is one and mustier still. Railroad tracks lie just beyond, paralleling the river.
This trip over, another begins. To the sea this time. A vacation with little to do but listen to the surf and think.
Others go away to war or to forge new business alliances or develop the technology of the future. Soon anything we think will happen and God-like future beings will rule the material world more completely than ever before but they will be no better than the ancients, some of whom had to look inward for consolation while their lords dissolved in dissipation and took whole empires with them.
The real struggle is not for faster, better, and easier. It is for sacrifice and hope. These are two sides of a single coin and it is with them that the future lies. Throughout history, only a handful of people recognized this coin intellectually – many fewer used it as daily currency.
All around, there are people who must think they mean well but they are like the father who is asked for a fish but who gives a serpent instead. The fish is the truth and the serpent is a lie.
How do they work through their convoluted thoughts to arrive at their conclusions? The thinking is foreign, alien and leads to destruction.
On the shoreline, fat humans play in the surf, consuming daily enough food to feed two other people. How do resources become this unbalanced? The few wallow in plenty and the many suffer in poverty.
Every single thought and action moves the whole of creation between the poles of good and evil. If all understood the ramification of their choices, would the world be a better place? Slowly, the tide would turn and living would improve.
But we are transient creatures not seeing the long view. We are pushed about by waves of emotions, feeling first one way and then another. Who can say what is real. Is there some objective observer outside this frame of reference who can tell us what really happened and what we should really feel? Or are we a gedanken experiment subjected to various stimuli to observe the outcome? Perhaps there’s no significant difference in that statistical minefield.
Well, now it is evening. The lights are on. One is florescent and two are incandescent. Power limits all we do. Its expense contributes to the existence of classes in society. Those who have access to adequate energy have the full belly and comfortable environment that leads to more success. Those who do not have enough energy go hungry.
SINGULARITY
June 25, 2007
All unhappiness comes when we do not get our wishes. We are more like the child throwing the tantrum than we care to admit. Happiness results when we get our way. You cannot make the world conform to your desires so you are unhappy. Happiness is locked away. The key to that lock is the coin of sacrifice and hope. When your happiness is dependent on your hopes for others and you realize that your sacrifice is the one thing over which you have total control, then you are in a position to achieve your happiness. Sacrifice and hope.
Today, we walked the dunes of Jockey Ridge. In places the dunes were all that was visible. I thought of T.E. Lawrence and wondered aloud at his thoughts of a Jewish homeland. He supported the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire but how would the prospect of an actual Jewish state have affected his thinking?
That state was created in an instant just as predicted but most think it coincidence if they know anything about the prophecy at all. The world now stands in direct opposition to God. I’m constantly surprised by the vitriol of bloggers who attack anything spiritual. The writers are not just ambivalent, they are militant in their opposition to God. I would very much like to discuss the nature of good and evil with these people. I suppose they think the world would be better without any belief system at all. Believers make mistakes and some cloak their political aspirations in a mantle of religion.
However, I can’t imagine a world without belief. It must be a world where truly “the strong take what they can and the weak yield what they must” (my paraphrase of the Athenians in Thucydides’ Melian dialog). Many non-believers focus on perceived intolerance but don’t give credit for schools, hospitals, and the consolation of a troubled heart.
Some of the non-believers no doubt think that we may someday be like Gods ourselves. Kurzweil thinks that we are only a few decades away from the singularity….that point at which we cross a technological boundary and become something new and achieve immortality. All the science in the world will not change a man’s heart. Treachery and deception will rise to a new level on that day and our capacity for evil will cross a boundary too.