I Am a Scientist

Okay, I'm not a scientist. But Vic Chesnutt once called my wife a "Library Scientist," which is what we really should call librarians. And then he laid his hands on her 9-month pregnant belly and blessed our unborn son. It was a good night.

Anyway, what the hell is this about? Science! I subscribe to several techy and science magazines and spend too much time on science websites and blogs because I'm a frustrated Man of Science. Today Scientific American has an incredible slide show you all should check out: Fade to Black: The Night Sky of the Future. I've posted here what the night sky will look like when we are way too much closer to the Andromeda Galaxy than we are now. This takes me back to childhood daydreaming over the gorgeous planetscapes of Chesley Bonestell, the father of modern space art. Ches did it way better than, well, everyone, but the spirit is there and I appreciate it. Here's Ches' most famous painting, for your eyeballing pleasure.


Anyway, I'm sitting in our cozy little 1920s bungalow, having a beer, a nice Schlafly ESB (my second if you must know), and pondering the sky of our planet billions of years in the future. Got some music on, too, checking out the sound quality on a future post, loving this very early Green On Red show (you will too!) and I'm thinking - "Why the hell does life have to be any harder than this for anyone on the planet? Don't we have the resources to make sure that every man, woman and child on the planet could be doing exactly what they want to be doing right now, rather than scrabbling for food, fighting for their lives, running from people that want to hurt and kill them, etc etc etc."

It's not just a couple of beers talking. Think about the resources available to the industrialized nations of Earth - natural and man-made - and think about what they are used for, what they are wasted upon, and how the lives of billions of people could be improved if we started to shift those resources away from their current uses. We'd have a new world, kids, a better world, in our lifetimes. This is where we could go, this is the possible future, but we have to change the now to do it.