Holy Crackers! I have a theme!

I know, right? That’s super unusual.

Anyway. Earlier this week I blogged about legos washing ashore along Cornwall and Devon. And it’s probably no coincidence the BBC also did a piece on what those islands of plastic are up to in our oceans. I’m sure they have just as much fun searching for content as I do.

Could you tell that was facetious?

Anyway. The standard saying is that we know more about space than we know about what happens at the bottom of our own oceans. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it might be, humans have an incontrovertible attentiveness to what’s happening up there in the sky over us, and we’re generally just–probably rightfully—afraid of deep water.

But, along with the random lego octopi, and a travelling hoard of rubber ducks, and the kind of plastic that’s working its way into the geologic record, we get things like a message in a bottle sent in 1914 that just found its way to someone. Think about that. Someone wrote a message to his family, in the early days of WW1, and it’s spent the last hundred years doing cheese knows what in the ocean.

And reading that, I can’t imagine what else is floating around down there, waiting for us to find it.

I feel like this Sci-Fi Friday needs to be audience participation. Given the amount of content I've managed this week, I'm allowed to be a little lazy.

So, write me a tagline for the picture. Make it as silly or as serious as you like.

Unclear on what a tagline is, look at some of these. Even if you know what a tagline is, go look. Just trust me.

I love science. Probably because it's generally a challenge to me--my brain is very good at language and creative enterprise, but I've always had trouble with math and science--and I like to beat my head against things I don't understand once in a while. I like the things science can tell us about our history just as much as the things it can tell us about our future. 
But very rarely do I come across something new that doesn't make me think of that moment in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm looks at the scientists and the man behind the dinosaurs and asks if any of them thought about whether or not they should have created dinosaurs while they were so all-fired busy figuring out if they could. 
And I'm not talking about the likelihood of the Large Hadron Collider ending the universe, or new vaccines creating super-germs, or whoever happens to be building SkyNet this week. I'm talking about this.

You should totally go read the article, even if it gets a little science heavy in some places and a little strangely quasi-religious in others, it's interesting. The gist of it is there's a seventy-some year old scientist out there who's been obsessing over his need to stop aging for fifty-some years, and he thinks this spectacularly low number of people born with a incredibly rare genetic disorder might be his answer.

So, skating over literally half of what I just said there--like how his life's gone for the last fifty years while he's been freaking out about getting old, and how he's basically capitalizing on someone else's pain and in my reading anyway doesn't feel all that sorry about that (reminder, I am one of the least sentimental people in the universe most days so if I think you're being callous that's something to think about)... Dude wants to stop aging.

Like how does that even work? Do we get a magic pill at 27 and stay young and perfect (assuming you won the genetic lottery in the first place and you're young and perfect)? And even if we could choose to stop aging, does that mean immortality? Does that mean Facebook--or whatever comes after it--fills up with family pictures, comments hanging around at the bottom like 'Spent spring-break in Cabo with Gram, she always picks up better looking guys' or 'Me Mom and Grandma belly-dancing, I'm the one in the pink' where everybody's indistinguishable from each other? 

Okay, scratch that one, that sounds cool.

Anyway. I'm not a Luddite, I don't think modern technology is ruining us all and everything is scary. But when you start looking at big changes, not better cosmetics or disease control, when you're just in it to live forever maybe it's time to step back and think about whether or not you should. Sometimes that's more important than can.

That picture has absolutely no relevance to the thing I just wrote, but I like it. It's from here under this license. 


PS. Wrote that entire thing and then thought "Gee, that sounds a little like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the fifty pages I read anyway..." Yeah. That's still on the too-read list. More-so now.