Analog by Night

As in, what if you lived forever? What if you traveled to the edge of the universe? What if you lived in a decade where rapid technological advancement produced a hyper-frenetic optimism about the future? Remember the fifties? I just watched Aubrey de Grey’s TED Talk, and it so unhinged my understanding of my life, that it led me to all the wild optimism that permeates these TED talks. My friend Robin and I just had this giddy-as-schoolboys sci-fi conversation where we postulated that, based on the things people are talking about at these damn TED talks, people, or something sorta like people, could be living on another planet, living forever, synthesizing their own happiness, and creating a liveable environment, like within the next …100 years (to be conservative).

Crazy huh? Have we learned anything since we were postulating that electricity, automation and the discovery of nuclear energy gave us ideas about flying cars? I mean if people then had “wildest dreams” about cities in the sky, what will we have given our own “wildest dreams” My wildest dream is still sorta Jules Verne like. That I’ll “go” to the edge of the “universe” and “comprehend” “everything” and be in a constant state of ecstasy forever. Why the excessive quoting? Because those dreams are mostly just linear extensions of my understanding. Extacy is just a linear extension of happiness. It’s happiness plus. Comprehending is just sort of applying my logic “plus” but history tends to tell us that advancement is not always additive, sometimes it’s multiplicative or even exponential. Which brings me back to my first early concept of Nirvana, which was that it was so different from Samsara, that one could not communicate it.

Enjoy your friday, it may be the last one you ever understand in the same way. And skip lunch, go get a TED talk.

Update: I think my state of mind is sort of a combination of a few things. I had a beautiful look at the Olympics today, got to listen to my favorite song while walking downtown to work, and finished a two year old Aubrey de Grey talk.

The Olympics are so pretty this morning. They’re lit by the sun, but sandwiched between a voluptuous mat of rain-heavy clouds, and a second layer of foggy low-liers marbling the hamlet of Ballard and the trees of further out in the Sound. Because of that reflection, punctuating the the muted shapes today, the mountains seem close, and celebrated. Its wonderful to see them this early in the morning. It brightens and and quickens despite the dull of a late slumber under February’s first overcast morn.

I wish I’d seen Kentucky that way, I wish I had some better eye to cast on a better more glorious monument. It’s not why I left there, but its a big part of why I come home here.

I tell ya though, KY summer nights are making a big run on WA mountain mornings. I’ve got at least four-five more months of this depressive gray to get through. Seattle is so masochistic.