As you will see below, my formative years were spent dissipating while reading tomes like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
We’re just sending the Europa Clipper to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Clipper is an apt name coz there’s apparently a huge underwater ocean on the planet. That is a current reminder of the vastness of space, whose unimaginable size we can now start to imagine by checking out the uncountability of the objects we think we can see. How many is that?
One of the later theories to explain the Big Bang (now an obsolete concept bye the way) was that it was preceded by a hyper-rapid expansion of all the contents of the contemporary (whatever that means) universe to its presumed apparent size now. This theory, invented by one Alan Guth of MIT (where else right?) is (was) called cosmic inflation.
Hmmm is that the same as what the governments of the world spend all their time making it higher, so we will all be happier? Because then we’ll all be richer?
I’m trying to think myself into being a participant in one of those undoubtedly deep NASA strategy sessions where the eggheads ask The Question du jour: where shall we go next? Some possibilities:
Too many thingamies that are incompressible, uninflatable, unlocalizable, too many incomprehensible Escher-like forms that we can’t navigate through no matter how many dimensions we’ve achieved in string theory.
When will we find pan-energetic unlocalables? How do we know to get there?
To prove their existence or infer it?
Is there something that is the same as vast but bigger in a highly different way?
That’s gotta be a fascinating discussion. Starting with, what is the budget, Joe?
Where do we aim for? What is the superlative of vast? How do we get there?
My theory is that that are so many things resembling monetary inflation out there. Just like your current government’s budgets. This time its inflation of nonlocalables.
We’re running out of objects to research because new ones keep appearing. That means huge budgets and lots of inflation, cosmic, monetary and comic.
Is it the telescopes that are the problem?
What’s the nut? What’s the solution? Essentially, we need to give it to the accountants to figure out. Bitcoin and digital currencies have emerged to offer a way of tethering the runaway cosmological creation of value. NASA, totally up against the tide, is trying to do some inflation fighting. As Boeing shows, that isn’t working out very well.
AI and its offshoots are the latest way to accelerate the recognition of the process of value creation in the universe. But the horse is already out of the stable. Bitcoin is that latest vain attempt to forestall the phenomenon of cosmic and monetary inflation to which all aliens, us included, are totally subject.
The Singularity is not actually important because it doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. It’s the reification of the psychic drive by all intelligent beings, living or otherwise, to leave a huge mass of value behind, to show that we once actually existed. Bitcoin and its ilk aim to show how meaningful and valuable that rock is.
The key insight is that unless we can assign a real idea of the value we have created cosmologically, we haven’t done anything useful at all.
So, this chunk of value can be measured, admired eventually and revered for its divine unlocalizability.
NASA and the rest of us (i.e. the rest of the aliens) are merely trying to create a chunk of meaning recognized as value that we once called God and is now being subsumed into what we once called the Singularity and is now that chunk of unlocalizable value.
Once we can assign that chunk to trading platforms, we will be able to exchange and transform these Bitcoin blobs with everyone else out there that wants to be a player.
That’s what NASA is trying to move towards, but they are all merely faceless bureaucrats. That’s where the Musks and Trumps are aiming to play.
Who is the Man then?
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