Thursday, June 11, 2015

The Future

We’ve put a robot the size of an SUV on the surface of Mars.

I know this, because I’ve been in communication with said robot.

I subscribe to it, you see, and it sends me messages via a computer the size of a planet that we built by combining every computer on earth and allowing them to communicate with one another.

I access this planetary supercomputer via a phone that itself has more computational power than the shuttle we used to travel to the Moon nine years before my birth.

Oh, yes, and we travelled to the Moon. Nearly a decade before my birth.

While we were walking on the Moon, Mars was the stuff of stories, defined to us only by that which we imagined it might be. Now we have a presence there, learning what it can that we might one day go there in person and sending the information back to Earth, back to me, back to anyone interested enough to pay attention.

We have a robot the size of an SUV on the fucking surface of fucking Mars, and it is my friend on Twitter, and we made that happen. Humanity did that. We reached up into the heavens and put that robot there and it shows us what it sees and any and every one of us has the ability to watch it, it is the future that we are living in and it is a glorious fucking future indeed.

But I digress…


You were saying something about how you think we as a culture have gotten dumber due to our choices in popular media?

2 comments:

  1. I would NEVER say that! And I follow the Rover on Twitter too, of course I follow the SARCASTIC rover, but that counts, right?

    It actually really annoys me when people who know nothing about twitter talk about how stupid or useless it is. Maybe if they took the time to learn how to use it properly they'd be more open minded. Instantaneous world-wide communication? They can't even imagine how that would be useful, yet TWITTER is what's stupid. ��

    But I digress. .. Awesome post, as always.

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  2. I'm withholding my opinion until I know what several popular singers have to say on the subject. ;-)

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