Walking out of the grocery store today, I happened to see the headline of our local paper.
"Durbin Pushes Bill Passage"
My first thought on seeing this was, "Cool. We need that transportation bill." My second thought was, "Gods, are we f'n boring."
Granted, I live in a small town, so there's not a lot of news to be had anyway. But still...
As I got into my car, still thinking about it, I muttered to myself, "Hey, how about this for a headline: 'Colonists On Mars Find Signs Of Life!' That would be non-boring..."
I drove home, and found myself thinking about how far technology has come in the past few decades, and truly, what a marvelous species we are! Our capabilities strike me as pretty darned boundless, once we set our minds to something.
Technology grows so rapidly these days, and given how much we can do, how we have taken basic technologies and evolved them into a myriad of applications in the blink of an eye, what more could we be doing, that we are not? Why, then, are we stuck in such a rut, with things like transportation, and energy, and so many other technologies?
And where the hell is my flying car? We could certainly achieve such a thing, given our capabilities. So why haven't we?
At which point, I realized why we don't have flying cars, or zero point energy, or any of the other super technologies we find suggested by physics that we seem so close to achieving - yet somehow, never do.
Because historically, misery, has always been very, very profitable.
Why cure cancer, when we can just treat it? Why develop alternative energy, when we can continue to rape the Earth for oil? Why join together to tackle the challenge of creating new amazing, interesting, and liberating technologies, when we can just build a big ass skyscraper for another gigantic multinational?
But it seems to me that these days, it is getting harder and harder to maintain misery, in the face of the human race's growing knowledge and understanding of science, and how to apply it to technology. And while I don't doubt that there will always be profit in misery, I think we are seeing the very beginnings of that particular profit center, starting to fade away. And this, gives me great hope...
I am reminded, by these ramblings, of a quote I recently read by David Brin, in the afterword of his novel, Existence, that I shall close with:
We aren't a curse upon the world. We are her new eyes. Her brain, testes, ovaries...her ambition and her heart. Her voice.
So sing.