Like this article on Hogmany, always find it a pity they don't sing Auld Lang Syne here in Austria, more moving and fitting than the traditional Blue Danube. Whereas that is a nice, dainy celebratory marking of the new year, there's something about the scottish tradition that captures the birth and death of the years together; replacing a slightly mounrful but steadfast lament with a stately waltz is wine where there should be whisky.
So, raise a cup of kindness yet, for the sake of those auld lang syne, and then raise another to the fine art of getting on with tomorrow!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/29/hogmanay-new-year
to quote:
"I have decided that this is a metaphor for Christmas and the oppressively affectionate layers of traditions and obligations that restrict your movements during the festive season. I love Christmas, but I generally collapse, like a slightly worn bouncy festive castle, when it is over. The past stacks up on top of you, distant years materialise with clarity, chains clanking like Marley's, as each ornament is unwrapped, as each card is opened. My life is made up of nothing but Christmases past, and achievements and maturity disappear under tinselly demands to "do it the way we always do it".
"Thank goodness for Hogmanay. Where Christmas is about family, New Year is about friends; where Christmas locks you into the past, New Year frees you to look forward. It is not a cosy holiday,"
"New Year is a time to get rid of layers. Shrug off the last 12 months, raise a glass to loves lost, then get yourself a refill, count the chimes, and raise another to the fine art of getting on with tomorrow."
Friday, December 30, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
In public, you lose your right to be an idiot
I never could stand Jeremy Clarkson, with his puerile humour and bravado and the smug conservative views that only a man with more cars than cares could have. So I would normally never waste my time or digital ink on him, but the recent controversy over his comments is with commenting on.
Two of his comments have caused "controversy" this week, one that striking public sector workers should be lined up and shot (in front of their families for good measure) and another that people who throw themselves under trains are selfish because of the inconvenience this causes others.
Is it right that he be condemned for these statements, or is it an example of what is claimed to be faux-indignation coupled with infamous "political correctness gone bad"?
There are two different issues here I think. With the first one, to be fair to the unfair, it's the sort of hyperbolic comment plenty of people might make in casual conversation, and while imbecilic in its ignorance of how such language, like racist jokes, has real negative effects, we can't really condemn him for being an idiot,in private that is. But, and this is a very big but, it wasn't in private, nor in a private role coincidentally on tv, but on a public tv channel, by someone paid for and made famous by that same channel, which is funded by the public, which makes it about as un-private as one can get. And saying such things, which will cause offence directly (and not indirectly as in "sachsgate" where people were more offended on behalf of Sachs than he himself was), and to people who pay his wage through their licence fees, is despicable.
While can't complain about him being an idiot in private, acting one in public is unacceptable.
However far more offensive, and corrosive, was his comment on suicides. The best way to characterise It is I think to ask how offensive it would be if he had said disabled people are selfish, with their slow wheelchairs, or cancer sufferers are selfish, with their slower deaths. The point is anyone driven to suicide is also sick, and it is just as disgusting to blame them for their condition as to blame someone with cancer. Of course this is a modern understanding and unfortunately having advanced cars doesn't prevent someone having primitive attitudes. Again, Clarkson has every right to act the idiot in private, but this can't be tolerated on the national stage, and he should lose the job paid for by the national purse.
Now I'll try and forget him again!
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
What the phone didn't do
It seems the Blackberry outage is held to be responsible for a recent 40% drop in traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi, which would suggest four out of ten accidents there are being caused by people reading email at the wheel!
While a nice piece of trivia, it's also an interesting example of how events in one area (email outage) can result in significant changes in crowd behaviour in another, and, assuming some of these accidents might have been fatal, quite literally how these influences can be a matter of life and death.
What comes to my mind is the potential this shows for manipulating individual behaviour, for large scale effects, and the ethical questions that then arise.
Consider for example if a national government enforced a mobile phone data outage on a particularly dangerous stretch of road, or at particularly dangerous times. If this could be shown (as in Abu Dhabi) to save lives, would it be justifiable? Our instinctive personal reaction would probably be indignation at such restrictions, but could anyone honestly claim their email access tops the benefit of one less widow, or one less orphaned child? We already (largely) accept speed limits as a necessary curb on our personal freedom, so what would be the real difference? And of course, we're not legally allowed use a mobile phone when driving anyway, so technically only passengers could complain (any gut rejection we have I think is just another example of how immune we are to the tangible benefits to a society that can come from reducing what are to the individual, intangible risks; small changes in a massive driving population can save some lives, but we very rarely view it that way; but this is a topic for another dicussion!).
And of course, then there's Google. Given the location information it already has available, it surely is possible for Google to also detect if someone is in a speeding car, or, from knowledge of other users in the area, if they are in a group of speeding cars. Indeed, if they are using google maps navigation, then Google probably even knows which cars are going the same place. In principle, the company could delay (at least Gmail) emails being delivered, if even for a few minutes, if it detected the person was in an at risk situation. Not that there is much likelihood of them ever wanting (and hence) trying to do this, since while there might be long term commercial benefit in keeping customers alive, unfortunately no one thanks you for saving their life if they don't know it. But maybe they could use this traffic analysis in other areas - though we might get suspicious if after an accident (and our car is detected to stop suddenly in the middle of an intersection) we get a pop-up ad for the nearest breakdown service/taxi company. But the potential is there, and the likes of Google have a habit of following potential.
The point is, mobile phones represent a somewhat unique phenomenon : a system which majorly influences individual behaviour, but yet can be centrally controlled. There has been a lot of talk about 'nudge' policies, whereby society is gently prodded in a favourable direction; what the Abu Dhabi traffic incident shows is how easy this sometimes can be done directly, and to everybody. Though in this case it's more a question of what the phone didn't do.
While a nice piece of trivia, it's also an interesting example of how events in one area (email outage) can result in significant changes in crowd behaviour in another, and, assuming some of these accidents might have been fatal, quite literally how these influences can be a matter of life and death. What comes to my mind is the potential this shows for manipulating individual behaviour, for large scale effects, and the ethical questions that then arise.
Consider for example if a national government enforced a mobile phone data outage on a particularly dangerous stretch of road, or at particularly dangerous times. If this could be shown (as in Abu Dhabi) to save lives, would it be justifiable? Our instinctive personal reaction would probably be indignation at such restrictions, but could anyone honestly claim their email access tops the benefit of one less widow, or one less orphaned child? We already (largely) accept speed limits as a necessary curb on our personal freedom, so what would be the real difference? And of course, we're not legally allowed use a mobile phone when driving anyway, so technically only passengers could complain (any gut rejection we have I think is just another example of how immune we are to the tangible benefits to a society that can come from reducing what are to the individual, intangible risks; small changes in a massive driving population can save some lives, but we very rarely view it that way; but this is a topic for another dicussion!).
And of course, then there's Google. Given the location information it already has available, it surely is possible for Google to also detect if someone is in a speeding car, or, from knowledge of other users in the area, if they are in a group of speeding cars. Indeed, if they are using google maps navigation, then Google probably even knows which cars are going the same place. In principle, the company could delay (at least Gmail) emails being delivered, if even for a few minutes, if it detected the person was in an at risk situation. Not that there is much likelihood of them ever wanting (and hence) trying to do this, since while there might be long term commercial benefit in keeping customers alive, unfortunately no one thanks you for saving their life if they don't know it. But maybe they could use this traffic analysis in other areas - though we might get suspicious if after an accident (and our car is detected to stop suddenly in the middle of an intersection) we get a pop-up ad for the nearest breakdown service/taxi company. But the potential is there, and the likes of Google have a habit of following potential.
The point is, mobile phones represent a somewhat unique phenomenon : a system which majorly influences individual behaviour, but yet can be centrally controlled. There has been a lot of talk about 'nudge' policies, whereby society is gently prodded in a favourable direction; what the Abu Dhabi traffic incident shows is how easy this sometimes can be done directly, and to everybody. Though in this case it's more a question of what the phone didn't do.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Aristotle, marriage, and the balanced life
After Plato's excessive abstraction and airiness, Aristotle I think provided a wonderfully pragmatic foundation for Western civilization, as beautifully depicted in Raphael's "School Of Athens" which shows Plato gesticulating to the sky, while Aristotle points firmly back down to earth. While we must examine and question life, there is no point in wandering about with our head in the clouds. Life is about real things, real commitments and enterprises, not abstract wondering, and marriage, family, settling down, is somehow part of that reality for the social animal that is man.
What I also intuit from him (but need to confirm this) is the idea that via these things there is one of the roads to happiness, whereby one gains happiness not by striving for it itself, but by seeking it for others. As he says in the Nichnomachean Ethics, the essence of love "seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved". Given our willful and whimsical nature, how we habituate and how desire begets satisfaction, begets desire, then there is something in this. This I think is complemented by the Aristotelian idea of such things a happiness etc. as actitivites rather than states : to be happy is to act in such a way, not to achieve a state, and to experience love, is to love, not to be loved. And that is what a family offers - the opportunity to love by choice, not through duty or default, others, one's wife/husband, and children; to work for their benefit at the (at least partial) cost of one's own. And of course, it's nice the way evolution provides the innate drive to gain satisfaction from that as well, but one that doesn't habituate.
"In being loved, on the other hand, people delight for its own sake; whence it would seem to be better than being honoured, and friendship to be desirable in itself. But it seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved, as is indicated by the delight mothers take in loving; for some mothers hand over their children to be brought up, and so long as they know their fate they love them and do not seek to be loved in return (if they cannot have both), but seem to be satisfied if they see them prospering; and they themselves love their children even if these owing to their ignorance give them nothing of a mother's due. Now since friendship depends more on loving, and it is those who love their friends that are praised, loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends, so that it is only those in whom this is found in due measure that are lasting friends, and only their friendship that endures."
Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Quote of the day : Vanishing lives...
“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.”
― Paul Auster
― Paul Auster
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Digital Serendipity?
Some fascinating articles and books at the moment about the long term effects of the web's move towards personalization. On the one hand it means the web will deliver more of what you want, the problem is, getting what you want isn't the same as getting what you need. The more our sources of information and inspiration mould themselves around what we already are, the less opportunities we have to grow into something new. The phrase of the moment is 'serendipty' - the chance stumbling on something unsought, but well found.
There is indeed I think a lot to the idea that ever more impressive personalization will limit this, and some have gone so far as to say that a digital world, being definite and algorithm based, just can't provide the distractions and abstractions needed to stumble accidentally on something. But while not saying the current structures won't end up being so restrictive, in my vieww they don't need to. Any truly complex system is open to chaos-style behaviour, where small changes in input result in wild variations in output, and the internet, and even the search and match algorithms of the likes of Google and Facebook, could surely display, or be allowed to display, such behaviour.
Indeed, probably serendipity itself results from accidental pattern matching, where we are thinking of one kind of thing and suddenly spot something similar in a completely unrelated field, achieving a flash of insight which is maybe really a flash of recognition, a realisation of how theold can lead to the new; and pattern matching is what Google etc. are good at. Up to now they have probably been trying to emulate perfect 'directed' pattern matching, focused in one area, but surely there is also the potential (if not probability) for cross-field matching. If for example Google Translate is trained to match words across languages, what would happen if it was fed with a different data set, and tried to extract similar patterns in this new domain. Is this not exactly what the serendipitous brain does?
In fact, what is often portrayed as a bad thing, that even the very people who design and operate these systems are losing true insight into how they work, provides hope, since they may become semi-evolved 'intelligences' in their own right (and i only mean this in so far as excellend pattern matching machines), and provide us with unexpected insight - since what they produce will be unexpected.
So, when it comes to digital serendiptiy, as Google itself suggests, i'm feeling lucky.
There is indeed I think a lot to the idea that ever more impressive personalization will limit this, and some have gone so far as to say that a digital world, being definite and algorithm based, just can't provide the distractions and abstractions needed to stumble accidentally on something. But while not saying the current structures won't end up being so restrictive, in my vieww they don't need to. Any truly complex system is open to chaos-style behaviour, where small changes in input result in wild variations in output, and the internet, and even the search and match algorithms of the likes of Google and Facebook, could surely display, or be allowed to display, such behaviour.
Indeed, probably serendipity itself results from accidental pattern matching, where we are thinking of one kind of thing and suddenly spot something similar in a completely unrelated field, achieving a flash of insight which is maybe really a flash of recognition, a realisation of how theold can lead to the new; and pattern matching is what Google etc. are good at. Up to now they have probably been trying to emulate perfect 'directed' pattern matching, focused in one area, but surely there is also the potential (if not probability) for cross-field matching. If for example Google Translate is trained to match words across languages, what would happen if it was fed with a different data set, and tried to extract similar patterns in this new domain. Is this not exactly what the serendipitous brain does?
In fact, what is often portrayed as a bad thing, that even the very people who design and operate these systems are losing true insight into how they work, provides hope, since they may become semi-evolved 'intelligences' in their own right (and i only mean this in so far as excellend pattern matching machines), and provide us with unexpected insight - since what they produce will be unexpected.
So, when it comes to digital serendiptiy, as Google itself suggests, i'm feeling lucky.
better to have believed and lost or not to have believed at all?
One reason for even aetheists not to completely shield their children from Religion, is the idea that like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, it provides some harmless yet comforting fantasies to the young mind, support until it can fully grasp and handle the beautiful yet brutal realities of existance; however, the question then is whether the puncturing of that bubble is overall a worse knock, then not having had the bubble at all.
Without beginning to start the analysis that the topic needs, one piece of psychologic research I read about recently struck me as being perhaps relevent. Ironically putting things into perspective, it had to do with parents in a real nightmare scenario, with a seriously ill child. what was examined was, if, against the odds, the child seemed to be improving, but was still at some (but not too much of a) risk of a relapse, which of two attitudes worked better in terms of the parents' mental well being. First was the quietly optimistic but still very cautious approach of thinking yes, things were better, but wasn't worth getting too excited since weren't out of the proverbial woods yet. The other attitude was basically hallelujah, this was wonderful luck (which of course it was), and best to appreciate and enjoy it for what it was, and not worry about what might yet be. As could be expected, the latter strategy resulted in lower stress levels. As might also be expected if a relapse did occur, then the positive effects immediatey dissappeared, but what is important is the parents mood dropped lower than during the original onset of the illness. Dashed hope really does seem to be worse than no hope at all.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma of the heart - hope for the best, and end up worse, or keep hopes possibly needlessly dampened. Don't fly too low Icarus, let the water weigh down your wings, nor soar too high, lest the sun may burn them. Flying a middle course may sound like the best option, but how can we then reach for the stars?
Without beginning to start the analysis that the topic needs, one piece of psychologic research I read about recently struck me as being perhaps relevent. Ironically putting things into perspective, it had to do with parents in a real nightmare scenario, with a seriously ill child. what was examined was, if, against the odds, the child seemed to be improving, but was still at some (but not too much of a) risk of a relapse, which of two attitudes worked better in terms of the parents' mental well being. First was the quietly optimistic but still very cautious approach of thinking yes, things were better, but wasn't worth getting too excited since weren't out of the proverbial woods yet. The other attitude was basically hallelujah, this was wonderful luck (which of course it was), and best to appreciate and enjoy it for what it was, and not worry about what might yet be. As could be expected, the latter strategy resulted in lower stress levels. As might also be expected if a relapse did occur, then the positive effects immediatey dissappeared, but what is important is the parents mood dropped lower than during the original onset of the illness. Dashed hope really does seem to be worse than no hope at all.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma of the heart - hope for the best, and end up worse, or keep hopes possibly needlessly dampened. Don't fly too low Icarus, let the water weigh down your wings, nor soar too high, lest the sun may burn them. Flying a middle course may sound like the best option, but how can we then reach for the stars?
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
brain simulations
(this is a VERY random thought - more a wondering than a pondering!)
A major goal of technology has always been to emulate human behaviour, especially reasoning, and far from getting closer to a solution, our modern advances seem to simply reveal more and more how hard the problem really is.
One problem is we are looking for a 'design', and this requires first an understanding of what it should really do, and then how it should do that. But this is of course a 'top down' approach, whereas the thing we're trying to copy, the human brain, is the product of a 'bottom up' mechanism - the evolution of our species over millenia.
Ironically our 'higher level' conceptual approaches can't seem to match the mindless simplicity of the natural process. The reason being of course, that we are trying to produce the same 'work', and work is a product of power and time; we have the power, but nature had the time, and for the moment our power pales in comparison.
There are though two ways to achieve something - through planning, and through trial and error. In principle any method could be discovered by just trying out all the possibilities, and (within the limits imposed by 'adjacent possibilities') this is basically what happened during our evolution - over time multitudes of organisms of increasing complexity were thrown into the testing ground of the world, and slowly whittled down until just us were left.
Even for the simplest problems, we don't ever really have time (or inclination) to really apply trial and error, but we have a powerful substitute : computer simulation. It could be that since we don't fully understand what we are really trying to emulate from the off, then maybe a better approach would be to use simulations and then see if anything produced actually matches what we were looking for (our ignorance in understanding the brain then is out of the equation, since we might not know much about intelligence but we know what we like when we see it).
The question then is, is this feasible, and if so what would be involved?
What i'd be interested to know sometime, is if (and that's a big if) we had a model of an earth environment, and could model some basic creatures in it (we could cheat and start of with some primitive lifeforms we DO understand better) - then how many iterations would be needed to match the simulation runs performed by evolution?
There are admittedly many parameters involved - at the very least not just the number of generations (years/lifespan?) but also the number of relevant interactions (reproductions/terminations) per generation.
But surely there is a number which could be worked out,even from what we currently know about the history of the earth and biology?
And if so, then what is the number of computer operations, or the number of years for a computer running at 1GHz (1,000,000,000 operations per second) it would take to run?
And I don't even think it is a problem that nature basically ran one large simulation, but for a very long time : that large simulation (history) consisted of a multitude of smaller simulations in parallel. Of course there needs to be room for cumulative effect, but it is also probably the case that the starting points in nature (the number of relevant creatures) was initially small and it is in the 'cone' of development that the amounts mushroom.
My point is not really that this is a valid approach for modelling human behaviour, but it would be interesting to quantify just what sort of domain space is involved.
And of course, there is still that big IF of how to model the environment, but probably we could again take a leaf out of evolution's book and not model ourselves a complex environment, but allow complexity arise through the interaction of a sufficient number of simple models.
I know in areas like game theory such long running interactive simulations are used, but I must do some research to see what sort of sizes of runs are involved, and how the addition of parameters increases them.
I would just be interested to know what for example would happen if took some of the most powerful computers today and ran a simulation of some simple interacting evolving structure for say a year?
Nature didn't have the guns, but it sure had the numbers. My question is - how many?!
A major goal of technology has always been to emulate human behaviour, especially reasoning, and far from getting closer to a solution, our modern advances seem to simply reveal more and more how hard the problem really is.
One problem is we are looking for a 'design', and this requires first an understanding of what it should really do, and then how it should do that. But this is of course a 'top down' approach, whereas the thing we're trying to copy, the human brain, is the product of a 'bottom up' mechanism - the evolution of our species over millenia.
Ironically our 'higher level' conceptual approaches can't seem to match the mindless simplicity of the natural process. The reason being of course, that we are trying to produce the same 'work', and work is a product of power and time; we have the power, but nature had the time, and for the moment our power pales in comparison.
There are though two ways to achieve something - through planning, and through trial and error. In principle any method could be discovered by just trying out all the possibilities, and (within the limits imposed by 'adjacent possibilities') this is basically what happened during our evolution - over time multitudes of organisms of increasing complexity were thrown into the testing ground of the world, and slowly whittled down until just us were left.
Even for the simplest problems, we don't ever really have time (or inclination) to really apply trial and error, but we have a powerful substitute : computer simulation. It could be that since we don't fully understand what we are really trying to emulate from the off, then maybe a better approach would be to use simulations and then see if anything produced actually matches what we were looking for (our ignorance in understanding the brain then is out of the equation, since we might not know much about intelligence but we know what we like when we see it).
The question then is, is this feasible, and if so what would be involved?
What i'd be interested to know sometime, is if (and that's a big if) we had a model of an earth environment, and could model some basic creatures in it (we could cheat and start of with some primitive lifeforms we DO understand better) - then how many iterations would be needed to match the simulation runs performed by evolution?
There are admittedly many parameters involved - at the very least not just the number of generations (years/lifespan?) but also the number of relevant interactions (reproductions/terminations) per generation.
But surely there is a number which could be worked out,even from what we currently know about the history of the earth and biology?
And if so, then what is the number of computer operations, or the number of years for a computer running at 1GHz (1,000,000,000 operations per second) it would take to run?
And I don't even think it is a problem that nature basically ran one large simulation, but for a very long time : that large simulation (history) consisted of a multitude of smaller simulations in parallel. Of course there needs to be room for cumulative effect, but it is also probably the case that the starting points in nature (the number of relevant creatures) was initially small and it is in the 'cone' of development that the amounts mushroom.
My point is not really that this is a valid approach for modelling human behaviour, but it would be interesting to quantify just what sort of domain space is involved.
And of course, there is still that big IF of how to model the environment, but probably we could again take a leaf out of evolution's book and not model ourselves a complex environment, but allow complexity arise through the interaction of a sufficient number of simple models.
I know in areas like game theory such long running interactive simulations are used, but I must do some research to see what sort of sizes of runs are involved, and how the addition of parameters increases them.
I would just be interested to know what for example would happen if took some of the most powerful computers today and ran a simulation of some simple interacting evolving structure for say a year?
Nature didn't have the guns, but it sure had the numbers. My question is - how many?!
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Voyager, and a badly stuffed bear, live on
It seems voyager is now about to leave our solar system, which is quite significant, even for this long range traveler. The point was made that when our sun eventually explodes, as it must, then even if there was any trace if humankind left on Earth, or any of our neighboring planets, then this would be obliterated at the very latest then, and the only traces of us which would remain would be whatever, like voyager, had managed to escape the solar system .
It's a sobering thought, but there is also some resolve and pride to be taken in the fact that, no matter what happens now, and even if human civilization has already peaked and goes into decline from now on, at least one artefact, one achievement, will live on. And even if it will never be found by anyone or any being which can recover it, it is fitting that the words of Carl Sagan are out there somewhere on that golden disc -from the man who realized we are all from star dust,a message will live on long after we've returned to it.
And this also reminded me of a nice little idea I have, which even if just a fantasy, is somehow comforting and pleasant, even if I can't properly articulate why: the notion that, for everything that happened (outside at least but given things like xrays then maybe not just) there is in theory, at all times, some point which would just then be reached at the speed of light from the event, and where, with a powerful enough telescope, that past event can now be seen unfolding. Think of any fond incident, like playing outside as a child, and in theory, if not in practice, it's "happening" again somewhere right now. Those moments, like voyager, are flying out forever into the universe, and in a small way, will never be lost.
It reminds me too of the end of the last Pooh bear book, “The House at
Pooh Corner”,in which the boy is leaving for school and takes his leave of the companions of his youth :
“But wherever they go , and whatever happens to them on the way ,in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing. ”
This never fails to bring a tear to my eye, since for me it encapsulates the transience of our youth , our lives ,our loves and joys . . . and yet , somehow also the hope that these things live on somehow.
And that we can feel this I think shows that it is not just the astronomical immortality that is involved. Whether Voyager might really physically outlive our sun is not really the point, more that we can have the notion and feeling that it could. Our special moments and achievements endure not just in the outer world but in the inner as well, forever reverberating around our minds, and in the minds of those with whom we share them with. Like voyager, or the image of a boy playing with his bear, they will always in some sense be "happening", sometime, somewhere.
Or, as Bogart might say, we will always have Paris...
Posted from phone via Blogaway (so excuse any typos!)
It's a sobering thought, but there is also some resolve and pride to be taken in the fact that, no matter what happens now, and even if human civilization has already peaked and goes into decline from now on, at least one artefact, one achievement, will live on. And even if it will never be found by anyone or any being which can recover it, it is fitting that the words of Carl Sagan are out there somewhere on that golden disc -from the man who realized we are all from star dust,a message will live on long after we've returned to it.
And this also reminded me of a nice little idea I have, which even if just a fantasy, is somehow comforting and pleasant, even if I can't properly articulate why: the notion that, for everything that happened (outside at least but given things like xrays then maybe not just) there is in theory, at all times, some point which would just then be reached at the speed of light from the event, and where, with a powerful enough telescope, that past event can now be seen unfolding. Think of any fond incident, like playing outside as a child, and in theory, if not in practice, it's "happening" again somewhere right now. Those moments, like voyager, are flying out forever into the universe, and in a small way, will never be lost.
It reminds me too of the end of the last Pooh bear book, “The House at
Pooh Corner”,in which the boy is leaving for school and takes his leave of the companions of his youth :
“But wherever they go , and whatever happens to them on the way ,in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing. ”
This never fails to bring a tear to my eye, since for me it encapsulates the transience of our youth , our lives ,our loves and joys . . . and yet , somehow also the hope that these things live on somehow.
And that we can feel this I think shows that it is not just the astronomical immortality that is involved. Whether Voyager might really physically outlive our sun is not really the point, more that we can have the notion and feeling that it could. Our special moments and achievements endure not just in the outer world but in the inner as well, forever reverberating around our minds, and in the minds of those with whom we share them with. Like voyager, or the image of a boy playing with his bear, they will always in some sense be "happening", sometime, somewhere.
Or, as Bogart might say, we will always have Paris...
Posted from phone via Blogaway (so excuse any typos!)
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