History

A Stone Jug

A bulldozer digging a pond
on my mother's family's land
unearths two stoneware jugs
buried four feet in the ground,
one broken and one intact.
Who put them there? When? Why?
We suppose, but can't explain.
Those who have come and gone
are gone. How lost to us
they are whose lives passed here
in the sun's beauty and sorrow!
And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?

-Wendell Berry

The more I discover about The Future (that the world will end in 2012, snakes of zero thickness will continue to eat themselves, there will be no fresh water, holodecks will be the next Lynagh's (or we will go to Lynagh's via holodexing!)), the more I find myself thinking about the past.

What about time travel to the past? No way. I think the first time travelers to the past will be fun-ruiners, spying on everybody with wide eyes and writing things down and taking pictures with their futuristic image-capturers and always suggesting better ways to do things.

So I wrote a poem about the things I've been thinking about for the past few hours here in a coffee shop in Louisville.

Rumors

And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?
(Wendell Berry, "A Stone Jug")

This is what the first man thought
as he pierced the skin of the first roaming animal
and watched her children scatter
as she sank to the earth.

This is what the first woman wondered
as she dropped the seeds of the first fruits
and watched the sprouts bloom
into a tree she wouldn't outlive.

They pondered the assurance of this constant renewal aloud,
quietly, in a language we no longer understand,
a simplicity we have forgotten over time,
as instantly as a twig is stamped, snapped.

This is an assurance growing steadily weaker
as we forget the future, as the land ever changes,
as it is dug and excavated,
developed and exhausted.

This is what we know:
only what has been passed down.
Stories and symbols,
artifacts and imprints.
Still, they are only rumours.

Holodex!

As some of our readers may not be total future nerds yet I feel I should hit upon the most important make-believe future tech ever. I'm talking about the Holy Grail of the Geek; I'm talking about the universal definition of "If only"; I'm talking about the Holodeck.

The name may not ring any bells if you've never seen an episode of Star Trek (The Next Generation) but I'll lay it down for you nice and simple like. The holodeck is a room that can reproduce and project almost any environment you could possibly describe to a computer which you can then interact with exactly as if it were reality. Say you want to safari across the vast veldts of ancient Earth Africa, or maybe you want to solve devious crimes in 19th Century England, Baker street, or perhaps you'd want to play poker with Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Stephen Hawking! All is possible with the holodeck!

Although I think they once tried to explain such a ridiculously amazing concept by saying that they used complex "photon manipulation" to achieve the Holodeck but other more actually living people are trying to reproduce the same effects in reality, even today! Of course we are so far from an actual implementation of even a rudimentary holodeck that it isn't even funny. Actually it's really sad because I'll probably die before it happens. Now that I think about it though I'm going to insert a clause for my Will that requires that my ancestry immediately create a holodeck version of me as soon as the technology is available! Of course since every piece of the internet is currently being cached by Google (whether you like it or not), by that time all that will remain for my progeny to use to reconstruct my personality will be Jacob and the Furries videos and witty Facebook profiles. In the future I will live on as a caricature of myself! But any metaphysics philosopher worth his weight in reconfigured photons will agree that that is better than nothin'.

To sum up, in the future we can all have post-humous sex with David Bowie without fear of necrophilia laws or rejection.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodeck



A really good example from ST:TNG
Einstein cracks me up every time.