Month: March 2026

23MAY2019 – Quote of the Day

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When the time of danger comes, all Americans, whatever their social standing, whatever their creed, whatever the training they have received, no matter from what section of the country they have come, stand together as men, as Americans, and are content to face the same fate and do the same duties because fundamentally they all alike have the common purpose to serve the glorious flag of their common country.

Theodore Roosevelt

The American Path

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I was thinking about some of the comments on yesterday’s post “Persistence of Memory.”  It was about detachment, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”

And I replied, “You are correct about the path. We’ve atomized our existence. We’ve monetized our lives to such an extent that we almost don’t exist except as consumers. We’re just cogs in the machine. It’s inhuman.”  And that stuck in my mind.

And today I got a call from a friend whom I knew from high school.  He lives in Hawaii and only comes home to Brooklyn once a year at Christmas.  And we talked about meeting up next Christmas.  Now I haven’t seen him in thirty years.  I wonder if he would even recognize me.  And we’ve managed to speak on the phone every Christmas but we haven’t interacted other than that.  Well, I sent him a copy of my book and he called me up today and it was like a time machine.  He was laughing and saying how he always thought one day I’d write a science fiction story.  He was very complimentary and said he really liked the story and of course that was very gratifying.  But in the back of my mind, I was thinking what a strange world we live in.  Here was one of my best friends in the world and I hadn’t seen him for almost half a lifetime.

And so that conversation reinforced the statement, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”  Our way of life is somewhat related to the nomadic existence of herders.  They move to follow the grazing grounds of their herds.  There is no one home.  But our way is even worse.  Because the herders live in tribes or at least extended families that move together from place to place.  But we separate into at most nuclear families and often just single individuals, moving from job to job and city to city without anyone permanently included in their “tribe.”

I’m pretty sure that none of this is sustainable.  And maybe that’s why corporate America is backing a policy of wholesale immigration to provide a steady supply of new workers that Americans are no longer providing from their own descendants.  After all, how do you produce a family when all you are is a nomad living from job to job without a family to prop you up and give you help when things get tough or you need the resources to get married or buy a house or pay for expenses associated with children?

And this gave me an idea for my next book after “The Sniper.”  It should have to do with the smartest and richest guy in the world trying to fix “the American path.”  If someone powerful enough wanted to restore our country to viability, what would he think to do?  Maybe he’d redefine the partnership between communities and corporations.  Would it be a feudal system or a socialism?  Or neither.  I haven’t figured out what my “utopia” will be based on.  Maybe I’ll wave “artificial intelligence” around as my deus ex machina.  But I do want to think about it a little.  How do you go about fixing the world?

Persistence of Memory

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I was at my mechanic’s shop to have the rear brakes replaced on my “new” car.  Well, long story short, getting replacement parts from Toyota was going to take longer than expected so I couldn’t wait around.  I called Camera Girl for a lift home.  While I was waiting for her, I started reading some of the stuff he had on the walls of the shop.  There were photos of the cars the shop was selling and the first one was from 1930.  That’s ninety-six years ago.  And the place has had the same last name all this time.  Now Steve looks to be about my age.  That means his grandfather was probably about thirty years old in 1930 (in that ballpark).  Looking at those photos and illustrations from the 1930s was interesting.  His grandfather and probably his father and maybe his uncles have been working at this business for generations.  That would explain why he seems unflappable with respect to mechanical problems.  You probably see almost everything when you’ve been working around cars your whole life.

And here was this company in a tiny town in southern New England lasting for generations and serving a community that know each other from birth to death and beyond.  And that got me thinking of where I came from.  The Brooklyn neighborhood where I was born was just as solid to my eyes when I was young.  The people had been there for generations.  They had their traditions and institutions and a sense of community.  There was a feeling of permanence.  But that was an illusion.  All it took to annihilate that illusion was crime and poverty.  And over the course of time that entire neighborhood disappeared without a trace.  I’ve been back there, mostly for funerals.  And that’s the funny thing.  The Catholic church is still there although it has all the masses in Spanish now.  So, the old people come back for their funerals and then they’re driven out to be buried in Long Island.  And then their children and grandchildren disperse back to the four corners of the Earth.

So that’s the difference.  New England still has towns and those towns still have families that live here for generations.  Maybe not everyone stays put.  But enough so that you can feel like you come from a place that isn’t just going to blow away when the wind shifts.  And I think that’s actually something worth having.  We’ve been programmed to believe that we can drift across the continent finding work where it happens to be and move our kids and expect that everything will be like it was when we were kids.  But I don’t think it works that way.  You don’t have traditions without permanence and you don’t have a neighborhood when you don’t even know who your neighbors are.  And if you only see your family at weddings and (worse) at funerals, then how quickly will family become strangers?  Well just something I thought about while waiting for a ride.

The Earth’s Planned Maintenance Schedule – Part 2

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Let us speculate that humanity survives its intellectual infancy.  Let’s imagine that it’s now 10,000 A.D. (that’s right, the Year of the Lord) and our smartest Earth scientists have calculated that by 100,000 A.D. the Earth’s magnetic field is going to shut down for good.  I have no reason to believe this is an accurate number.  By all accounts we should have many millions of years on the warranty for the magnetic field but just let’s say for the sake of discussion it will.

Well, there we are ultra-modern humans with a world government, a genetically engineered genome that includes a third set of teeth and a three-hundred-year lifespan.  We hear that our distant descendants are going to lose their atmosphere, oceans and have to wear SPF 50,000 rated sunscreen for days at the {dry) beach.  So, what will they do?  Well, with a ninety-thousand-year window of opportunity, if they’re my descendants they’ll probably waste the first twenty thousand years dithering.  After that they’ll start engineering the crap out of their options.  But what will that be?  Let me try to guess.

So, the Earth’s liquid iron core produces a magnetic field because it is a moving electric field.  So, all we have to do is produce a moving electric field between Earth’s atmosphere and the sun (and to a lesser extent all of the universe around us.  Well then shouldn’t we install solar panels in orbit around the Earth and run a current through a really long piece of copper wire that is moving and thereby set up an electromagnet?  Now someone with any kind of electrical engineering knowledge or a physicist who specializes in E-M would slap me across the face and say, “What the hell are you rambling about?”  And he would be right.  But just for the sake of getting through this exercise let’s say that it is theoretically possible to have a framework around the Earth that converts solar energy into enough of a moving electric field to induce a magnetic field as strong as the current field we enjoy today.

Postulating that, is it technically feasible?  Or would the amount of mass needed to create this device be completely ridiculous from the point of view of the energy needed to boost it into space ?  Would the weight of the conductive material and the photoelectric cells be just so enormous that it would be beyond all of the resources of even a distant future civilization to put in orbit from Earth?

Now this is a cheat.  I don’t know the answer.  I haven’t tried to estimate the amount of material needed to produce such an enormous electrical field.  Something with a diameter of more than 24,000 miles and with the structural integrity that that requires seems absurd.  I, of course am aware of the science fiction convention of a ring or (Dyson) sphere around a star used to harness some significant portion of the energy output of the fusion reaction going on inside every star but I don’t know that anyone with enough of a technical background has tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see if the numbers are just too scary to make any sense.

So, I’ll throw this one out to the readership.  What have you heard?