Complex Numbers

Sitting in my Tin Can

Well, I guess yesterday's April Fool's entry was too over-the-top to be believed, even for a moment. Still, I wanted to do something funny.

The truly great April Fool's joke was perpetrated by Google (a couple years ago, so this is kinda old, but it's not like I have anything else to talk about):

http://www.google.com/virgle/

Seriously, that's an awesome one: For thousands of years, the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world's every last nook, cranny and subdivision...

Sure, it's a hoax, but I figure if it gets people talking and thinking about space exploration again, it's a useful one.

In a story I wrote (and am currently working on editing), which is set about 75 years in the future, I envision an Earth overrun by right-wing extremists; the West by Christians, the Middle East by Muslims, and most everywhere else, some sort of authoritarian society. In this future, we haven't gone much past the moon, and certainly not to Mars.

I know there are people who think space travel's a waste of resources, or that we'd just fuck up other planets the way we're doing this one. I'm not one of those people. Having been raised on a steady diet of science fiction (and science), I know that when we can do something, we will. I don't expect any of the futures predicted by any science fiction writer to come true (and that includes mine); a writer's job is to entertain, and a science fiction writer's job is to envision, not what will be or should be, but what could be.

I also know that human nature will find a way to screw up even the most optimistic of futures. But we gotta try. That's also part of human nature.

"Virgle" is a hoax, but the people involved really are working toward a future of commercially-viable space flight (even if they're not ready to send pioneers to Mars). I say go for it.

And I want my flying car, goddammit!