Complex Numbers

Draggin'

With May's 30DBC behind me and June yet to begin, I thought about doing my usual riff on a link, but I just can't be arsed today.

Nine years ago, I witnessed the final Space Shuttle launch. Well... sort of. I was in Florida anyway, and I hung out on a pier and looked north toward Cape Canaveral. I didn't really expect much, because it was kind of cloudy, but through a gap in the cloud cover, I saw the very distinct smoke trail left by the booster engines.

Since then, we, by which I mean the US, you know, the country that first landed dudes on the moon because we were in a propaganda war with the USSR, have been paying Russia to launch our astronauts into orbit, because we as a country couldn't work up the will to do it ourselves.

And no, don't give me that shit about space exploration / development / colonization / science / whatever being a waste of money, or that we should instead be concentrating our efforts on fixing racism or stopping gun violence or ending hunger or reversing climate change or developing a COVID-19 vaccine or whatever your little pet cause is, before daring to venture off the planet. That's fucking bullshit. It's like saying "why are you cleaning the kitchen when you could be at work earning money?" And there will always be another problem that needs fixing; that won't end until we do.

Okay, yes, all of those things and more are important, too. But there are over seven billion of us on the planet. We (and this time I mean all of humanity) can do more than one thing at a time. And as for the money thing, some people act like we're taking wads of cash and burning them, when the reality is that spending money on this sort of thing boosts the economy. We kind of need that right now.

Anyway, that's why I watched the launch yesterday, because MY little pet cause is that we should be getting our asses into space, and I'm glad that we (and now I'm back in my own country) seem to be getting back on track with that and I wanted some closure after nine years of overpaying a government that doesn't seem to have our best interests in mind to do what we should have been doing all along.

So yeah, civilization is collapsing all around us, but at least we have that.