Man Reaches The Stars

Spitzer Space Telescope View of the Galactic Center

I stood last night and watched humankind reach the stars and beyond. I watched what we dreamed in Star Trek become the real; breathtaking and ditto on the speechless state of wonderment. In case you're wondering, it wasn't us - meaning it wasn't the USA that did it. It was actually a bunch of nerds, geeks, and heroes that we wouldn't have imagined. They were a bit of all of us, but it did not occur as quickly as we used to believe it would.

It took a while to reach the stars. Our first effort in space travel was like us choking down candy at Halloween, trying to beat that piggy USSR kid at eating our sugar stashes, and we got sick and vomited, and our parents scolded us and told us to keep our eyes on the prize here on earth of running financial scams... So we grew up and forgot about the stars, other than as a potential arena for wars on terrorism or wars on something-not-yet-defined... I had indications that the periodic downturns of the US economic system - and the rest of the world - finally became so severe that they lead to weakening which led to anaphylatic shock.

Periodic crisis are not the sign of health; "creative destruction" may eventuate in a system of destruction only. Economic crises are more easily gotten over in a diverse and "rain forest" type economy. Once wealth becomes too highly concentrated, once dinosaurs like "too big to fail" appear on the scene, once the jobs which create real value become an endangered species and the period of the Great Extinction of jobs occurs, the system's diversity has been severely compromised.

A severe shock, like the recently self-inflicted one, may cause a Crash of meteoric impact proportions:, an Extinction Level Event. I guess it did. Life is so wide and broad... From the Prisons of Globalization and Wealth Concentration, we wandered out free, blinking in the sunlight. It was just a few years after The Crash that a united humanity made it to the stars.