June 6th 2021
Frontiers
Look through a telescope to the nearest star and you are a time traveller looking at events of four years past; light takes four years to reach earth from that distance. Our galaxy of billions of stars is two-hundred-thousand light years across. If your telescope is quality enough and you know how, seek out the exquisite nebular in Andromeda—the nearest galaxy to this one—you are looking back in time over two and a half million years: the more distant you look into space the further back you see in time. There is not a galaxy nor a space all existing at 'one time' in what we imagine is 'the present'.
Turning homeward, make a video-call to the other side of the world and, though apparently seamless, there's a lag, you are looking back in time. Far harder to accept, look at someone across a table and what (or who) you see is a 'moment' past, by our perception (attuned for our survival) an infinitesimal span of time, but nevertheless having forever passed. These sense reflections enter the mind-field: one's thoughts and strategies, so fast so close that the lapse passes unnoticed. We introverts are cognizant of a pre-verbal level in thought and the flowing of unnamed emotions deeper and faster yet in an asymptote of accelerating time. Language isn't made to cope with the real world; we imagine the real world as solid and rational in accord with the senses. It is not. The real world is alive, spontaneous, immediate. 'Understanding' it involves seperating from it, thinking, and a journey into a past. The real world is not to be 'understood', it is 'experienced'. That's it, so I'm told.
Earth being so jammed with human bodies, we are looking at Mars to colonize (animal instinct): making it more suitable—terraforming—to continue surviving in our present physical form. But after any length of time on Mars, Mars will have marsformed our bodies; we will no longer be earthlings but martians and so it would be with any planet (btw, forget Jupiter where conditions would instantaneously flatten colonists into plasma). Returning from Mars will take an almighty effort to acclimate back to Earth where we'd struggle just to stand let alone walk. So, this human form, integral part of this planet, would need undergo change wherever we go, maybe beyond all recognition: become alien (sound familiar). And forget those trips extending for generations in colossal starships, the star and its planet we're heading to might even now have ceased to be!..four, fifty, a thousand light years past.
Even should our goal exist, although we may be little physically changed when we reach it, we will nevertheless be newplanetformed. Or, in the event we're brilliant enough engineers to terrorform the planet (and probably its sun) just to maintain our own precious form—why? why bother going to such lengths? trawling our physical bodies and their offspring across vast oceans of space to impose ourselves upon a hapless planet? To do what?
I am predicting that within...one hundred...one hundred and fifty years (if we put off exterminating ourselves first), the very concept of physical expansion will be seen as brutish and pointless. Why? Because—as we are on the fringe of seeing, albeit through the medium of digital science—we can transport 'ourselves' anywhere by more subtle, more immediate means, and because, at some point, we'll have fathomed that there's no need: the complete mastery of time-space is ever-present within. The real world is the next frontier.
