Street Urchin

Listening to the Spanish guitar tag radio on last.fm ... setting the mood... wrote the last few blog entries to put space between me and others so I can focus on my storyline.

When you've seen more than you planned to see, when you wandered your neighbourhood streets more than you wondered about them, you put together, you assemble, you draw, you conclude, you deduct, you infer.

I entertain because of who I've been. I think because of who I am. I multitask because I like to exercise my nervous system pathways.

I use self-referential pronouns because I only know how to be me.

If you knew the future, what would you do now? If you knew that your species will survive in one form or another for thousands of years but a reconfigured version of your species will take off and explore the rest of the universe without your version, what would you do tomorrow? What did you do yesterday knowing that you'd be here today?

If you knew that you didn't exist, what would you do about the concept of you? Would these words matter? Would you continue being you as you know you?

I am not these words, I tell myself, but I am these words as well as the radio waves going out from this laptop computer and the wind and rain blowing outside the window.

I don't see this planet as a living organism (e.g., gaia) but I do see the planet as part of a system of living systems. I see us looking for us as individual organisms on planetary systems in other parts of the galaxy. We talk about alien technology as if we've been visited by extraterrestrial intelligence and we talk about possibly being as highly intelligent as life has ever gotten in our galaxy (or maybe even in the universe), in both cases distinguishing individual accomplishments within social systems as a form of what we call intelligence.

But none of us is alone in achieving intelligent accomplishments. It is the system of living systems that changes itself within points/nodes of itself that we think of as signs of intelligence in individual species and individual members of species.

We are part of the environment around us, not separate from the planetary system on which we developed.

[Today, I can't get past being me to see where we will be when we aren't we. I can't imagine what it's like to compress a version of me into a set of serial/parallel cosmic ray communication channels or cloud set of neutrinos and decompress the new self-replicating, local-environment adapting version of me somewhere else.]

How do I take the future and backtrack to the present? How do I apply practical decisionmaking to get us to where I already know we'll be, especially when I know I'm going to do what I'm going to do, no matter how much I fret over what it is I think I should do next to get me away from seeing me as me?

The future is not guaranteed. Or, as we know, no one future is guaranteed. All futures are guaranteed to possibly occur until they don't occur.

I believe that life happens because life happens. People do what they do. We spend as much time in an accidental future as we do in a purposeful one. Many possible futures include us merging our individual lives into a generally-agreed planetary-focused future. Many possible futures include us battling over the changing dynamics of our planet's resources to ensure the distinct definition of individuals over the general survival of the species.

I sit here and know which futures I want to happen, which ones are going to get us moving outward in the universe. I also know that a lot of what I know will change by going in the direction of those futures. However, a lot of what I know will change in every future I plot out. Therefore, I toss out my concerns about change. My focus is on which changes benefit not me but my planet and my species as I currently know it. Science, not science fiction.

We are cogs in the wheels of the factory called Earth in the system of living systems we call our solar system in one spiral of the Milky Way galaxy. We are the current snapshot of constant change.

How are we going to change in the future? We are going to create a version of ourselves that can replicate itself iteratively and figuratively in order to adapt to the rigours of space travel. We've already partially done that in mechanical form, our umbilical cords of radio wave communications extending high-tech fingers into the solar system to maintain contact with those early prototypes. Next we, as extensions of Earth, grow arms and legs. Instead of dropping sweat or hair off our bodies when we now send probes from the planet, we'll figure out how to stretch out our limbs like amoebae and split, our duplicate bodies a similar version of ourselves but better adapted to local environments with each new regeneration.

With time, we won't recognize our new selves anymore. We may or may not be able to communicate with one another.

Like I keep saying, you don't have to believe me. I hardly believe myself and wouldn't, if it weren't for this Book of the Future I keep adding to its pages using newspaper headlines from the past that keep forecasting the future.

For instance, when we figure out how to send out high-power beams far enough into space that one of our signals hits an "alien" organism on another planet, causing the organism to mutate, we have extended ourselves. It happens here in our bodies from the Sun everyday. It happens when we reprogram computing systems on Mars. One day, we'll have our day to mutate extraplanetary bodies, too, creating new nodes/points in the web of life. Just you wait and see...