REACH ISO14000 RoHS WEEE J-MOSS EWRA

Welcome to Acronym City, Knowledge Edition D - WACKED, for short.

Unless you know what the business community communicates via cryptic initial caps, you may miss the benefits you receive unknowingly.  For instance, is there any validity to the Erdős–Bacon number?  Is China RoHS better than EU RoHS?  When can you throw away batteries and when do you pay a fine for disposing of harmful chemicals?  Does IBM or HP have a better environmental standard?

I live inside and outside this moment.  I see the future as clearly as if I've lived in moments that haven't existed.  Time is like an XYZ/three-dimensional component of time, is it not?  We step forward, we mountaineers, and hike up onto steppes and plateaus, looking back in time to now in order to understand, to gain a perspective that takes away the wowness of the moment and tells us if our current discovery was significant or simply amazing.

I have ignored the Book of the Future lately because I've enjoyed surfing the bumps, curves and refreshing ocean spray of the moment.  But every surfer knows you can't ride the waves forever.  Eventually, the surf or the shore comes crashing up toward you at breakneck speed.  As a middle-aged man, I take longer to recover from crashes than when I was younger.  Muscle memory and joint pain make me lazy, all too glad to pause a little while at the keyboard before I wrap a strap around my ankle and paddle out for another look at life from atop a mini-tsunami.

Back to the Book of the Future.

Do you know what defines you?  Is it your genetic code?  Is it the constant birth and death of the cells in your body?  Is it the total environment, including other living beings in and around you?  Do you have any idea of the organisms with which you carry on a quasi-symbiotic relationship?  Do you know the organisms that are needed to exist to produce and share the organisms that live in and on you?

Do you know what you don't need to still be able to define you?  Is it your skin?  Your other sensory organs?  Your skeletal structure?  Your gastrointestinal system?  Your central nervous system?  Your cultural history?

If, instead of sensing heat, cold and nervous system "pain," you could sense cosmic radiation levels and ion drive propulsion efficiency, would you?

If, instead of planetary-based gravity as the focus for your movement, you had no "center" on which to comfortably lay down at night, would you continue to explore your "world" (which is now the complete universe, using gravitational fields like roller coaster rides)?

Could you see yourself completely retrained and rewired to concentrate on decades-long goals that meant your sense of time would stretch the definition of a "moment" to months or years, your thoughts no longer subconsciously tied to heartbeats and lung expansion/contraction?  Communication with others of your kind, instead of getting closer and closer via Internet time, would take place occasionally, with every one of you having to store "conversations" for weeks or months until you found another "person" with whom you could exchange new information?

Would you carry with you a set of raw material that you would use decades or thousands of years from now to construct new images of yourself that could reproduce themselves using material native to a newly-explored region of space?

If you can imagine yourself as such a "person," then can you put aside those regular, three-dimensional, mechanistic futures and see yourself in a whole new way that hasn't been imagined yet?  Can you see a self-aware version of yourself traveling through another dimension, squeezing between the surface tensions of two bubbles into a place where you're all alone as the first "person" to enter unexplored "territory" who may or may not be able to return to the world you thought you knew?

The Book of the Future tells many wonderful stories such as these.  Some of you have already written your names in these futures.  Some of your offspring and inventions have, too.

I wish I could be there with you but my fate I've already seen and so I know won't be traveling with most of you there.  I have something like 14,660 days left to enjoy this world as the comfortable writer I've become.  So, while many of you train yourselves to live centuries long with carefully-controlled diets and wise exercise programs, I will enjoy my fatty foods and beer tankards as a descendant of pioneer Ulster Scots on this day I choose to call St. Patrick's Day, when I spend more time celebrating wearing green (although I should more appropriately wear orange), dancing to Irish jigs and drinking alcohol than I do to any religious purpose for this day.

I might see some of you on a spaceship cruising around the Moon but that's probably as far as I'll get.  I envy those who have longer journeys and greater goals than my simple goal to get some of us living permanently off this globe.

I raise a toast: Here's to you until we meet again!