Some Ideas
I feel like I have a lot of ideas, but I always forget them. I'm writing some down today, most recent first. I just got out of class so some are a little science-y.
In Astronomy class today, the professor was talking about forces, and about the 'messenger particles' responsible for communicating forces--gravitrons and the like. These apparently are very strange; they aren't subject to the uncertainty principle, and they are very short lived (so they don't disobey conservation of energy). What he said that stuck with me, though, was that they were very similar to light in that they travel at c and can be thought of as a wave. And I was sitting there in class, ignoring all this hard math he was doing, thinking, if messenger particles have a wave nature like other small things, like light or electrons, then constructive or destructive interference should be possible. So would it be possible to, like, diffract a force through something analogous to parallel slits? Would it be possible to focus a force through some process?
If you could focus the force of gravity (though gravity is a bad example because it is the least well understood), or bend other forces through diffraction, well, that would be sort of like magic, and I bet it would come in handy for lots of things.
This college's slogan is 'Big Green'. For the stoner segment of campus, (members of which, remember, may look sloppy but all have enough money to buy pot), I would market 'big green' sweatshirts just like the college ones, except mine would have a big pot leaf emblem, and people would think they were so slick and rebellious for wearing them, and I would make lots of money.
You know outsourcing? Basically, how there are plenty of people smarter and more motivated than you on the Indian subcontinent, all of whom speak English and can do your mid-level information-technology job just as well as you can? All sorts of Americans are complaining over lost jobs when US companies outsource overseas. Bu you could turn this on its head and use outsourcing to your own benefit. If you could secure an IT job and work there until they trusted you enough that you could telecommute, you could talk to your smart friend in India (you would have gone to India and made a smart friend), and he would be elated to do your job for you, via telecommuting, for half your salary. Then you could have him do your job at IT firm #1, and you could go get a job at IT firm #2, work until they trusted you enough to let you telecommute, and then give all your work from that job to smart Indian friend #2, for half of that salary, and so forth. You could repeat this cycle until you nominally held 8 or 10 mid level IT jobs, collected for keeps 4 or 5 such salaries, and never had to do any work. Your Indian friends would be elated to have your job for a full half of its actual salary, because when companies outsource they pay locals much less than that, and half of a western salary would go a long way in India (or wherever). The whole system might require a little oversight, and you'd probably want to move overseas just in case you overlooked something, but it would be quite an effective racket I think.
If you wanted to make the same idea legal, you could secure a telecommuting job and then simply move to India or Thailand or something, where the cost of living is very very low in American dollars (at least for now), and you could work from there, still collecting your full western salary, and live like a king.
Taking that idea to the undergraduate level, I'm sure there are plenty of smart Indian college students who would do your physics problem set for about 10 bucks. Or even a term paper. If you really were so jaded with the educational system, I'm sure you could get an ivy league degree with rather minimal work if you outsourced your homework as you saw fit.
Back to physics/astronomy, earlier in the course we looked at the famous parallel slits and thought about diffracting light, and it was noted that c was a property of light's particle-like nature. And I remembered that once Shane's friend Joey, who majored in physics, had told me that light's wave aspect was not subject to this law in the same manner. When you change the shape of the slits (and thus the diffraction pattern), does the pattern change instantly, rather than d/c seconds later? If it changed instantly, like I think it might, then the implication is instantaneous transmission of information. If you could use fiber optics or something, and change the on/off of computer language into different diffraction angles, and make a ccd on the other end read the different angles, then I bet you could make really really high speed internet. Also, if you had already found aliens in another galaxy and knew where they were and had a beam of light going at them then you could talk to them in real time.
I suppose that instantaneous transmission of information is probably impossible but speaking of applications for fiber optic cables we should make a new system of numbers--base seven, a system based not on symbols but on the colors ROYGBIV. Then the internet could become faster because instead of flashing a light on and off to represent ones and zeroes we could shoot numbers across the infospace really quickly by a continuous variation of the frequency of the light.
Also, you know how most people don't really want to smoke, they just want that cool smoking image? I bet you could make a few bucks by selling rolling papers that were full of dry ice, so it would look like you were smoking.
Also, you know how everybody likes sea creatures as pets, but it's sort of a bummer that they have to stay in those big tanks all the time and they're sort of trapped? (at least I find that depressing...). Well, what if you filled a hamster ball with water. Then you could put your pet lobster in it and he could scuttle all around your house with you. Or, you could take the idea a step further, and build a sort-of water-filled space suit for any sea creature, and put it on wheels or something, and then you could have any kind of sea creature be a more viable household pet. At Dartmouth you are only allowed to have a 10 gallon tank in your dorm room, so my idea of having a pet shark is not really feasible. But if you found a shark whose volume was approximately 9 gallons, and built him a custom air-suit that would surround him with about a gallon of water, and you put him on wheels, then you could keep your pet 10 gallon shark in your dorm room AND take him on walks around campus.
More on the hamster wheel concept: you could have a bike with huge tires and fill those tires with tons of hamsters and probably move forward bit by bit.
Or, you could take that same bike with huge huge air filled tires, minus all the heavy hampsters, and put paddle-like treads on the huge air filled tires, and with a little outrider canoes or something I bet you would have made a bike that could drive right over the water. It would be a cross between an innertube or zodiac boat and a paddle wheel boat, except the hull and the propulsion would be the same. And you would need to pedal.
And if you got bored with your water-bike, this isn't that innovative, but I think it would be really rad to buy one of those lightweight recumbent bicycles, replace the wheels and chain with a drivetrain to an airplane propeller, and hang the whole thing under approximately 4500 liters of helium (or 2000L of Hydrogen gas, scary) in a lightweight skin or balloon. Then you would have a flying bicycle. My only reservation is that you would either need a second propeller to control altitude, or else just drag something heavy along the ground so you wouldn't fly away into the clouds. I think a dog or big monkey would be a good choice because it could follow along with you.
Also, you know the permanent fund dividend that Alaska residents get? They're paid yearly by oil companies, nominally as compensation for the disruption their land use may cause. Really, though, most view the dividend as a sort of bribe so Alaskans look the other way on the environmental justice and so forth.
Well, the payment ranges from 2-3000 dollars per Alaskan per year, and anyone who's been an Alaska resident for at least a year is eligible. My idea is to buy a plot of land on the North Slope or somewhere really cheap, and build a big big dormitory, and I would start an orphanage. A really huge really cheap orphanage. I would feed them oats, or rice, whichever was cheaper. I would import orphans from all over the US and Asia. And I bet, once I had enough orphans, I could house and feed them for less than $2000 a year. But of course they would be AK residents, and would all collect permanent fund dividends. And I could harvest these dividends, and make potentially in the neighborhood of $1000/orphan. If I had even as few as 200 orphans, this would be a really good racket.
Overpopulation is a big problem--the root of most of our problems, some would say. Of course, lots of cynics consider the hydrogen bomb, basely applied, to be the solution. But I see a way that it could solve the problem in a different way. I read about an international research vessel, conceived as a platform for a giant flexible drill that could conceivably drill through the thinnest part of the oceanic crust near a passive margin, and at a surprisingly un-deep depth, break into the region of molten mantle. To ease the population problem, all the worlds hydrogen bombs should be dropped into such a broehole, and then detonated simultaneously, such that a 'manmade volcano' would be created, and a gigantic island formed in the pacific. Volcanism would not be a problem on this island, with the artifice of conception removed. Then we could send thousands of bangladeshis (whose homeland has been flooded) there, and they would farm and live happily. (I do not take into account the exacerbation of land-loss due to sea level rise that the creation of my island would entail).
If you could lock a satellite in very high earth orbit so its period was one year, and you could keep it on the daytime side of earth at all times, which I think would be possible, couldn't you put a huge magnifying glass (or more likely, a large bent mirror) on it to focus light down to a solar collecting station on earth and make solar power generation a lot more efficient that way?
Modern shopping malls with fashion botiques for women should have little reserves in which men can hunt for food.
After we used magnesium as an oxidizing agent in Chemistry lab, I noticed that MgO, which you get when you burn Mg(s) in air, had a really bright white color. So I took some home to my dorm, and we played with it and made little men with the wire, which could sort of explode but they're really cute.....anyways, MgO is white, so when you scotch tape a ribbon of magnesium to the bricks that fall off the facade on the dorm across from mine, and burn it, you get a really well defined white line surounded by really black scorch marks, and if you tape the Mg on right you can write messages, which are really hard to get off, so if you wanted to have a lot of fun making really hard-to-remove graffiti, that would be the way.
Oh, back to physics, I'm sort of just brainstorming, but Fusion:
Cold fusion doesn't happen since the coulomb potential that must be overcome by two protons (H+) before the strong nuclear force takes over and joins them would require each particle to have a kinetic energy of something like a million electron-volts to overcome. (For comparison, it's easy to figure out that, even at a temperature of 10 million degrees K, the avg KE of the particles in a gas is only about a thousand electron-volts). So nuclear fusion doesn't happen at low temperatures. Where it does happen is in the sun, and in hydrogen bombs. In hydrogen bombs (I don't know exactly how they work), but I'm pretty sure fusion is initiated by a conventional nuclear bomb via nuclear fission. This process is out of control and very destructive so it isn't used for energy generation.
But I bet we could use fusion power with the technology we have now, if we did it in outer space. Fusion bombs could be used for propulsion in outer space, like the Orion Project. Or else fusion bombs could be set off in outer space where they wouldn't hurt anything, and tough satellites could do their best to collect the energy from the explosion.
Or else, you know how the moon is so close, that it causes tides and stuff and screws with us here, and during the monsoon those tides kill millions of nice kids in places like Bangladesh? Well if we wanted to launch a probe or spaceship really fast into interstellar space, we could do so from the surface of the moon using a fusion bomb as propulsion, and the probe would get shot off really quite fast, and the added benefit is, if we did this enough, and always on the backward side of the moon, we could speed the moon in its orbit, causing it to get farther away, and reducing the effects of tides here on earth.
Alternately, if we wanted to preserve tidal ecosystems, or if tidal power proves to be a viable means of generating sustainable electricity, explosions on the forward-orbit side of the moon could slow it and cause it to fall into a lower orbit, accentuating tides here on earth, and providing a lot of electricity for us, and ravaging smelly coastal cities like Seattle, Washington.
(this may also have the effect of breaking the moon's tidal lock, so it would rotate and we would all get really spectacular looks at the other side).
Sort of related: if we wanted to make the second best power plant in the solar system, we could build a huge tunnel into the earth's mantle, where temperature and pressure are naturally high enough that we could, with a little push, initiate a controlled fusion process. Actually I'm thinking that's a long shot because it's not nearly hot enough. But if we did make a huge tunnel, we could detonate H bombs in it, and harvest all the energy coming out, and that could actually be refined into a fairly efficient process I think. Also, it may result in really cool volcanism if it were done in the right area.
Do you know, with the new particle accelerator about to come online (at CERN in Switzerland), many believe that there's a finite chance that the world will be destroyed? This belief was also held by some scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. I just love how people push on with these things
Here is a form I thought of and composed with some help; may be useful in a variety of situations:
__/__/20__
Dear, _________________
I, _________________, wish to offer you my heartfelt apologies for the
❏ Tragic
❏ Embarrassing
❏ Regrettable
incident involving _________________________________ . It was due to (check all that apply):
❏ Family emergency
❏ Illness
❏ Unforeseen time conflict
❏ Extenuating circumstances
❏____________ phenomena
❏ Aggressive wildlife
❏ Rockfall
❏ Current economic climate
❏ Catastrophic flooding
❏ Pirates
❏ Global warming
❏ The tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001
❏ My GI tract
❏ Car trouble
❏ Other _______________________________________________________________________ (please explain)
and wholly beyond my control. It will
❏ Never happen again
❏ Be rectified shortly
Sincerely,
_______________________
Last thing, promise: You know when you're thinking at night in bed, and you just can't get to sleep because your thoughts are going round, and you feel like you just have to put it onto paper to get it out? You stumble up over to you desk, grab a pen and without turning the light on or anything you scratch out on some scrap whatever it was you were thinking about, and then fall exhaustedly in the bed and asleep. You never look at the paper again; if you do it's most likely unintelligible......well, i found one scrap of paper on my desk the other morning, a note from my subconscious self, really, and I read what it said and it sort of fits in this line:
"Life as higher level of organization in physical world--more interesting less efficient way of dealing with excess energy"
"Our allegiance should be to life, not just mankind"
"Send hardy microbes to stars"
A few days befrore my astronomy teacher gave us his professional guarantee (he's some sort of big honcho) that before our lives are over there will be a system of optical telescopes that will be able to take spectra of atmospheres on extrasolar planets, and determine if these planets are suitable for life.
I think what I was getting at was this: I've read enough of this bunk that I think people probably won't ever make it to other stars...they're just awfully far away......but I was thinking, if biotechnology gets as scary as everybody promises it might get, then we could manufacture tough little bugs that carried in their DNA coded instructions to 'evolve' into us or something similar to us. Or they could just be tough bugs that would ensure that life on the universe doesn't end when some catastrophe breaks out on earth, and we could shoot them far into outer space.....anyways, I was just thinking, that would be the way to colonize these other earthlike planets that my teacher seems so convinced we'll find.
In Astronomy class today, the professor was talking about forces, and about the 'messenger particles' responsible for communicating forces--gravitrons and the like. These apparently are very strange; they aren't subject to the uncertainty principle, and they are very short lived (so they don't disobey conservation of energy). What he said that stuck with me, though, was that they were very similar to light in that they travel at c and can be thought of as a wave. And I was sitting there in class, ignoring all this hard math he was doing, thinking, if messenger particles have a wave nature like other small things, like light or electrons, then constructive or destructive interference should be possible. So would it be possible to, like, diffract a force through something analogous to parallel slits? Would it be possible to focus a force through some process?
If you could focus the force of gravity (though gravity is a bad example because it is the least well understood), or bend other forces through diffraction, well, that would be sort of like magic, and I bet it would come in handy for lots of things.
This college's slogan is 'Big Green'. For the stoner segment of campus, (members of which, remember, may look sloppy but all have enough money to buy pot), I would market 'big green' sweatshirts just like the college ones, except mine would have a big pot leaf emblem, and people would think they were so slick and rebellious for wearing them, and I would make lots of money.
You know outsourcing? Basically, how there are plenty of people smarter and more motivated than you on the Indian subcontinent, all of whom speak English and can do your mid-level information-technology job just as well as you can? All sorts of Americans are complaining over lost jobs when US companies outsource overseas. Bu you could turn this on its head and use outsourcing to your own benefit. If you could secure an IT job and work there until they trusted you enough that you could telecommute, you could talk to your smart friend in India (you would have gone to India and made a smart friend), and he would be elated to do your job for you, via telecommuting, for half your salary. Then you could have him do your job at IT firm #1, and you could go get a job at IT firm #2, work until they trusted you enough to let you telecommute, and then give all your work from that job to smart Indian friend #2, for half of that salary, and so forth. You could repeat this cycle until you nominally held 8 or 10 mid level IT jobs, collected for keeps 4 or 5 such salaries, and never had to do any work. Your Indian friends would be elated to have your job for a full half of its actual salary, because when companies outsource they pay locals much less than that, and half of a western salary would go a long way in India (or wherever). The whole system might require a little oversight, and you'd probably want to move overseas just in case you overlooked something, but it would be quite an effective racket I think.
If you wanted to make the same idea legal, you could secure a telecommuting job and then simply move to India or Thailand or something, where the cost of living is very very low in American dollars (at least for now), and you could work from there, still collecting your full western salary, and live like a king.
Taking that idea to the undergraduate level, I'm sure there are plenty of smart Indian college students who would do your physics problem set for about 10 bucks. Or even a term paper. If you really were so jaded with the educational system, I'm sure you could get an ivy league degree with rather minimal work if you outsourced your homework as you saw fit.
Back to physics/astronomy, earlier in the course we looked at the famous parallel slits and thought about diffracting light, and it was noted that c was a property of light's particle-like nature. And I remembered that once Shane's friend Joey, who majored in physics, had told me that light's wave aspect was not subject to this law in the same manner. When you change the shape of the slits (and thus the diffraction pattern), does the pattern change instantly, rather than d/c seconds later? If it changed instantly, like I think it might, then the implication is instantaneous transmission of information. If you could use fiber optics or something, and change the on/off of computer language into different diffraction angles, and make a ccd on the other end read the different angles, then I bet you could make really really high speed internet. Also, if you had already found aliens in another galaxy and knew where they were and had a beam of light going at them then you could talk to them in real time.
I suppose that instantaneous transmission of information is probably impossible but speaking of applications for fiber optic cables we should make a new system of numbers--base seven, a system based not on symbols but on the colors ROYGBIV. Then the internet could become faster because instead of flashing a light on and off to represent ones and zeroes we could shoot numbers across the infospace really quickly by a continuous variation of the frequency of the light.
Also, you know how most people don't really want to smoke, they just want that cool smoking image? I bet you could make a few bucks by selling rolling papers that were full of dry ice, so it would look like you were smoking.
Also, you know how everybody likes sea creatures as pets, but it's sort of a bummer that they have to stay in those big tanks all the time and they're sort of trapped? (at least I find that depressing...). Well, what if you filled a hamster ball with water. Then you could put your pet lobster in it and he could scuttle all around your house with you. Or, you could take the idea a step further, and build a sort-of water-filled space suit for any sea creature, and put it on wheels or something, and then you could have any kind of sea creature be a more viable household pet. At Dartmouth you are only allowed to have a 10 gallon tank in your dorm room, so my idea of having a pet shark is not really feasible. But if you found a shark whose volume was approximately 9 gallons, and built him a custom air-suit that would surround him with about a gallon of water, and you put him on wheels, then you could keep your pet 10 gallon shark in your dorm room AND take him on walks around campus.
More on the hamster wheel concept: you could have a bike with huge tires and fill those tires with tons of hamsters and probably move forward bit by bit.
Or, you could take that same bike with huge huge air filled tires, minus all the heavy hampsters, and put paddle-like treads on the huge air filled tires, and with a little outrider canoes or something I bet you would have made a bike that could drive right over the water. It would be a cross between an innertube or zodiac boat and a paddle wheel boat, except the hull and the propulsion would be the same. And you would need to pedal.
And if you got bored with your water-bike, this isn't that innovative, but I think it would be really rad to buy one of those lightweight recumbent bicycles, replace the wheels and chain with a drivetrain to an airplane propeller, and hang the whole thing under approximately 4500 liters of helium (or 2000L of Hydrogen gas, scary) in a lightweight skin or balloon. Then you would have a flying bicycle. My only reservation is that you would either need a second propeller to control altitude, or else just drag something heavy along the ground so you wouldn't fly away into the clouds. I think a dog or big monkey would be a good choice because it could follow along with you.
Also, you know the permanent fund dividend that Alaska residents get? They're paid yearly by oil companies, nominally as compensation for the disruption their land use may cause. Really, though, most view the dividend as a sort of bribe so Alaskans look the other way on the environmental justice and so forth.
Well, the payment ranges from 2-3000 dollars per Alaskan per year, and anyone who's been an Alaska resident for at least a year is eligible. My idea is to buy a plot of land on the North Slope or somewhere really cheap, and build a big big dormitory, and I would start an orphanage. A really huge really cheap orphanage. I would feed them oats, or rice, whichever was cheaper. I would import orphans from all over the US and Asia. And I bet, once I had enough orphans, I could house and feed them for less than $2000 a year. But of course they would be AK residents, and would all collect permanent fund dividends. And I could harvest these dividends, and make potentially in the neighborhood of $1000/orphan. If I had even as few as 200 orphans, this would be a really good racket.
Overpopulation is a big problem--the root of most of our problems, some would say. Of course, lots of cynics consider the hydrogen bomb, basely applied, to be the solution. But I see a way that it could solve the problem in a different way. I read about an international research vessel, conceived as a platform for a giant flexible drill that could conceivably drill through the thinnest part of the oceanic crust near a passive margin, and at a surprisingly un-deep depth, break into the region of molten mantle. To ease the population problem, all the worlds hydrogen bombs should be dropped into such a broehole, and then detonated simultaneously, such that a 'manmade volcano' would be created, and a gigantic island formed in the pacific. Volcanism would not be a problem on this island, with the artifice of conception removed. Then we could send thousands of bangladeshis (whose homeland has been flooded) there, and they would farm and live happily. (I do not take into account the exacerbation of land-loss due to sea level rise that the creation of my island would entail).
If you could lock a satellite in very high earth orbit so its period was one year, and you could keep it on the daytime side of earth at all times, which I think would be possible, couldn't you put a huge magnifying glass (or more likely, a large bent mirror) on it to focus light down to a solar collecting station on earth and make solar power generation a lot more efficient that way?
Modern shopping malls with fashion botiques for women should have little reserves in which men can hunt for food.
After we used magnesium as an oxidizing agent in Chemistry lab, I noticed that MgO, which you get when you burn Mg(s) in air, had a really bright white color. So I took some home to my dorm, and we played with it and made little men with the wire, which could sort of explode but they're really cute.....anyways, MgO is white, so when you scotch tape a ribbon of magnesium to the bricks that fall off the facade on the dorm across from mine, and burn it, you get a really well defined white line surounded by really black scorch marks, and if you tape the Mg on right you can write messages, which are really hard to get off, so if you wanted to have a lot of fun making really hard-to-remove graffiti, that would be the way.
Oh, back to physics, I'm sort of just brainstorming, but Fusion:
Cold fusion doesn't happen since the coulomb potential that must be overcome by two protons (H+) before the strong nuclear force takes over and joins them would require each particle to have a kinetic energy of something like a million electron-volts to overcome. (For comparison, it's easy to figure out that, even at a temperature of 10 million degrees K, the avg KE of the particles in a gas is only about a thousand electron-volts). So nuclear fusion doesn't happen at low temperatures. Where it does happen is in the sun, and in hydrogen bombs. In hydrogen bombs (I don't know exactly how they work), but I'm pretty sure fusion is initiated by a conventional nuclear bomb via nuclear fission. This process is out of control and very destructive so it isn't used for energy generation.
But I bet we could use fusion power with the technology we have now, if we did it in outer space. Fusion bombs could be used for propulsion in outer space, like the Orion Project. Or else fusion bombs could be set off in outer space where they wouldn't hurt anything, and tough satellites could do their best to collect the energy from the explosion.
Or else, you know how the moon is so close, that it causes tides and stuff and screws with us here, and during the monsoon those tides kill millions of nice kids in places like Bangladesh? Well if we wanted to launch a probe or spaceship really fast into interstellar space, we could do so from the surface of the moon using a fusion bomb as propulsion, and the probe would get shot off really quite fast, and the added benefit is, if we did this enough, and always on the backward side of the moon, we could speed the moon in its orbit, causing it to get farther away, and reducing the effects of tides here on earth.
Alternately, if we wanted to preserve tidal ecosystems, or if tidal power proves to be a viable means of generating sustainable electricity, explosions on the forward-orbit side of the moon could slow it and cause it to fall into a lower orbit, accentuating tides here on earth, and providing a lot of electricity for us, and ravaging smelly coastal cities like Seattle, Washington.
(this may also have the effect of breaking the moon's tidal lock, so it would rotate and we would all get really spectacular looks at the other side).
Sort of related: if we wanted to make the second best power plant in the solar system, we could build a huge tunnel into the earth's mantle, where temperature and pressure are naturally high enough that we could, with a little push, initiate a controlled fusion process. Actually I'm thinking that's a long shot because it's not nearly hot enough. But if we did make a huge tunnel, we could detonate H bombs in it, and harvest all the energy coming out, and that could actually be refined into a fairly efficient process I think. Also, it may result in really cool volcanism if it were done in the right area.
Do you know, with the new particle accelerator about to come online (at CERN in Switzerland), many believe that there's a finite chance that the world will be destroyed? This belief was also held by some scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. I just love how people push on with these things
Here is a form I thought of and composed with some help; may be useful in a variety of situations:
__/__/20__
Dear, _________________
I, _________________, wish to offer you my heartfelt apologies for the
❏ Tragic
❏ Embarrassing
❏ Regrettable
incident involving _________________________________ . It was due to (check all that apply):
❏ Family emergency
❏ Illness
❏ Unforeseen time conflict
❏ Extenuating circumstances
❏____________ phenomena
❏ Aggressive wildlife
❏ Rockfall
❏ Current economic climate
❏ Catastrophic flooding
❏ Pirates
❏ Global warming
❏ The tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001
❏ My GI tract
❏ Car trouble
❏ Other _______________________________________________________________________ (please explain)
and wholly beyond my control. It will
❏ Never happen again
❏ Be rectified shortly
Sincerely,
_______________________
Last thing, promise: You know when you're thinking at night in bed, and you just can't get to sleep because your thoughts are going round, and you feel like you just have to put it onto paper to get it out? You stumble up over to you desk, grab a pen and without turning the light on or anything you scratch out on some scrap whatever it was you were thinking about, and then fall exhaustedly in the bed and asleep. You never look at the paper again; if you do it's most likely unintelligible......well, i found one scrap of paper on my desk the other morning, a note from my subconscious self, really, and I read what it said and it sort of fits in this line:
"Life as higher level of organization in physical world--more interesting less efficient way of dealing with excess energy"
"Our allegiance should be to life, not just mankind"
"Send hardy microbes to stars"
A few days befrore my astronomy teacher gave us his professional guarantee (he's some sort of big honcho) that before our lives are over there will be a system of optical telescopes that will be able to take spectra of atmospheres on extrasolar planets, and determine if these planets are suitable for life.
I think what I was getting at was this: I've read enough of this bunk that I think people probably won't ever make it to other stars...they're just awfully far away......but I was thinking, if biotechnology gets as scary as everybody promises it might get, then we could manufacture tough little bugs that carried in their DNA coded instructions to 'evolve' into us or something similar to us. Or they could just be tough bugs that would ensure that life on the universe doesn't end when some catastrophe breaks out on earth, and we could shoot them far into outer space.....anyways, I was just thinking, that would be the way to colonize these other earthlike planets that my teacher seems so convinced we'll find.