(Phaysis)

I think I’ve always had a touch of paranoia, even as a kid. What started as an open trust in the benevolence and altruism of humanity turned into a self-protective distrust of those who would seek to hurt me. Throwing myself into the religion of love did nothing to turn me right again. In fact, it fueled my paranoia until I burned in its self-fueling heat. Did not matter one iota that I was turning into an irascible asshole as long as I was doing the Good Work to shine the light on the demons in the shadows and call out the devils in the corner who seek to dominate, contort, and drag humanity down to Hell.

Now, as a sophomoric old man, I’ve dropped the pursuit of the invisible, yet I am still hunting the boogeymen lurking in the shadows. Instead of railing on about a spiritual war, I’m rattling on to any who would pay attention about the corporate war over consumer souls, digging deep and hypothesising about the snares set to dominate, twist, and drag us down into another level of control and profit.

I’ve become one of those old men who, after being confronted with a new thing on the market, will talk loudly about The Riggings Beneath It All, the puppetry, smoke and mirrors designed to soothe, confuse, and ensnare us. Can’t stop myself from pointing out the rig. And part of me hates this about my nature, about the fact that I cannot put my trust into much in this world.

In my younger life, I could pray for guidance, love, and release (knowing full-well that my mission was to illuminate), but now, there’s no prayer except to my fellow man, begging for him to see what’s going on. There really is no difference between the two; one is praying to the nonexistent, yielding nothing, and two is praying to the immovable, yielding nothing. One voice cannot move the masses. Not in this culture, not ever. And there is no Deus Ex Machina who will step in and put it all right when it all goes horribly wrong. The older I get, the more I understand this.

I assume the feeling of powerlessness is natural.

Been doing some light reading about the Golden Record carried by both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, and reading up on the two spacecraft themselves.

The Golden Record is a disc, fashioned after vinyl records, made of copper, plated in gold, packaged with a stylus and a needle, and is encased in an aluminum dust sleeve inscribed with basic listening instructions and mounted to the outside of the craft. It was designed and placed there by a team headed by Carl Sagan on the chance that alien civilizations could discover the craft and listen to the record. It is a slim hope, but it provides a time capsule proving the existence of humanity.

The disc contains a selection of recordings of earth sounds, greetings in several languages, and a cross-section of world music (including “Johnny B. Goode” from our country’s own Chuck Berry). Also encoded on the record is a set of rasterized images which, if the aliens decipher and follow the instructions on the dust sleeve, will show them various depictions of our culture and our planet. The first picture is of a circle, matching the circle on the dust sleeve, as a confirmation that they’ve correctly decoded the signal. Also among the pictures are: some primary scientific and mathematical principles to help understand the rest of the images; the location of our solar system in relation to 14 pulsars; the makeup and ordering of our solar system’s planetary bodies; the composition and structure of earth and its land masses; depictions of our basic evolutionary path; images of animals; scenes of human life, fetal development and human physiology. Really cool stuff.

Both probes are now in the thick of what’s called the “heliosheath“, which is an egg-shaped area around the solar system where all the particles that stream from the sun lose their velocity and come to a halt. The heliosheath is essentially where the momentum (which is mass times velocity, remember?) of the lightweight solar particles is not enough to push through the gasses that exist in the near-empty regions of space between stars. Anything that uses this solar wind of particles to accelerate through space will lose the speed assist but, due to Newtonian physics, will keep going forward if it’s heavy enough. Both of the probes are reporting that their velocity isn’t changing much, maybe slowing down a little, and that the compression of the solar particles around them in the sheath is raising the probes’ temperature slightly. Once the probes punch through this cloud in a few years, they will truly be the only man-made objects to go into intergalactic space.

However, although the probes are still powered up and running, 33 years after their 1977 launch (yeah, before we had desktop computers), they cannot remain operational forever. The plutonium fuel in their thermal reactors does have a half-life, and with that radioactive decay comes a reduction in power output. One by one, scientific instruments will have to be shut down in a carefully-planned sequence spanning over the next 15 years. It’s calculated that there will not be enough power to run the inertial gyroscopes, necessary for calibrating locational instruments and for aiming the large radio dish in the direction of Earth, by 2020. In order to keep the main electronics and radio running, the gyros will have to be shut down. It isn’t known how long radio communications will last after that point. The predicted final gasps of power are expected in 2025, when the reactors will cease to provide the power needed by the core electronics.

After a very, very long service life doing exactly what they were designed to do — survey the outer planets of our solar system with never-before-seen detail — with very few problems, they will then sail on into the black. By the time our extra-terrestrial friends find them (the nearest star system is over 4400 light years away) the spacecraft will have become electromagnetically-dark, lifeless metal husks; their reactor cores ice cold and turned into radioactively-stable byproducts. Then, hopefully, the aliens will find the records and hear the words of a hopeful, and hopefully still existent, planet.

“Greetings, from the children of the planet Earth.”

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.

Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.
Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis.
At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  At accusam aliquyam diam diam dolore dolores duo eirmod eos erat, et nonumy sed tempor et et invidunt justo labore Stet clita ea et gubergren, kasd magna no rebum. sanctus sea sed takimata ut vero voluptua. est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat.

Consetetur sadipiscing elitr,  sed diam nonummy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr,  sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

So, I considered giving a palms-up apology for getting so behind on keeping you kind folks updated on the state of my life with frequent blog posts, as though I owed you a debt of timely updates and regular musings on a set, announced schedule. But you know what? That doesn’t matter one iota. My little blog doesn’t matter. There is no schedule, so there is no matter to attend to. I don’t have to apologize.

The “I’m so sorry for being late” sort of apologies are just wrong. This isn’t English class. You’re not running late to your best friend’s wedding. It’s a personal blog, and that’s faulty thinking. The kind of thinking that new webcomic artists are guilty of. The thinking that convinces them that their audience will vote with their feet and turn away if the artist doesn’t keep up his/her end of the bargain and post on a fixed schedule. The thinking that being a day late, or just not posting for a week, will anger everybody so immensely that the blogosphere will be rocked with the same vitriol and slander usually applied against a kidnapper. That thinking is false and obsolete.

Yes, it’s obsolete in this day and age of technological wonder. We have RSS feeds now (here’s mine!). We have software and services that people can use, if they so desire, to automatically check for new updates and alert them on anything new. Nobody has to personally check a website for updates on a regular basis ever again. Freedom!

See, if I tell you that I plan to write a long, thoughtful post every Sunday and ask you folks to tune in to read and comment, then without the technological publishing advantage of using feeds, you would be required to visit every Sunday for the freshest stuff. If I fizzle out on that high-minded goal, either because I’m lazy, have nothing in my head, or because everything I want to say has already been said on Facebook, for instance (hypothetically, of course), then without the aid of modern technology, you, my readers, would have some amount of right to get upset at my slack, or else you’d just go for months without checking. Both of which, historically, are actual outcomes.

But this isn’t 1999. We have automation now, technology where we can “time-shift” posts for people to fetch and read on their own schedule. It’s like someone using a DVR to grab every episode of a show whenever it happens to come out and alerting the viewer when it has arrived. That’s not our future; that’s our present! We don’t have to actually check for ourselves and wait with bated breath for the next post, or bite our tongue if that post is late, because when it comes out, it comes out. End of story.

I have to wonder how much of the content streaming from the blogging and webcomic world is wasted on writers apologizing for a lack of updates. I’m guilty of it, and I know you know other people who are guilty of it. It’s a waste of time mentally kowtowing to a great and faceless Other out there reading your posts. Progress to the next stage of technological evolution. Stop apologizing and just start writing. You owe no karmic debt to your little audience. When your audience grows to millions, then that’s when you have license to apologize for not posting regularly. But by then, I would assume you’d be making a living through your posts. But these little blogs? Don’t sweat it. Just write and move on. Don’t show your palms.

Something’s wrong. Can’t quite place it. There’s no telling. I’ve screwed up somewhere. Won’t know for sure. I’m wishing I knew. This’ll end badly. You’ve no idea.