UTOPIA REDUX – First Response To Yesterday’s Post

Sinboy writes...

Polymorphous yes. Utopianism? Are you effing kidding? This shit takes work. One of my tribe (*) just broke her leg on the way to thecourthouse to help with the same sex marriages in San Francisco. She's a massage therapist, has no health insurance, and is going to need near
24 hr care for a while. The really shitty thing is that she's a marathon runner, and was just recovering from some pain from her last try at training for an AIDS marathon. That Heinlein guy never mentioned this in Stranger In A Strange Land. But somehow I don't feel cheated. If you're still worried about the whole "Manson cult" thing, you should see the scar one of my other family members just got. A lamp fell on him. He's this intense biker tech guy with a superman fixation. I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them.
(*)there's no word for what we do as a family. It's not common enough to get a definition. Some call it polyamory, others call it open marriages, and some would call it communalism. The words aren't what's important.

While some girl corrects a couple of Star Trek details I screwed up.

Star Trek: TNG is set in the 24th century. That would make it THREE hundred years in the future. Not two hundred. And you didn't key in a code to get what you wanted from the replicator on the Enterprise-D. You just told it what you wanted. You know, like, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." And there you had it.

GAY WEDDINGS

Again I stand corrected. There were 2500 gay weddings in the Bay Area over the long weekend, to which I can only paraphrase Col. Kilgore in one of my favorite movies. -- "I love the news of gay weddings in the morning. It's news of...chaos."

WHAT US WORRY?

But this clip from the New York Times may indicate that all this discussion of a better world may be totally academic...

Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation. “In some ways it sounds more like science fiction than fact," said Dr. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist who described this apocalyptic possibility in a paper with Dr. Marc Kamionkowski and Dr. Nevin Weinberg, from the California Institute of Technology, last year. The Big Rip is only one of a constellation of doomsday possibilities resulting from the discovery by two teams of astronomers six years ago that a mysterious force called dark energy seems to be wrenching the universe apart. Instead of slowing down from cosmic gravity, as cosmologists had presumed for a century, the galaxies started speeding up about five billion years ago, like a driver hitting the gas pedal after passing a tollbooth. Dark energy sounded crazy at the time, but in the intervening years a cascade of observations have strengthened the case that something truly weird is going on in the sky. It has a name, but that belies the fact that nobody really knows what dark energy is. In six years it has become one of the central and apparently unavoidable features of the cosmos, the surprise question mark at the top of everybody's list, undermining what physicists presumed they understood about space, time, gravity and the future of the universe.

CRYPTIQUE – Surf or fight!