On September 21st, 2018, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) deployed two rovers from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft onto the surface of an asteroid named Ryugu.
The asteroid is one of the better tracked near-earth objects. It measures about a kilometer across and it orbits between 0.96 and 1.41 AU away from the earth.
One kilometer is a little more than half a mile. You can probably walk a kilometer in less than 15 minutes. The average person would be able to run that distance in even less time.
One AU is approximately 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the Sun. That’s hard to even conceptualize.
I live in Royal Palm Beach, Florida. From here to Tampa, there are about 210 miles. If I were to get in my car right now and drive at a steady 60 miles per hour I would get there in about three and a half hours. I would have to take that trip over 442,850 times to get to one AU, that would take me over one and a half million hours to complete. That is to say that one AU, is a long fucking way.
So to recap: Japanese NASA created a spacecraft. This spacecraft had two remote rovers that could be controlled from earth. This spacecraft and the rovers were launched over 93 million miles across fucking space, only to land on an object that would take you about ten minutes to walk across…
The other day I saw a man in Walmart stick his hands down his pants to scratch his ass, then put that same hand into a bag of Skittles. I watched him eat one.
The amazing things we are capable of doing, can only be dwarfed by the unfathomably small-minded things we actually do with alarming frequency. It’s a wonder how those two extremes can cohabitate in one species.
I mean, just think of that variation. Most animals operate on instinct honed by millions of years of evolution. The intellectual difference between two abled-bodied and healthy chimpanzees is miniscule. The average chimpanzee would have no harder time learning complex algebra than the smartest chimpanzee. Yet the chasm between the Japanese scientists in charge of the Hayabusa2 mission and that guy at Walmart is so vast, I have a hard time believing that their genetic make-up is nearly identical. I actually don’t know if that chimpanzee thing is true, it just sounded better for the point I was trying to make. I think the spirit of the statement is true, however, and if not, let’s pretend…
I’ve always been a little obsessed by those juxtapositions; putting a man on the moon – Westboro Baptist Church members screaming at funerals for veterans that “faggots” are going to hell; the discovery of CRISPR opening the doors to the future of biological engineering – white supremacists and Neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches screaming “Jews will not replace us”; the successful launch and landing of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, marking the nascent stages of a new space age – Kanye West saying slavery is a choice and that the 13th Amendment is a trap door that keeps black people suppressed. If humanity was a personality in a novel, critics would be up in arms about the lack of consistency in the character development.
The internet has helped crystalize that.
Both blessing and curse; the same technology that has allowed us to achieve higher levels of connectivity than we could have even imagined a generation or two ago, has also serve to elucidate the duality of humanity’s character; Star-gazers and luddites, explorers and hermits, merchants of peace and chaos alike. You can get on the internet right now, go to a reputable science journal and read about the best and brightest among us diligently working to find cures for some of the worlds’ deadliest diseases – then open up YouTube and watch grown men flick each other’s testicles with wooden spoons. It’s scary to think that given that variation, we trust ourselves with control over existential risks like nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence.
But I consider myself to be an optimist about humanity. I believe that we will achieve enough advancement, despite the many societal set-backs we are currently experiencing, to traverse whatever Great Filter lays ahead for our civilization. We just keep tinkering ahead, making better and better computers, and robots, and selfies sticks.
I choose to believe that there is some sort of mass-consciousness driving our society. And it’s nice to think that it’s little self-aware. It’s comforting to imagine that at the core of humanities’ hive mind, lays the inherent realization that we are not meant to wield the power we have stumbled upon in our industrious tinkering, at least, not in our current form. So we strive to make technology an extension of ourselves, so we can expedite what biology is too slow to accomplish. Isn’t that a cozy thought? That in the end, we know what we are doing, that we know what is wrong and are trying to fix it without realizing it… I just remembered that a U.S. Senator named James Inhofe used a snow ball as an argument against global warming…
Never mind; we’re fucked.
Lando Writes Sometimes 