Sometimes when I take my dogs out at night to use the puppy restroom, I take a long gander up at the sky.
And I often fixate on Mars.
There's been talk by rocketheads for decades about an expedition there.
But what if something went wrong? What if there was no return from the red planet?
Looking up, that grips my chest. It takes my breath away a bit. Even though I won't even remotely approach being in that situation, someone else may be. I know that in the big picture of the galaxy, in the chessboard that is existence, Mars is in the square right next to us.
A goddamn neighbor, really.
So that puts things in a darker perspective. In and amongst the monstrous maelstrom that is the universe, we are all but an infinitely insignificant dot in a massive pointalism painting. A grain of sand in a vast beach.
So, with the incredible size of our current political situation, peppered with the apocalyptic fuel of what despotism and authoritarianism may mean to all of us, including mutually assured destruction, it all seems so...
petty.
It means nothing in the grand context of the universe.
The wrong side of history? Who will be reading that book in 1,000 years? And as I'm still gazing up, maybe still at Mars, maybe a guest appearance by Jupiter, I realize it.
I'm terrified.
Horrified by my own insignificance.
And when my thoughts go down that rabbit-hole, I don't have the slightest clue on how to dig my way out.
Its been asked. "What does all of this mean, this life?"
Does it matter?
You have figures crushing other people, inflicting hurt and loss for their own gain. Dancing to an evil song with its notes written on the sheet music of the wrong side of history, indeed. Taking us back instead of forward, pockets filling as they step on the throats of others, the helpless, the innocent, who they profit from regardless. These people are elected to represent us, to benefit us. And they take it to the bank. A bank they can't take with them.
And if they were to do the unspeakable. To hit the launch codes, to be the matching hand that is needed to hold the other key to make nuclear war possible, don't they see the stupidity?
Nothing gained.
Just a flair on Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot that wouldn't be noticeable anywhere in the cosmos. In the event of the remote possibility that there were an intelligent and sentient being out there to witness it? It would be nothing more than what a sunstorm looks like to the rest of us.
And we were lucky enough on this sphere to be given awareness, life; life that grew from the lowest levels. Life that figured out the wheel, the boat, languages, the printing press, commerce, science, medicine, the telephone, television, and eventually?
Religion and Politics. Climate ignorance.
And we are capable of destroying thousands of years of human history, over what? Profit? Protection from accountability? We have the first trillionaire, and he's not capable of even the most remote displays of philanthropy. Somehow this country elected TWICE a guy with designs on nothing but self-improvement, and avoiding being held responsible. We may be teetering on the brink.
I'm not even coming close to saying we are the only living beings out there....
But what if we were?
We could wreck it all on account of a handful of overpampered despots who want to have it all. We all fight, and we all lose due to the thinking of a few.
We are the stewards of that existence? In all of that infinite eternity out there, we may fuck it all up because of human vanity and greed.
And the only record of us would be the recording thats headed out toward the heliosphere aboard Voyager 1 that stopped its time capsule before Reagan took office. And really, that's appropriate. It was the Reagan administration that started the spiral we're in now. A slow rambling gait, that is now in a full-on sprint towards the cartoon character kakistocracy that is now in the driver's seat. Anyway, that space probe that is so far away, it can't be seen. And it signal takes 22 hours to get here and a ridiculously powerful antenna to translate its information.
That's what I think about under the stars at night.
