The Blue Origin of Life
This morning I am reading articles that are making me simply pop with enthusiasm to write stories. Thus is the burden of a fertile and inquisitive mind since we are destined to depart on our cross-country road trip as soon as Kim finished her ablutions. It was a strange last night at home since Betty Poop has a case of explosive diarrhea which seems to have been brought on by the addition of Prozac to here medical regimen. The Prozac is something Kim is adding to insure that Betty is calmer during the trip, so its ironic that it is making us a lot less calm as we prepare. The bad news is that she has been exploding through her doggy diaper for two days now. The good news is That it has induced us to finally decide to replace the Master Bedroom carpeting (enough said).
Getting beyond the mundane, on to the ethereal. The first article was about the new bipartisan bill that looks certain to fly through Congress. That’s right, a bipartisan bill at a moment when there simply is no bipartisanship. The bill is a budgetary initiative designed to expand the amount of federal government support for early-stage scientific research, designed specifically to combat the leaps and bounds advancement underway in China that has started to overtake our American scientific initiatives. Nothing like the fear of an outside threat to motivate bipartisan thinking. And what a threat it truly is. America’s progress over the last fifty years was the result of scientific research and development initiated in the fifties and really pushed forward with the space race of the sixties. Much like the German republic got its early Twentieth Century impetus from the chemical research of Messrs. Haber and Bosch and the breakthroughs in ammonia and other chemical productions. A cynic might suggest that scientific research that thrusts authoritarian regimes forward like that gave rise to National Socialism and that it was therefore questionable in its value to mankind (not to mention the massive climate change side-effects it promulgated), but that would be small thinking. We cannot allow ourselves, as an eight billion person world, the luxury of declaring progress as bad because our human instincts sometimes lead to abuse of that progress.
The benefits of the space race did more than give us Tang. Under a socially liberal Camelot governing system, we took the advancements that space exploration gave us and built our modern tech-based world that has indeed allowed eight billion people to exist on this planet. Now we are faced with the ongoing issue of how to manage that wonderful situation to the benefit of all. Aye, there’s the rub. And now we are just getting to the interesting point in our second space race.
The second article I found so fascinating was that Jeff Bezos, the man who brought us the cloud and who delivers all of our products to our homes during the age of Coronavirus, has announced that right after he steps down as CEO of Amazon, he is getting onboard the first manned Blue Origin flight into space, with his brother Mark. There are so many thoughts that evokes. First of all, anyone wondering why Bezos would step down from the helm of his massive public company when he has (he is 57), now has their answer. Shareholders generally don’t like their leaders propelling themselves into the unknown. The second thing this should tell everyone is that money and the pursuit of it generally does not satisfy the ambitions of the heart and is not its own reward. Here is a guy who can afford to stay safe and perhaps live forever and he is putting himself in harms way to fulfill a dream he has pursued since childhood. Bravo. Granted it would be a challenging dream to fulfill fir a mere non-billionaire mortal (unless you have one of those as a brother).
It’s even more interesting and poignant that the three guys trying to race to be the first into space propelled by wealth are Richard Branson (Virgin Galactica), Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Bezos (Blue Origin). The naming says a lot. Branson is still thinking with his gonads, as he has for decades. Musk is out there with his fellow Gen Xers still doing the ubiquitously unconventional X thing. And Bezos, perhaps the most mainstream of the bunch (though apparently not immune to governing gonad thinking), is doing all this for the immortality of saving mankind by finding its bluest origins. The similarity between these three massive egos is that none of them has found full happiness in wealth alone. I would like to think that they all realize that the rape and pillage of the commercial world, at which they all excel with some differences in style, has given them the wherewithal to save the world by giving it access to the broader universe. That is the positive take on all of this. The negative, of course, would be that they are merely looking for their next market, whether in selling shuttle seats to the rich and famous or finding new places in the universe to exploit for their natural resources. I hate the dark side of my mind and really hope this is more a positive than a flamboyant and self-centered negative.
As for the research push that even a dysfunctional Senate seems prepared to get behind, I guess I will say bravo as well since I have had a front row seat to the Trump administration being both climate deniers and cutting the bottom out of scientific research funding. My little hydrogen company does its work in Dundee, Scotland and is now focused on European and other non-American markets exactly because the United States under Donald J. Trump was unwilling to provide assistance to primary early-stage research, which, by its very nature, is years away from profitability and therefore in desperate need of governmental support. That support was forthcoming both from the U.K. Government and the government, specifically, of Scotland. But it was not on offer from the United States. Shame on Trump and all that he stands for. Today we think of him as a mere narcissist who couldn’t handle COVID or anything with more than one syllable, but down the toad we may curse him even more or stunting our scientific supremacy and giving China the ultimate leg up while thinking he was just enabling Putin’s Russia.
But back to Bezos and Blue Origin. Bezos Brother Mark tells a tale of his experience as a volunteer fireman. He just missed getting to save a dog from a burning building and envies the guy who did. Clearly, he’s a experience junky as only the brother of a gazillionaire can afford to be. I have an idea. Maybe he wants to save me from Betty Poop’s diarrhea? Maybe that would be an experience worth having after a ride in space, into the brown origin of life?