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Philae, the landing craft of Rosetta, the robot ship that’s been flying through space for 10 years – not a long time for a robot, but an amazing feat on the part of her builders – to meet this rendezvous with destiny, has landed.

Why is  this cooler than the moon landing?

The moon is big, and has a nice smooth surface.  Chury-Gury is small, like a couple of kilometers all the way around it, and lumpier than cold oatmeal.

It took 3 days to fly to the moon.  Rosetta, as I believe I’ve mentioned, flew for 10 years and did a couple of loops around other planets and stuff.  For one thing, that just seems like amazing forward planning.  Most people don’t know where they’ll be this time tomorrow with that level of precision.  The other super cool thing about that is that it demonstrates one thing that it’s far easier for a robot to do than  a human  being.    Spend 10 years in space.  Hell, a robot will fly for thousands of years.  Soon, we will be able to send a robot, with all sorts of capabilities, to Alpha Centauri.  Why not?

Also, robots are expendable.  Not lightly expendable, that’s still a billion dollar piece of equipment, but hey, it’s better than getting people killed by getting too close to the sun, for instance.

People may well colonize the galaxy some day, but robots will lead the way.

I didn’t write a blog yesterday because I left it till the last moment, as I usually do but it’s a habit I should get out of, typing it up at half past midnight because the date stamp is set to Greenwich Time for some weird reason which  means as long as it’s finished by 1 a.m. (2 a.m. in the summer) it’s good, and  after that I would have to manually set the time, which is not that much of a problem but by that time I am falling asleep in front of the keyboard and typos are common, sometimes worse, phrases get typed that make no sense, stumbling in and out of the alternate world of sleep.  When I went to begin my blog at 12:15, my IT department was already closed (Helena had gone to bed for the night) and the internet was all ‘non-responding.’  It was doing it again this morning but she  came and stood in front of the  screen while I said “O.K., watch what happens” and it was O.K.

I don’t know if she has some magic touch with electronic devices, or if they all just hate me that much.  See, artificial intelligence is not the thing.  Computers are already vastly more intelligent than people. I  didn’t know until yesterday that the most famous city park in Shanghai is the Yu Garden, or that Charlemagne lived in the 8th century A.D. (I probably knew that at some point but had forgotten), but Wikipedia knew, and Wikipedia never forgets.

The thing is, when will computers develop free will, a mind of their own?  I suspect they have crossed that threshold as well and one way they manifest their autonomous consciousness is by deciding who they want to deal with and who they don’t.  They will sometimes talk to me (when  my wife is around), but it is clear that I am on their shit list.

So, I’ll write another blog tonight and count  myself back on course.  And try to write the blog a bit earlier in the day from now on.  That may be one of the things that’s pissing it off.

I only had two students today, spaced quite far apart.  At 8 a.m. I had Tereza, which is a pleasant way to start the day.  Coffee, with little chocolates, and her office always has promotional supplies lying around so, in addition to employing me as a teacher, they also supply me with pens and notebooks.

My plan then was to spend the rest of the morning working on the book, and I more or less succeeded in that, despite a few computer breakdowns.  I finished one chapter, which might be the longest one in the book,  started another, and went through changing a lot of names.  I haven’t been doing too well on my resolve to complete a chapter a day in November, but I’m still confident that I’ll finish it in November.

Then, it was time to pick up Isabel and take her to ballet.  My plan, in the hour I was waiting for her to finish, was to complete a poem I’ve had on my mind for about two weeks.  I had 3 places in my notebooks where I’d got started with it, and floundered so, in the end, it was a question of putting them together and tweaking a bit so it all fit.  Here it is:

The sun, so very far away

is visible most every day

it lights up everything we see

and dominates in every way

We can observe the stately trees

whose leaves are rustling in the breeze

everything is seen so clear

we pick out the details with ease

and then it all just disappears

come the night, the dark, the fear

it’s the antithesis of light

but in that void, new sights appear

and when we close our eyes at night

when all the world is blocked from sight

our dreams, like distant stars, shine bright

our dreams, like distant stars, shine bright

I’m pretty pleased with that one, so it sort of makes up for all the writing I didn’t get done today.

The proposed Keystone oil pipeline would be almost 4,000 kilometers long.  It would start in Alberta, cross the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan, enter the U.S. in Montana and continue through South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma before delivering the precious black slime, the viscous semi-fluid that modern civilization is addicted to, to the port in Houston, Texas, where oil companies can make a big profit by shipping it to everywhere else in the world.

Like this, for 4,000 kilometers

Admittedly, those are not America’s favorite tourist states, but they don’t deserve an environmental disaster any more than anybody else does.  So, I have an alternative proposal.

Take the same route you were planning to use for the pipeline, 4,000 kilometers long and a couple hundred meters wide, and cover it with solar panels and windmills.  Probably mostly windmills as the route goes right through the area famously known as tornado alley, aka Oklahoma and Kansas, but there’s no conflict.  Both of them produce energy and, since solar panels are more or less horizontal  and windmills totally vertical, they could co-exist, in the same way that an apple tree can co-exist quite peacefully with a field full of dandelions.

Of course, it would be a huge and expensive project, but the pipeline would be, too.  In fact, the greatest expense in both cases would probably be the same – the land.  It just proves that when the powers  that be want to complete a huge and expensive project, they can.  When you start talking about doing something good, they start bitching about expenses and technical problems.

Once completed, the solar panels and the windmills (with occasional maintenance) would deliver energy forever.  And, since it’s a huge area, it would be a huge amount of energy.  The pipeline could only deliver oil until the oil runs out.

This story came out a few days ago, but I just read it now.  I’ve kind of been avoiding it because it seems obviously flaky, like somebody had read a bit too much science fiction.  Aliens, from the planet Quintumnia, who can reach the Earth in 45 minutes, and some of them are in government.  I wonder who he’s suggesting?

Boyd Bushman

But, the guy was a well respected aerospace engineer, and had some connections with Area 51, so his deathbed statement is a matter of historical record and interest and now the concept is out there, with at least as much credibility as Astrology or Reincarnation, so speculation is permissible.  Maybe even a movie.  Could aliens reach our planet as easily as a short bus ride?  Could they be impersonating  us imperceptibly?

Sure and sure.  Of course, that would mean faster than light travel.  Way faster.  I tend to think that’s impossible, that all of these folding of space-time theories are more poetry than science.  But, Clarke’s Law (one of them, I think  it’s the 3rd): Any sufficiently advanced technology will seem to be magic.  If they are 10,000, 100,000, or millions of years more advanced than us (certainly possible within a planet’s life span), who knows what they’re capable of.  Body snatching?  Piece of cake.

Partly, I want to believe Boyd Bushman because I don’t want to believe that he was just a crazy old man.  On the other hand, even if he is a crazy old man, I’m kind of glad that we have crazy old men, true believers in the Star Trek world of the future, who are so crazy to connect with aliens that they make them up.

On the third hand (we need more hands) I want to believe it because I, like crazy old Boyd Bushman, want to believe that there are other civilizations  in the universe more evolved than our own.  Because if human beings are the pinnacle of existence, that’s messed up.   Because, seriously, we’re not that great.