RE: Stars and Genomes: Why I Want Us to Remain Unmapped

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(Edited)

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Living in the U.S., having grown up in Los Angeles in a family with an unusual medical history, with ALL of us having given blood multiple times, with an elder sister who was married young to a man whose family was originally from Hiroshima, Japan, any wish I might have to remain unmapped is a pipedream at best.

Kind of like my grandfather, who during WWII chose a relatively unpopulated part of New Mexico as their place to retire to should the shit hit the fan, only to discover after the fact that that was in fact quite near the location of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atom bombs dropped on Japan were developed, which would have been among the first places attacked had the shit actually hit the fan. Oops.

I moved to Middle Tennessee largely to escape city traffic, smoggy skies, light pollution, and to finally have relatively clean water and air, plus the ability to see the Milky Way on clear nights before it was even fully dark.

But escaping surveillance? Puhlease. There is a National Guard recruitment center and battalion within ten minutes of our home. I wasn't born yesterday.

We have black helicopters crossing overhead several times daily, during all seasons, including all times of day and night, ostensibly searching for cannabis growers, but in reality? Who knows what the hell they are really doing. They certainly wouldn't tell me, even were I to ask.

Bottom line, I love my country, but I distrust my government, which was true decades before Donald Trump took power, and has certainly degraded substantially since.

Currently, Marek has decided that he wants to move to New Zealand. Having been born and raised in a seismically active volcanic area, I've stipulated that I want to be a minimum of fifty miles from any active volcanoes or calderas.

Will that be enough? Only time will tell.

I must take exception with some opinions posted here, however, in that I've somehow managed to maintain a childlike sense of wonder, despite living six decades and counting.

Perhaps it's because I never had my own kids, and thus never really "grew up," but having been a functioning adult for some time now, I think it is something else.

I think a sense of wonder can be maintained if we choose to recognize that, no matter how much we learn, there is still so very much that we can NEVER know.

Life is wonderful, and getting better, better and better. And the more we manage to learn, the better it gets, ad infinitum.



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Ha, yeah, and especially in wake of what happened in White Island, which was pretty awful. But I'm sure you'll be just fine - just don't walking up to the goddamn crater's edge on a day where they show seismic activity. That's what winds me up though - we ARE all mapped, and mostly without our consent.

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Indeed we are. All we can do is to keep certain information off the web as much as possible, think first before posting or speaking, and hope for the best. It is what it is.

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