Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Except for several volcanoes of course.

The problem is that in recent years we seem to have had such a series of global problems that I’m sure that many people figure that it just can’t get any worse. Starting with the economic woes we seemed to be teetering on the abyss a number of times yet it just seemed to get worse for quite a while, far surpassing the worst that anyone thought they’d see at the outset of the difficulties. At least the swine flu seemed to be a non-runner in the disaster stakes. Yes, people died, but they all seemed to be people who’d have died with any flu that came along and the numbers overall, so far, were less than in many normal flu epidemics.

We’re not quite at the end of the volcano problem as I write this so who knows when that will truly end? In the 1820s it ran for over a year but, of course, none of the modern technology that we take for granted was in place at that time. Right now, nobody knows just when the eruptions will stop and there’s talk of another volcano in Iceland going the very same way (a bigger one too).

What we’ve not seen, yet, though is a really major solar flare. Little ones happen all the time but really big ones have only happened in other stars and, so far, there doesn’t seem to be any way to predict whether or not they’ll happen one day with our own sun. Still, at least that’s one natural disaster that we’d not need to worry about too much as within 24 hours we’d all have been wiped out.

Puts the last year in some context, eh?

By the time the shorter holidays swing round we seem to have built up a massive list of things that we should take the kids to. Summer isn’t so bad as there’s a couple of months to play with but it can get pretty bad during the shorter holidays like Easter.

In fact, Easter seems to be the worst of these. Not only do the kids and ourselves have a list of things that have accumulated since Christmas but there’s a whole host of activities going on aimed at kids all over the place. Almost all of these activities fall from the Saturday through to Easter Monday though so there’s not so many that you can actually get to and, on the whole, we always miss out on at least a couple that we’d have liked to have gotten to.

Over that Saturday to Monday period we always seem to end up with both of the little guys pretty much totally worn out and this year has been no different. Saturday ended up relatively quiet but we made up for that on Sunday and Monday with all day trips to Castleward and Portrush which left them both exhausted.

Still, at least we’d fairly grim weather on Tuesday which gave them (and us!) a bit of a chance to get some rest.

Leaving aside the religious approach, supposing that someday it becomes possible for people to live forever, would you actually want to? In principle I would have always said that my answer would surely be “yes” but one of the odder Star Trek episodes has me thinking about that.

For a first premise, the assumption is that in living forever you’d want to live in a healthy state ie no sliding downhill into nursing home territory as we see these days when people get old. Obviously, living forever and gradually sliding downhill like that through illness and disease isn’t an overlly appealing prospect. However, even if you were perfectly healthly, would you want to do it? Let’s say the life was in the body of you as you were in your 20s ie no aging beyond that.

Forever is a very long time. It’s not 100 years or 1000 years or even a million years. Thus, if you were to try out different walks of life over time you’d eventually have done pretty much everything. Assuming that you were in a society that also lived forever then over time they’d collectively reach the point where everything was known. I imagine that there’d be new species turning up as time went by but aside from that all of science would be known, presumably also the society would stablise after a time so even the likes of movies would pretty much all have been done. Pretty much nothing would change.

How many of us would actually want to live in a society where everything that could be known already was known, where there was nothing new, where nothing changed?

Everyone and their dog tends to look for aliens from outer space but the number of people looking for time travellers is very much smaller. There isn’t really a good reason for that on the whole. After all, absolute proof that time travel was possible would cause just as great a stir on earth as would absolute proof that aliens were out there.

It would be impossible to find a time traveller though, wouldn’t it?

It certainly would if they were really careful or even if they were careless but took the trouble to remove traces of their visits after the event. Would either situation apply though? Somehow I just can’t see it applying on all of their trips nor for that matter on any of them so long as their target time period was well before the invention of the time machine itself. After all, why bother trying to cover your tracks when anyone who knew about you would be classed as a nutcase?

If we take it as read that they wouldn’t bother to cover their tracks to any great extent then how about trying to find them? Where, or rather when, would you look?

I suspect that we can also take it for granted that they’d be visiting ever famous event over the range of their time machine but realistically we’d never know for sure that they’d been to any time much before the 1900s because the documentary evidence that we would need to detect them simply isn’t around. They might well need to be more careful any time from about 10 years ago when CCTV became commonplace too and, of course, the requirements for providing ID might make extended stays in the past more difficult too.

However, there is one event that would fit our requirements ideally and probably fit theirs too.

That’s the Titanic disaster.

Why? Well, it’s very well documented so we have the potential of discovering them and they would like well documented events too so that they’d know where they could go and, in this case, who they needed to be. The plus point for us is that if we assume that their time machine goes back with them and they need it to return home, then they have to be one of the survivors (on the assumption that at least the mark #1 time machine would be a fairly sizeable piece of equipment).

So, in principle, all we need to do is to check through the records of those survivors to find someone who a) doesn’t have a past more than a few days prior to them getting on the ship and b) disappeared after they returned to England (or Ireland). That task is easier than you might think as the Encyclopedia Titanicia has biographies of all of the survivors and, of course, you can ignore the first class passengers (too famous) and those who were part of families which narrows down the field somewhat.

So what’s stopping you?

Over the years I’ve been making efforts now and again to track down various friends from places I’ve been ranging from primary school through to university.

Thanks to the likes of FriendsReunited, FaceBook and LinkedIn it’s gradually become an easier task as the years went by. However, there’s a surprisingly high percentage of people who don’t use any of those services and particularly surprising in my case as I did computer science at university so I’d have expected the percentage of those from the course using these services to be higher than average. I even had the idea some years back that presumably there’d be quite a high percentage of the computer science people who would have their own domain name by now but, so far, I’ve only tracked down one person that way. Still, now and again there’s little flurry of activity on one or other of those sites and suddenly you find people you’d been looking for over a number of years.

One of those little flurries happened over the past couple of months and I’ve added more contacts from the past than I’d done in the previous several decade from primary school right through to university.

Obviously the people I’ve not seen from primary school have put on “a few years” with their appearance. However, what’s really striking is how differently people have aged from university. Probably a silly assumption to make but I figured that we’d all look like we were 22+X years but in fact the range of appearances is something like 22+X-10 through to 22+X+10 ie some look around 20 years older than others even though we’re all just about the same age.

Now, I can understand the shows like 10 years younger have 40 year olds who look like they’re 50 to begin with and who look 35 after their transformation because they’re picking people from a whole host of different backgrounds and lifestyles. It seems strange that you can get a similar range from people with quite similar backgrounds and, by and large, fairly similar life histories since the last time I saw them at university too.

What I must do next is to compare what people said they were going to do with what they actually did… I’m sure between this post and that one I’ll end up having nobody speaking to me 🙂