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Time Capsule Letter

Dear Future Archeologist’s,

I’m an Earth man, I’ve been alive on this planet for 31 orbits around the sun so far, and here’s what we’ve been able to figure out about this place. They call me Michael, and I write this time capsule for three reasons.

The Earth men before me carved pictograms, painted caves and build giant triangles in the desert and all over the world. Some of the things that we were sure were mountains turned out to be really big, really old triangles. They arranged giant rocks in all sorts of interesting ways all over the planet, but the sad fact is 5,000 years later we still can’t figure out what any of them mean, let alone how they managed to build these things in the first place.  So I’m going to do this in good ol’ American English so everyone understands what I mean. If you don’t speak American English, please see the above pictogram I drew which explains it all.

Two, if you found my time capsule, you probably found a bunch of other books, movies, t-shirts and other stuff from my time. And almost all of what you’ll find is complete bullshit and not to be trusted under any circumstances. I’ve collected the full width and breadth of my species knowledge so far into this one printout so you’ll have it all in one spot.  And as luck would have it, putting all our knowledge into one document is pretty easy because, we in fact, know very little at all.

Which brings me to the third reason why I write.  We are a lost species on the brink, detached from our past and unsure about our future. Here’s what we got figured out so far.

We are surround by stuff, it’s absolutely everywhere, you can’t swing a stick without hitting stuff. And we’re made of stuff, the same stuff actually.  It seems, stuff is made of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. That’s how we describe it anyway. Protons are most of the actual stuff, and if an atom has one proton we call it Hydrogen, if it has 79 protons we call it Gold and so on.  Our scientists are busy smashing protons together to see what they’re made of,…but that’s mostly because our scientists are really good at smashing stuff, we haven’t really evolved that far in this regard.

But it turns out most of what we call stuff isn’t stuff at all, atoms are mostly empty and I’m curious about the other 99.9999999999999% of the atom, which we call Energy.  And I’m afraid we know next to nothing about Engery. We are a species that worships “stuff.”

We figured out a bit of how Energy is expressed, as light or heat or as electricity in our little blinky blue pocket screens. There was this Einstien guy who figured out a bunch of stuff about Energy, he was pretty cool. There was this guy named Tesla who seemed to have a more profound understanding of Energy as Electricty than most, but we called him crazy, bankrupted him and then kept much of his research a secret.

We know that Energy seems to behave strangely compared to our more respectable Earth man standards and one very important and very odd thing we discovered is that electrons only exist as a wave of probability if not being observed.  I don’t know if any one has asked if it’s the Energy itself that’s the probability wave or the little bit of “stuff” that comprises the electron. Either way, we’ve done very little with this knowledge and it’s considered to be a scientific curiosity, which is too bad.

So that’s the swimming pool and everything in it is either biology or not biology.  As an Earth man I seem to be a particular evolution of biology. I don’t know any more than that. Thinking of biological evolution as a fractal process is the cleanest model of our biological reality we’ve come up with so far.  A bottom up naturally occuring God, governed by the equisite mathematics of pi and eons of Fibonnacci iterations seems to.inform us with it’s beauty and other explanations man has come up with so far seems clunky and mechanical by comparison. 

So Darwin and the atheist’s get a point for being correct on the matter of biology but no one has been foolish enough to offer up an explanation of Energy, which by it’s scientific definition can neither be created or destroyed. This Energy that just “IS” is as far as we can see from here, our rational minds are blind past it and we can only guess at it’s marvels. This is what we call God.  One thing that we know about Energy is it seems to delight in expressing itself, our word for it is Greek, meaning “activity or operation” in fact the trickiest part for us has been harnessing it and getting it to hold still long enough in a battery to power our blinky screens for a few hours. Electricity will always seek a load, heat will always be on the move,…Energy seems to have a will for and gets a kick out of doing things.

So everything else seems to be a matter of Philosophy, and let me tell you about Earth man philosophy. We love a good story, we sit around fires to tell them, funny ones, scary ones, we have Story boxes that we call TVs, and a new TVs where you get to pick your own stories that we call the Internet. We read stories aloud to our children at night so it’ll be their last conscious thought before falling asleep. We love stories. And we’re curious creatures, always wondering about the stuff we’re smashing it into bits. And as I mentioned, we know next to nothing, plus we’re curious, plus we love stories. And that’s how you get mythos. But here’s the thing, we’re also really forgetful creatures who love the familiar and we tend to forget that the mythologies are in fact mythologies, and we confuse the model with reality.

But the mythologies started to wear hats.  After we invented agriculture, and the farmer needed a more involved god than the hunter and gather had required. And then we invented commerce and trade, and the bankers needed a more commercial god. King’s needed a more authoritian god and so on and so on until there’s nothing left to do but fight over who’s mythology is best.  If monkey’s start farming tomorrow, within 2000 Earth orbits they will have killed their first Messiah and be on their first crusades another 1000 after that.

The fact is, we’re a lost species.  There’s a gap in our knowledge, it seems like there was an Ice Age or Comet Impact or something big a long time ago. This big event killed the big lizards, which was good because those giant ass lizards sucked,…but it also seemed to have a been a big reset switch on our species. Our ancestor’s carved a bunch of strange things but we don’t understand. We have some really old books and stuff, but they seem pretty bogus as well.

That’s just it, it’s all bogus, it all feels way too small and way too restrictive.  It’s been worse for the past couple hundred years.  The power went from us, to the Church and their Warrior Kings, to the Banks and their Politicians and now into the back rooms where it seems that Corporations handle the day-to-day power mongering. And the mythologies have turned into outright lies, and we don’t know which way is up anymore and we’re terribly afraid as a species.

There are many secrets and enough evidence of collusion and conspiracy to suggest a cabal of greed. Some say illuminati, some say the Pope, the Queen, Reptilian Kings or even Satan himself.  Whatever you want to call it, I think it’s safe to say that overall we’re not doing as well as we could with our Energy and our resources as a species.

If there are humanoids on planet Earth as you read this, they will be decendants of these fucking-fuck-wads.  I know this because most of us can’t afford bunkers or spaceships like they can, and secondly because they are trying to kill us.  We know this because they told us. Someone actually took the trouble to carve it in stone. And if I were you, I personally would not trust anything these humanoids tell you.

Simply, something stinks and as a species I think we can do better. We’ve outgrown our ways and are driving headlong to the brink of some heavy duty stuff and we don’t know who were are, where we’ve been or where we are going. It’s sad to be lost like this.

Now I don’t know what we should do, I’m just writing this down for posterity. No one knows, and anyone who says they do is a liar because its only describes the symptom. And if you go around chasing symptoms rather than addressing the problem, then you have a pretty good idea of how Western medicine operates.

So in the absence of a larger program or purpose, and rather than dare propose a solution to such a monolithic symptom, I just wake up each morning and pick the highest quality thing to do that I can do that day. And as I go about these shananigans, I’ll be nice to other biologies because we’re both just doing the best we know how. And I’m going to smile at people more, and look them in the eyes longer than the cultural three-second-maximum-then-look-away rule. More and more, I suspect it’s not what we do, but how we do things.

I don’t know if it will much matter, but it feels good, so I’ll keep doing it. It may or may not have more weight to it than that, personally I’d never bet against a fractal operating in a space/time dealy, but who knows, it seems that time and space is stranger than we could imagine, and not for the faint of heart.

So that’s about it, God only knows how long we’ve been on this evolution fad, but it’s a little humbling to take stock of the situation as a species like this. We weren’t all bad, when we weren’t crazy killing each other over which story was better or killing everything else because it was delicious, we were pretty beautiful creatures capable of amazing acts of love and brotherhood.

Your friend,

Michael

holiday shopping

What’s the hot gift for 2011?
What did the TV tell you it was?

I bet it’s expensive and made overseas
by the only folks more broke than artists.

I bet it’s obsolete and at the dump by this time next year.
Just in time to do it again.

This year, rather than store-fights over junk,
buy gifts they will love from local artists.