Is This a Good Idea? Blogs I'll Never Write

January 04, 2010

By Patrick Kiger

It's been many years since I read Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" as a teenager, but one of the stories still sticks in my memory. "Kaleidoscope" tells of a crew of astronauts whose spacecraft breaks up, ejecting them into space with no hope of rescue or survival. As they fly off in different directions towards an inevitable demise, they use their fading radio contact to exchange their parting existential musings and last wishes.

The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.

Hollis, the central character, has a parting thought as he descends into the Earth's atmosphere to be incinerated: he wishes he could do one good deed to make up for all his regrets. It was a pity, he knew, he had no more time for that.

Alas, there's no more time either for this blog, which is ending after two and a half years. I want to thank the Science Channel for giving me an opportunity to ponder the outrageous, troubling and occasionally blackly amusing march of technological and social progress in the early 21st Century, and I want to thank all of you who read this blog and posted your thoughts about the good and not-so-good ideas that I've written about here, whether it was to denounce the potential creation of human-animal hybrids or a telepathic microwave weapon, or to praise the concept of solar powered cars or floating cities or a space elevator.  And I want to thank the scientists, engineers, tinkerers and science fiction-writing seers of the world for dreaming up so many crazy notions that I never even came close to running out of material.

But that leaves me with a parting dilemma. Like Hollis, however, I bid you goodbye with regrets about blogs that I never got around to writing, about ideas that I'll never get to praise--or parody--in this space. I'll never get to write about worthy technological advances such as the WindTamer, a small-scale, super high-efficiency, bird-friendly turbine design that could someday turn parking lots and rooftops of big-box stores into a valuable source of alternative energy. I'll never get to advocate reviving and expanding the 1960s Project Mohole, and drilling hole 30 or so miles down to the edge of the Earth's mantle. We'll never discuss whether live webcasts of brain operations and/or tweets by surgeons in the O.R. actually serve some redeeming purpose, or are just the ultimate extreme in medical exhibitionism. For that matter, I'll never get to write about Twitter for toddlers, a trend that, in its way, is nearly as disturbing. I'll never get to propose a pay-per-view Sarah Palin-Arnold Schwarzenegger cage match to decide who is right about climate change (with the proceeds going to help pay Brazil and other countries not to cut down the rainforest).

The latter idea -- paying countries to save the rainforest, not pitting Sarahcuda against the Terminator -- is a good example of how change is increasingly moving at a speed akin to broadband Internet connections in South Korea. When I first put that idea on my to-do list back in early 2008, it seemed like a suitably improbable proposal that would be perfect for this blog. Who could imagine the developed world coughing up billions of dollars for such a project? Flash forward two years, and it's on the agenda at the Copenhagen climate talks. It's getting so that you hardly can blink anymore, without the risk of missing some paradigm-rocking development.

But enough already. As Al Gore once said, sadly, it's time for me to go. Maybe I'll go on to get a Nobel Prize too, but don't count on it, unless they start a new category for snarky bloggers. You're on your own now, to peruse Wired and New Scientist and a 100 or so more obscure blogs in search of more good ideas, and to argue about them with your Facebook friends. If I've stimulated your curiosity and imagination enough to make you want to do that, I'll feel like I accomplished almost as much as astronaut Hollis did, without ever knowing it, when he made his final reentry.

"I wonder," he said, "if anyone'll see me?"
The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. "Look, Mom, look! A falling star!"
The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. "Make a wish," said his mother. "Make a wish."