We Went to the Moon

Every once in a while you will see someone hold up their cellphone and say, this phone is 100 times more powerful than the computers NASA used to send human beings to the moon. They always say it with a smile to make the point of how fast our technology has come in the last fifty years.
It has never impressed me.
In fact, I find it a pretty sad commentary on what we have been doing with all this tech. What it really means is we sent people to the Moon with vacuum tubes and computers that took up entire buildings using reel to reel magnetic tape but it took microchips, and faster memory to launch Angry Birds.

Instead of using our incredible advancements to keep looking outward we have used it to create apps on phones that keep us looking down.

You might think I am exaggerating but some of the first benefits the public received from the technology that was developed for the Moon landing was arcade video games. That's right. We went to the Moon and what we immediately got from it was Pong, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

This past Monday, July 20th, was the 46th Anniversary of the first Moon landing. It barely registered on the news and was only mentioned as a curiosity at the end of shows. The Internet talked about it but only to direct you to websites and YouTube channels dedicated to showing you how it was just a big hoax. Its more than a little ironic that the Internet owes its early beginnings to the space program. The technology that makes all those Google searches for 'proof of Moon landing hoax' possible was originally created by guys who worked with slide rulers in their pockets to figure out the trajectory of orbits; not to make and cash in with their latest app, move to San Francisco and drive my rent up.

It didn't help that we got to the Moon, looked around, brought back rocks, left a plaque signed by President Nixon and then got bored because really it is just one giant barren rock in our sky. But it was supposed to be the start of humanities reach for the stars. Then again, every time you see perfect CGI special effects in a movie where Hollywood latest heroes are blowing up alien invaders I think to myself, of course that's what we would use our computers for now. It is much more exciting to battle spaceships with killer robots than it is to actually go looking for them. Then again, if there are intelligent life forms in the universe, why would they want anything to do with us?

While we are busy spending a billion or so dollars on keeping humans we call illegal aliens out of the country we are spending millions of dollars to look for alien beings from
space. What would more advanced creatures make of this? If, as a lot of people believe,  we are being monitored like the way we might set up night vision cameras to learn about animals in remote jungles, what would they make of our radio, TV and Internet communications? I doubt they would come here and my reason why is the Nazi's. The first TV broadcast with enough strength to escape the Earth was Hitler at the Olympics in 1936. If you watched all of that 'mini-series' play out, would you really want to visit this wacky blue marble? Besides, now we have reality TV shows.

We once thought these signals spread out into space like a giant ripple upon the surface of a pond, forever rushing away from Earth as our first ambassadors of what life is like here. We now know that the signal strength dramatically drops off. There is a lot of dust and radiation that can degrade the signals. However, if we can view and measure the almost imperceptible drop in light of a distant star as an alien world passes in front of it, I'm pretty sure any advanced space faring culture can pick up I love Lucy repeats, which is good, and Nickel Back songs, which is not so good. If aliens are visiting earth it is only to leave warnings for other advanced aliens among the stars. Yup, crop circles are the equivalent of driving in the middle of nowhere and you see a sign that says, no services at this exit.

What about ancient aliens visiting Earth is the past? Maybe, sure. Its possible. My reasoning for this isn't based on the History Channels embarrassing, Ancient Aliens show, its based on something that occurred during World War Two in the Pacific. There were many tiny islands in the Pacific Ocean that were seldom visited. Some had tribes that were barely known and others lived on islands so small and so remote that outside visitors were extremely rare. The Japanese and then Americans, built landing strips and outposts on these distant bits of land. To get the people on their side, each side also dropped food and supplies. When the war ended, so did the cargo drops. How did the tribes, villagers and people on these islands react? They built statues of the air planes they once saw flying overhead with palms, sticks and rocks as offerings to the beings who came from the sky with technology and food in an effort to draw them back. People have referred to them as Cargo Cults. Google it. Look at some of the photos of the 'planes' they built and read about how a 'religion' developed around waiting for the gifts and the people from the sky to return.
Think about churches with statues of Jesus and how they preach of his eventual promised return or the countless ancient cultures that built massive stone temples dedicate to their gods who came from the sky, taught them knowledge and promised they would come back someday. It makes you think, right? It makes me think that if all our cellphones suddenly crashed a 'cargo cult' would spring up with people holding sea shells up to their ears.

Sure, we are sending unmanned probes out to the distant worlds in our own solar system and we have made better telescopes to see farther out into the cosmic void but one of the most incredible photos ever taken has to be the astronaut's on the surface of the Moon and you cant get there with an app on your phone.

Cannon Balls and Christians

In the early 1500's, when cannons became better built and larger, they not only brought down castle walls, they also brought down views of the universe that the Catholic church had taught were fact. Aristotle had said the heavens were perfect and unchanging. Everything up there moved in perfect circles because it was the realm of God. Down here on Earth, where things were not perfect, things moved in straight lines. The problem is if you fired a cannon ball it did not shoot out straight and then drop to the ground in another straight line as Aristotle and the holy church said. However, to ask questions about this was heresy.
The irony is that if you were firing on heretics in the service of the church, and you wanted to actually hit them, you used the heretical system of targeting, setting the cannon at 45 degrees and allowing for the curved trajectory of the ball, and not the Church approved Aristotle view, that said such curved motion did not occur on Earth.
Any time religion has made a declaration about the physical universe it ended up being wrong. The planets are not affixed to crystal spheres. The Sun does not revolve around the Earth. Things can move in circles here on the ground and objects in space can sometimes move in straight lines. These rules may seem silly to us now but these were laws. To question them, even with basic observation, as Galileo did, could get you into a lot of trouble.
If religion has been wrong about the physical laws of the universe then there is a good chance it is just as wrong about the spiritual universe, too.

Religion still informs peoples ideas on everything from what you can eat, who you can marry, what is and is not sin, and how to worship. By the way, historically speaking, there is not a Muslim god, a Jewish god or a Christian god. All the arguments stem from the belief that only one of those religions got what God was saying correct and the others are misinterpretations of his word. That's why when I see arguments between religions that boil down to, my dad can beat up your dad, I laugh because its supposedly the same "dad."
To me religion is best looked at like cellphone providers. They all use the same technology and connect to the same place but one says you have kneel on Sundays, one says you have to wear a funny hat and another says you have to face a certain direction to get a "signal." And just like cellphones I imagine most of those conversations are one sided with people saying, "can you hear me?"

There is no consistency in the rules people follow either. Most Christians can trace their belief that homosexuality is wrong to a single passage in the Book of Leviticus written more than 2,000 years ago. The same book tells people not to eat pork or sea food, yet, here in America at least, bacon is treated as a birthright and I've yet to see any conservative Christians protesting a Long John Silvers because of the all you can eat sea food buffet.
The book of Leviticus also has issues with mixing things. For instance, planting two different types of crops in a single field is a sin and wearing garments made from different fabrics is also a sin. Sins, I might ad, that are supposed to be punished by death. That means if someone is wearing a cotton blend T-shirt with the words written on it, "God hates fags" that person, under the rules of their religion and their book, is equally deserving as being killed as someone who is gay. That's how you know people who hate gay people aren't looking to their religion for moral guidance; their looking at it to justify their own hate. Why else would you cherry-pick one passage about one group of people and forget about all the rules around food, clothing and planting?

These people are still "firing the cannon" in a way that is inconsistent with a modern, intelligent and compassionate society.

Jon Did a Show.

This story is fictional. Its about a performer named Jon. It is in no way based upon anyones actual experience. Got it?

Jon did a storytelling show. He signed what he thought was a contract to have his performance recorded for a future podcast of that show. Jon was surprised when the producer of that show sent him a message about the producer of a much larger company with a bad reputation wanting to use that recording on one of their shows. Jon said, "No fucking way! They are a company that has exploited stand-up comics for content without any monetary compensation. Besides, I don't feel comfortable having my authentic performance edited down for someone else to comment on as they expand their own fame and make money from what I have provided while I am struggling to make ends meet!"

Many emails were exchanged. The company purposed a one time fee upfront and then a 50/50 split on any and all possible profits across all platforms. They also said, hey why don't you come in for this new thing we are doing and we will pay you for that, too. 

Jon went to the building. It was a typical office building today. The lobby was the most aggressively unfriendly place Jon had walked into. All marble and art installation with no seats, soul or security guard at the front desk to let you up stairs. When the guard finally appeared and sent Jon to the floor he needed to be at, he was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement so he wouldn't reveal any secrets he might see on this special floor. 

There was nothing special there. 

The thing Jon has been asked to do is simply make fun of something. Yet, the host of the show isn't in the same room as any of the other people also contracted to make fun of things. The host is elsewhere but live via the wonders of the Internet. Jon thinks to himself, this is a stupid way to foster chemistry between people but hey, this is how they want to do it so he does it.

After doing the thing the company asked him to do and handing them the contract they asked him to sign, Jon waited for his check. When it didn't arrive in what seemed like a fair amount of time to wait Jon emailed the contact at the company and was told he needed to submit an invoice. Jon thinks to himself, why didn't they tell that to me when I handed them the signed contract that day? Then Jon thinks, is being paid in a timely manner for your performance an old school way of thinking in business? 

It shouldn't be.

As Jon leaves the building that day, after someone from the company sat down with him to explain what a great deal he is getting for his recording, he waits at an elevator. A man child looking at his phone looks up, sees Jon, then looks down again and says to Jon, "I haven't seen you in a while." Jon thinks to himself, it doesn't seem like you are seeing anything and perhaps I haven't been around because I am actually traveling the world, performing stories and jokes, making people laugh and…who the fuck are you again?

When Jon gets home there is a letter from a company that recorded a CD of his. Sure, the clubs air-conditioning wasn't working so the audience, waving anything they could find to create a breeze, didn't respond all that great to never miss bits and sure, Jon was lied to when he asked about turning the air on full blast before the show started (they didn't have any air-conditioning) and Jon sees that the royalties accrued so far haven't reached the threshold of $25 before they send a check out for a work of art he isn't proud of, but Jon thinks to himself, I'm sure that theatre in town will get back to me after that unexpectedly well attended story show the day after a major holiday in America, but no. They don't get back to him and so far Jon hasn't seen a single dollar from that show either. Jon gets mildly depressed but the next day a letter from Comedy Central shows up! So far, the show he was on forever ago, hasn't reached the place yet where Jon can expect royalties from them either. Discouraged, Jon contemplates suicide. Don't worry, people. Jon can't afford a gun.