The Measure of Progress

400,000 kilometers is the farthest that humanity has ventured beyond cell phone reception. I came across an article on Wired.com about how to find an Alien Civilization. It led to another article on an infographic about how far apart things are in the Solar System. It got me thinking about how the future we were promised is still so far from us.

Only recently did the idea of using a video phone come into practical use in my life. It helps me keep in touch with my dad, who I rarely see in still images via his Facebook page, let alone see more than once every six months in person on trips back home (which begs another question for another day on another blog about why people from my hometown never take me up on sleeping at my apartment in the Greatest City in the World). We have, with the luck of our carrier and the reception we're getting with our phones, an infinite repository of information at our fingertips. Satellites floating above us to deliver that information. But no one beyond the bounced signal that returns to the ground to talk with when we hit send.

Neil Armstrong died the other day. As the internet meme jokes, "We're running out of Moonwalkers", it seems all too apparent that our existential egoism has neglected the fact that there are other places to explore than a celebutants boudoir orbiting servers in cyberspace. We can see on television the movie trailer of the next sci-fi blockbuster about going to another planet (and most likely being accosted by the indigenous lifeforms that either look like us or want to eat us), but we don't hear about humans actually going. They sit in a data center where they depend on automation to send pictures and data back to the home world. Where are the people?

I can only hope that in my lifetime - or that of the next generation, or even the one after that - might see the first human to sustain livelihood on another planet. It goes back to my previous post where I refer to the fact that as a human culture, we fail to unite along the simple grounds that we cannot inhabit this planet, nor this solar system indefinitely. Maybe we should get off our phones and work on getting off this planet?