Culture is Imploding

MovingPictures: The Phantasmic Turn

I Have Come Here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubble Gum...and I'm all out of Bubble Gum

[||Frag||m|en|ts||] of the Present Future

So ends my last signal until we reach
 our destination. We are now on automatic,
 a mere hundred and five light years from
 our base ... and at the mercy of com-
 puters. I've tucked in my crew for the
 long sleep. I'll join them presently.

Within the hour we shall complete
 the sixth month of our flight from
 Cape Kennedy. By our time, that is... 

But according to Dr. Hasslein theory of
 time in a vehicle traveling at close to
 the speed of light, old Mother Earth has
 aged a few thousand years since our de-
 parture -- while we have scarcely aged
 at all.

It may be so. This much is probable: the
 men who sent us on this journey have long
 since been moldering in forgotten graves;
 and those, if any, who read this message
 are a different breed. Hopefully, a
 better one.

I leave the twentieth century without
 regret. Who was it? Marshall? ... said
 'Modern man is the missin 'a link between
 the ape and the human being.'

One final thought -- nothing scientific,
 purely personal. Seen from up here,
 everything looks different ... Time bends
 and space is boundless. It squashes a
 man's ego. He begins to feel like no more
 than a mote in the eye of eternity. And
 he is nagged by a question: ahat if any-
 thing, will greet us on the end of man's
 first journey to a star? Are we to believe
 that throughout these thousands of galaxies,
 these millions of stars, only one, that
 speck of solar dust we call Earth, has
 been graced -- or cursed -- by human life? 

 I have to doubt it.

That's about all. I wonder if Man, that
 marvel of the universe, that glorious
 paradox who has sent me to the unknown...
 still makes war against his brother., and
 lets his neighbor's children starve.