jobstorming
It is almost September. Next month was the deadline I set for myself, for having some viable options thought up for next year. The need for this becomes especially apparent as I sit here warming my desk chair due to cancelled classes, and face the reality of my questionable usefulness as an assistant ESL teacher.
But it is undeniably a job, which is what I will be needing this time next year, so I am making a list. Carefully considered, in no particular order and with some disregard for viability:
1. Travel tour guide.
2. Grad school.
3. Website owner and maintainer.
4. Teacher.
5. Dolphin trainer.
6. Green building enabler.
7. Astronaut.
8. Something in a third-world country.
9. Starfleet.
10. Psychohistorian.
There might be more, but I think that covers a lot of ground.
Number 10 would be particularly cool, although probably a thankless task since humanity doesn’t yet have the million year history necessary for proper analysis, and even if it did and I could extrapolate the future, nobody would appreciate my predictions until I was dead. But I could still make the most amazing timeline ever, which has its own appeal. Grokking the depth of time really fascinates me, and my feeling is described well by this NYT editorial:
I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old…
It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity.
…3.5 billion years of biological history is different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time.
Asimov had an inkling, and his stories always took place over millenia. It was both awesome and alienating, because you knew you could not be the hero in one of his stories. None of his heros ever saw more than a fraction of the story. The Time Machine captured a sense of it, even the 2002 movie version had moments, but accidental spine tingles seem to be the best we can do to try and describe eons.
The author of the article said, “One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time.” I agree. It makes me want to stand in the Total Perspective Vortex (Doug Adam’s machine that shows you in one instant the whole infinity of creation and yourself in relation to it, reportedly with the one nasty side effect of destroying your soul), or at the very least to create the timeline to end all timelines.
Yes, the Ultimate Timeline. Now that would be a sweet, sweet project.
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