Our universe is poorly designed.
It is just an observation. I’m not saying I could build a better one, but honestly, I’m sure someone could.
You see, Life, in all of its perculiar varieties, seems to have at least one theme that is perhaps common across the entire spectrum of species. Everyone wants to intereact with someone else, in some fashion. This interaction could be in the form of, for example, a conversation, a drinking game or two people beating each other about the head with shovels. This latter passtime illustrates that not all interaction is conducive to our general well-being, but it remains true that we all seek out each other to engage in all manner of activities. Or to wager on the outcome of other people’s activities, such as which maniac dies first from a direct shovel hit to the temple.
First we were seperated by vast fields, or so I imagine (or rather, they imagined?). There were lions and tigers and hippy chicks from Kansas out there, so hey, let’s just hang out here in the cave for a few centuries. Eventually some one got curious – this seems to be how it always starts – and decided to find out what was past the trees over there on the far side of the field. He naturally did not come back because the aforementioned tigers and lions mauled him and sauteed him. This of course served him right (nosey bastard). However, he did not return to tell the other more sensible cave-dwellers that there was nothing so great about the other side of the field. Eventually some one decided he must have found a bigger cave and was never coming back. This inspired a whole buffet’s worth of folks to cross the fields and kept the four legged forest dwellers exceptionally well fed.
Anyway, where I’m going is, they eventually sought to find others to interact with. This is another common theme – escaping the lunacy of your immediate family for the strange yet refreshingly different insanity of other families. They found each other and then when looking for still others, until they came upon the oceans and for a time decided that was it, no one else to invite to the party was out there. But of course there was, and it took for-damned-ever for some one to figure out how to get over there and crash their party. Is this design intended to simply throttle us back, introducing different races and cultures to one another in a somewhat controlled manner?
If so, it works so well that its designers probably should have just stopped with the trees on the other side of the field. Why bother? Even if someday we do ship off some small contigent of humans to some distant planet, drop in unannounced and then proceed to commit two dozen cultural misunderstandings inside the first two and half minutes it still won’t make this layout anymore acceptable. If there are interesting lifeforms with better wine selections and hot wings out there then let us have a go at their menues today or at worst, next Thursday. Why do we have to always overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles first? Generations of really excellent people come and go while standing in line to get into the club, feeling the whole time as though they are seriously missing out on something truly wild and exciting. And why should they have to wait? What is the point of this kind of challenge, really?
Look, I guess my problem with it all is that our imaginations are so much farther ahead of what we are ever actually capable of doing and its maddening. We’re not ready to go inviting ourselves to an Alpha-Centurian weeny-roast yet, but in our minds we can practically taste the charred frankfurters already. And it’s not a matter of curiosity either, because half of us would already be running across the interstellar “field” to be ambushed and country-fried by grotesque space monstrosities. There is something out there and I want to interact with it, but odds are I won’t get the chance to. Because that is how the Universe is designed. 99.999 (and several million more 9’s)% utterly useless empty space. What I wouldn’t give to have five minutes alone with the architect of this plane of existence. Five minutes, and a shovel.
