Sometime in the year 42,000 or so, our descendants may unfortunately discover that their ancient 20th century ancestors had unleashed vital information to a superior extraterrestrial intellect inhabiting an M-class planet orbiting Gliese 445. How would this be possible? Endurance and time.
The communication was in the form of a disc of gold and nickel plated copper grooved on one side to provide music, speech and, amazingly, photographic images conveying an attempted greeting from the people of Earth to whomever finds the record and (a very important "and" here) successfully deciphers the cryptographic etched images on the obverse instructing the finders on how to play the phonographic record (on a record player they would have to construct from scratch using said instructions since no player was included). Alongside the instructions was that image you see on the disk on the lower left side that looks like a simple starburst. It's a star map indicating the exact location of our sun in relation to nearby stars, including maybe even Gliese 445. And if they get it to play...there's oh so much more:
Anyway, this disk was slapped to the side of Voyager I (II has one as well), blast off into space, and is now somewhere just beyond our sun's heliosphere border (approx. 15.5 billion miles, or about 23 light hours away) zipping along at a rate of 38,210 mph. As mentioned, it should at this pace be around Gliese 445 in about 40,000 years. That's when the Ka' Krathepna, a particularly nasty (yet, rest easy now, totally made-up) race of warlike aliens will find it, decode it, and use a light-speed communication system they've created to provide our hapless descendants here on Earth with the answer to the disk's greeting, "Prepare to Die!" 17 and a half years later just a few years before their near-light speed armada spawns suddenly in Earth's orbit.
This is how my mind works.
And this is how it all began.
Yes, this blog's genesis was born out of the same naive spirit and foolish imagination as those NASA engineers of the mid 1970s.
In this, the very first post of this blog, I detail my thoughts then on what inspired me to begin this journey on the relatively new frontier of personal expression on the World Wide Web. And I still feel I was honest and true in everything I wrote about. The teenaged-created Time Reports were my first step into compiling my thoughts, feelings and dreams into a tangible record that could be preserved for the future. And that none survived very long burned me up by the new millennium when, as I still feel today, we had finally as a race developed a way for even a nobody like me to keep a simple record of their life possibly -- forever.
I commemorate this day, twenty years ago, when I started this Golden Record of my little life. I'm just a simple man living, as the blog titles identify, a life out of balance, using whatever degaussing tools I perceive necessary whether they be helpful or detracting, trying to find clarity in a very blurry world.