We are yet in the process of forming a cosmological worldview that is “universal” at least in relative scale. In my own solitary opinion this universal worldview has been limited by an incomplete and insufficient Big Bang cosmological paradigm that asks fewer questions than it answers—but that is a blog for a different day.

The central question on the line here and now is Fermi’s paradox intelligently posed as an as yet unanswered question—“If they are out there, then where are they?”

Just to cast this question as it has mainly been posed as a SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) type problem, may be restrictive in itself, as SETI research and theory has been part of a larger theoretical research set of the applied search for extra-terrestrial life ultimately of any form or kind, however possibly intelligent. Even more, it is important to understand how critically significant answering this question may be, not just from the standpoint of our interest in space, space travel and colonization, to include the reasonable transferability of earthbound biomes in relatively permanent, long-lasting space-bound biospheres (think at least Winogradsky columns or even extreme cancer cell cultures on petri-dishes.) The search for extra-terrestrial life, especially ET intelligent civilization, is a huge driver of space-directed scientific curiosity, and actual discovery of ET lifeforms will surely lead to more questions than answers, but that is the basis and goal of good science.

I cannot but approach the problem from a General Systems Theoretic approach as an anthropologist interested in the possibilities and limitations of space-culture and civilization. Extraterrestrial life is possible not just because it is imaginable, but also because we know it actually exists, if only upon earth. Stochastically speaking, with an infinitely open system, infinite possibilities entail in the structure of the large and long-run the near certain likelihood of the rarest of extreme possibilities. In short, given the right conditions, life will emerge and intelligent civilization will evolve eventually, however unlikely its odds of survival in the large and the long run. The real challenge is overcoming the universal relativity of our observational sphere of the larger universe as a function of the absolute speed of light.

Several conditions must be met or dealt with if we are to perchance discover ET sooner than later, if ever at all.

These conditions include:

1. The presumption of an infinite and open universe, permitting ages of star-systems well beyond those cosmogenic models delimited by Big Bang theory (They are probably out there, but most likely too, too far away to be immediately contacted, much less reciprocated within two-way communication.)
2. A realistic rendering of the Drake Equation based upon increasing observation of Extra-Solar planetary bodies and systems well beyond our immediate Solar compass, that must come from our exploratory discoveries and adjustments as they happen and have happened. Already, we are coming to realize a Milky Way far more populated with diverse planets and other kinds of star systems than we ever could previously imagine or credibly believe. We may well yet find ET life forms very common in different forms of adaptation within many proximate star systems.
3. A realistic accounting of general relativity that entails our incomplete knowledge of a contemporaneous, instantaneous Universe beyond our relative sphere of the observable universe (the likelihood that intelligent civilizations probably exist but are too far away to readily contact without prolonged “delay” or with reasonable simultaneity.)
4. A realistic accounting of advanced civilizations on the higher end of the Kardashev Scale, which by chance may exist relatively proximate to our Solar system and that have enough curiosity and capability of signaling to be detectable from our Solar System.
5. Last, but certainly not least, is the expansion of our sphere of observability by our increasing technical and technological capacity to send out long-term “un-humaned” robotic, relatively autonomous, space vehicles with increasing capacity for long-distance and fine-scaled observation, for advanced communication, both back home—to earth—and to other mission vehicles, as well as also for targeted broadcasts well beyond into the greater depths of extra-Solar space.

By way of refrain, our interest in space exploration, observation and discovery, in large measure driven by the quest for ET life-forms, parallels both our human-interest based quest for long-distance and long-term space travel and space-colonization, and our growing earthbound global circumscription by human civilization, impacting global ecologies on all levels, in all ways, and in all places. However small or large we see our living planet, it is ultimately finite within an otherwise infinite universe, wherein exists all the stochastic possibilities, long-run likelihoods and potentials for ET life-forms.

We must remember finally that all systems have their beginning and their end, and our only ultimate hope of survival rests with the stars.
In regard to Fermi’s profound Paradox, the solution may be to answer the question with another hopefully profound question: Of all the stars in our nighttime skies, which is not home? It is only in and among the stars that we will find our full humanity.

I can imagine multiple reasons making up the complex motivation to blog. Blogging itself may be a somewhat passe’ thing on the Internet anyway. Facebook, Chat-bots, and content management systems may all have some degree of blogging potential, but the purpose and function for blogging may be usurped for other purposes like news dissemination, social networking, constructing social solidarity with some group or network, persuasive influence of a target audience, or just plain old simple egotistical and personal vanity. Certainly blogging by itself cannot compete with the power and pace of the “intelligent” development of the Internet.

I like to think I blog for two or three main intersecting reasons. First is the use of the blog as a new writing forum and framework for the rapid reconnaissance and exploration of new ideas, especially ones that collide in a fertile manner across semantic and cognitive domains. Secondly, it is to continue to exercise what’s left of my old writing muscles to keep tone and fitness of those muscles. Third, I simply like to blog for blogging’s sake, because I have long written just for the sake of writing. Beyond those simple reasons, I do not attempt to justify this line of effort on any grander or global scale.

Certainly the potential power of the blog is its global reach and potentially global influence. I’m sure “going viral” has its own advantages and disadvantages, but remaining low key, “just doing one’s own thing,” is not one of them. If I were truly blogging just to blog, for M. (un-gendered Mr./Ms.) Blog’s sake, then it would be enough to sit in my small lonely office and just compose letters to myself. If I could afford the postage and envelopes I might even mail them back to myself and claim poor-“person’s” copyright. What a way to practice my “dis-cursive” penmanship at least.

For myself writing has been a solitary endeavor, but publishing has been even lonelier. Writing all my life has been a vehicle to escape the world and to create a world primarily of my own imagination. I have written many manuscripts to have them pile up in out of the way corners of the house or to stack up in banker’s boxes over the years, inviting cobwebs, mildew and sometime even rodents. I kind of feel like blogging eliminates somewhat the remaining debitage of my yet active years on earth, during which time I can slowly and carefully, gradually, begin tossing a bunch of old paper work into my fire-pit in the backyard.

So now I blog primarily for M. Blog’s and my own sake. We make a least a good if strange “schizoid” duo. Though I have repeatedly lost several blog efforts with a substantial quantity of content, I miss the tune-up and toning that working out with M. Blog on a daily basis brings to my authorial persona. Now all we probably need is some new 3-B (Bureaucratic Big Brother) or perhaps some “Uncle X” to monitor what M. Blog and myself might digitally “dis-curse” about.

Human intelligence takes over where machine intelligence leaves off. Machine intelligence takes over where human intelligence leaves off. The two systems are at least in theory if not always in practice mutually complementary to one another, except when people begin mixing their metaphors of “Artificial” and “Intelligence,” which we have a strong tendency to do given the nature and structure of our linguistic intelligence. However powerful an A.I. algorithm or system might be, it is left to people to distinguish between real intuitive sentience and the simulation, however complex and sophisticated seeming, of such seemingly intuitive sentience.

I know my competition on this “Bloggishing” web-site. It is not the potential time of potentially interested readership who are too busy surfing and now “X-ing” the rest of web-world to bother with my Internet-conventional and mostly anachronistic “pages.” It is not even other Bloggers most of whom are both better writers and better published than myself. It is in fact not even the big Internet companies that are building these new “Chat” A.I. systems that purportedly can do miracles in simulating productive human consciousness. The competition is in fact these third and forth generation ELIZA like machine learning systems based upon advanced AI systems and technologies. My competition are machines, and most people today would prefer interacting with a seemingly alive and semi-intelligent machine than with a real other person, however dull or interesting the latter may really be.

My real competition for this aging doddering fool is a bloody sophisticated machine owned by a modern capitalist Ayn Randian “Howard Roark.” And it is really no competition at all because it is a game that someone like myself, of my age set, cannot even play well, much less expect to win. When and if I read someone else’s blog, I want to know and be sure that the blog was actually written by a real person on the other end of a two way computer terminal system, and not the plagiarized knock-off work of some Cyber “bot” or some criminal human cyber freak.

So perhaps we must again take heed Joseph Weizenbaum’s warning to the modern world made almost a half Century ago (“Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation,” Freeman & Company, 1976.) ELIZA was the epitome of simulated “true” artificial intelligence, functioning upon a seemingly intuitive and largely tacit level, but only projectively simulated in as much as it was received by and deceiving of sentient others who for a moment at least lapse in their own sentient judgment. The development of sophisticated and power modern AI will continue to leap light-years ahead, but it should not obscure as a developmental priority the fact or the facticity of human development.

What I have celebrated through my life’s work, however mediocre by modern standards, has been the basic honesty and value of human development and the development of truly human systems as a fundamental priority of our modern world, divested of any other “technological” considerations. In this regard, there is no other significant competition at all in my own little world at least, as this Blog will evidentially attest, except with my own self and my own limitations and weaknesses, of which there have been many.

The ultimate paradox perhaps is that I am all for Artificial Intelligence and advanced Robotics, as long as we do not over anthropomorphize it all. Advanced A.I. has its place, but that is not in substitution of or for human intelligence. A.I. as part of a larger human system, increasingly autonomous in function, has a critical role to play in the future development and facilitation of human systems, especially in terms of real working systems, except when it may potentially interfere with or promote technological development in lieu of the greater realization of human development.

I would argue that good blog would not, perhaps should not, or even could not well be in “natural” length much more than a single page of paper at 12 font and with single line spacing (or say between 500 and 700 words.) This limitation of length has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the text. Indeed, a better integrated text is always easier to read than an unintegrated piece of writing. Neither does this extrinsic limitation have much of anything to do with the inherent informational capacity of say an average 22 or 32 year old person, versus someone averaging 55 or 65 years of age. Perhaps it should be put like this: “if you can’t deliver 90 percent of the knockout punchline within the first page then there is no knockout likely to be had except instead a never-ending slug fest to the bitter bleeding end.”

The historical facts seem to read more like this: the average age of Internet readership is probably, per hour, younger than older, and the younger age set has probably had a vastly higher proportion of more average computing time during their short lives than those much older who came of age in a time when computing was still a fairly primitive appliance that no one could quite figure out what to do with it. Essentially, the average younger than older reader with more percentage of their lives spent uselessly on-line, will simply not have the patience or self-discipline to read a blog, even if fairly well written, down more than half a page in length, much less anything more than a full page in length. I would expect more than 70 percent bailing out before the end of the first paragraph.

Neither is it because younger people on average are stupider than their parents and uncles and aunts, necessarily. It seems only that they learned to move at an accelerated pace of processing, which if not maintained, quickly turns to boredom and “attention deficit.” Likely, their average parents and grandparents would demonstrate as a function of cognitive discipline a commitment to finish reading to the bottom of the page, even poorly written pieces, but that might not necessarily mean the older adult reader gained any more benefit from attending to the full reading than their younger children who probably moved on to more interesting things by the middle of the page.

It would be our grievous error to mistake a youth’s most apparent lack of interest as symptomatic of weak brain power or lazy attention, thus promulgating a theory of the loss of intelligence and a dumbing down of the younger generation, again, on average, just as it would also be a mistake to believe, much less assert, that older people are on average smarter not only because all the dumb have died off young, but only because they had the discipline to read a document, however poor in taste or lacking of flow, to the final word even if they had next to zero interest in what it was trying to say.

The point of all this being that we perhaps should not take too much for granted that which is almost completely new and historically unprecedented, and that which we little understand in any complete or truly correct sense. What we assume to be a text, and the qualities of a text, its literalness, its literacy and legibility, and its literariness and readability, that we older people assumed to be applicable and true de facto of any and all texts or even of any or all kinds of texts within their own natural, intrinsic limitations, may no longer apply in the technological mapping of a virtual world that is defined by digital text-like “pages” that flow unceasingly like rain through our computer screens as windows upon a virtual world. We move from a textual, traditional information age in which knowledge was always great but bounded, to a new post-textual modern world in which knowledge is unbounded but mostly of equivalent minimal value as anything decontextualized, or as something of real intrinsic worth, literalness, literality, or legibility.

The modern form of knowledge and information production is inherently transient, ephemeral, “virtual,” and only significant to the extent that it makes and leaves some mark upon the mind’s eye-view of the digital consumer, the new modern “every person” of the world. Reading a text ultimately is no longer a mainly passive process of making sense of strange printed letters and words on paper, but it is an active engagement, a participation in the on-going production of a virtual world that barely pretends to mirror and parallel the real world, if in fantasy only.

As I grow older now I’ve begun practicing again my cursive penmanship in order to bring myself back almost to the level at which I left off in 8th Grade—when I was all of 13-14 years of age. I remember letting go of the practice and use of penmanship for the sake of a “note-taking” shorthand-style that rapidly degraded into a form of print-manship that even I had difficulty reading afterwards. My adolescent rationalization was that I could print faster and in smaller combined spaces on limited paper in small notebooks—my goal was to be able to write as fast as someone might normally speak. It was a goal well achieved by my graduate years, after years of classroom lectures and seminars, but by the time of fieldwork only realized with a word-processing keyboard on a laptop computer. With regular practice for short periods—a couple of sentences here a page or half a page there, I soon came to notice a couple of interesting coincidences.

I have been regularly keeping my own notebooks for decades but all in note-taking, print-manship style. But my hand writing sucked to being mostly illegible even by me. As I consistently practiced my cursive in a small notebook, at first I noticed that a part of me that had been closed of, apparently in a cognitive sense, reopened with a new kind of “old memory” and sense of greater “hand-writing” capacity that was essentially illegible to anyone but myself. Secondly, I also noticed that as my cursive improved to levels left off in 8th Grade, so too did my printing style and lettering improve substantially with better line, fluidity, evenness, form of lettering, etc. Now I consider the practice psychologically and behaviorally pleasing to do, especially when done well, and I believe it is remediating perhaps of something important in the integration of my aging mind. A part of myself long since turned of, with many early memory associations, turned back on.

I believe penmanship, rather than print-manship, has become something all but lost in the brave new world among a younger generation, a lost skill if not art form, like English spelling, long division and complex multiplication. Now I am not one to publish calls to the return to the good old days of horses and buggies as a mode of transportation in order to prevent major automobile accidents and perhaps much air pollution. But I must critically question the advantages and relative disadvantages of the trade-off between intimate long-hand letters and finally formed, well written documents in actual words, and the speed and thrift of text-messaging, the economy of memes, and the noise and information overload of YouTube.

My family calls me a hoarder, especially of old books collecting dust and mildew. I wrote by typewriter and now by word-processor lengthy manuscripts that few have ever read. I refrain to my critically observant family members that I am not a book hoarder, but a bibliophile, and proudly so self-proclaimed. Yet I know I will have no Viking send-off on a small boat in which the majority of my books and manuscripts will be burned with my body. Instead, I can imagine most of my books ending up at the local dump or recycling back through another time the local “Friends of the Library.”

Then we must reckon with the passing of each generation to the next one descending, the loss of basic knowledges and skills and abilities possessed and often prized by those of the past. We of the passing generation are not the ones to gainsay the wisdom and values in a rapidly changing world of those who will inherit our books and our texts and other words, and who are now being raised within a technologically different world. Maybe not learning good penmanship is not a bad thing after all, but makes room for a brand new way way of communicating through digital texts in virtual, mostly immaterial, media rather than actual paper. Perhaps the new “old way” of paper print and penmanship was when compared to new technology just a downright inefficient means of literacy development. Perhaps everything will be OK in the future of the world, but somehow I still have doubts, and will not miss the way the world is becoming as much as I miss how it used to be with manual/electrical typewriters, land-line telephones, real books on a small bookshelf, and nice paper, pens and ink.

Then I also think and am glad that perhaps our youth are of a much smarter world than we grew up with, and thus will become much more intelligent about that world than we had been otherwise. At least they may not share my own sets of extremes that I have known too well in the course of my life and that served most often just as the limiting factors of my book-bound world and paper-biased worldview. Youth always has the potential of overcoming unprecedented challenges and rising to new levels of achievement far far away better than what we have ever previously known or even imagined. At least I hope so.