So I finally got off my ass and rolled the dice again… but I cheated. This is where the dice told me to go:
This is actually where I went
The Intrepid Museum is not actually that far away from 32nd and 12th. It is located at 44-45th and 12th, and I have really, really wanted to go since they put the Enterprise there.
To be fair, I eventually walked my ass down to the stupid intersection (there isn’t actually an intersection for 32nd and 12th, so I went to the one closest to it) so that I could say that I was actually where I was supposed to go. Proof here:
Also, sorry the pictures suck. My phone camera sucks, it’s scratched and now all of my pictures are blurry or too bright. This post is most likely going to be very picture heavy, and very long. I have a lot to say this time.
The Intrepid
The Intrepid was very impressive. It was as cool as I wanted it to be, but it didn’t really blow me off my feet. There were all of these super cool little stories and facts that they threw at you which were fun to find. One of my favorite parts about it was the exploration area where little kids get to experiment and pretend they are astronauts, submariners, and naval officers. These are always the most fun for me to wander around in because even at 32, it is still fun to sit in a shuttle cockpit replica and pretend that you are an astronaut.
Also, LEGOs (because I fucking told you so):
The Flight Deck was probably my second favorite part because I have always had a fascination for airplanes and they had all kinds of old and new fighter planes parked up there. It was cool, it was nice, I basically forgot what I was looking at because the impact the Shuttle had on me overshadowed everything. Have some random pictures because I have nothing intelligent to say here:
The Enterprise and Human Endeavor
Totally unrelated, this week I started reading Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. I bought it because I like to pretend that I’m smart, and because I saw this video:
I am barely into Pale Blue Dot, and already I have had to use Wikipedia and a dictionary more times than I have in the last year of my life combined. I tend to believe that I am an intellectual person and that I learn very quickly, but holy fuck if there are not so many levels of intellect and understanding that are just way beyond me. There are very few times in my life where I have felt out of my depth and in which I was not in a position where if I gave it enough time I could muddle my way into understanding. Actually, I do not think it has to do with understanding. It has to do with the fact that there are people out there that think in a manner and fashion that dwarf more pedestrian logic and concepts. They take leaps of faith in their thought process that 99.99% of other people are incapable of making without guidance. That is what reading Pale Blue Dot makes me feel like – that I am an intellectual child and need the important things in life and existence spoon fed to me for understanding.
Anyways, that’s happening and then I went to go see the Space Shuttle Enterprise.
I have never in my entire life been as impressed with a single human endeavor as when I saw the Enterprise. I was in the shuttle hangar/exhibition for almost 2 hours and for the majority of the time, I just sat and looked at the shuttle and reflected.
Here’s the thing, The Intrepid Museum is doing a special called Hubble@25. They showcase the history of the Hubble (since it is going to be replaced soon by the James Webb Space Telescope http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/), talk about how excited they are that the maintenance work they did in 2009 is doing spectacularly so they can get more time out of it… and then they show a lot of pictures. A lot of amazing pictures. Here’s two random ones I just pulled from Google that look like ones at the museum:
I mean. Just look at them. The first one shows two GALAXIES that are TOUCHING. Wtfwtf. The second one is just an overview shot of a small section of the universe. If you look closely, you can see that each of those points of light is its own galaxy with its own unique shape. There is no way that I would believe that someone who fully understands the implications of those two pictures would not be complexly blown away. The implications are staggering. One of the most important ones comes straight out of Pale Blue Dot (super long quote inc):
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known
This is the pale blue dot that he is referring to:
There is nothing I can say that would be more pertinent than what Carl Sagan said.
Anyways, this was basically the frame of mind I was in (because I was reading on the subway on the way to the museum) when I walked into the Enterprise. Legitimately, I had chills running up and down my body for the first 30 minutes I was there. The reason for this is very simple: the entire reason that the Space Program and NASA exists is to explore something completely unexplainable. To become a part of something so much bigger than what everyone else on Earth is involved in. I sat in that room and thought about my life and all of the things that I have done / am doing to make myself feel like I have “achieved success”, and all I could think was that I will never contribute anything to something greater than myself or immediate sphere of influence with what I am doing. Never. As far as I am concerned, the lowest scientist, engineer, laborer, and janitor that worked on the Enterprise or works at NASA has done something greater with their life than I will ever be able to emulate on my current path. Their life’s work is dedicated to expanding the horizons of human existence while mine is focused purely on nominal and relatively marginal individual growth. How can you even compare?
When my sister and I were picking our career paths out of college, I used to joke with her about how she was going to have to marry rich or I would end up supporting her because she chose to be a teacher. 10 years later and now she’s married so now I just joke about having to support her. I used to look at the career path she chose and be a little sad for her. She is one of the brightest and most motivated people I have ever known and I could not understand why she wouldn’t take all of her intellect and go out into the world and make money; I could not understand why she wanted to teach. This spoken word performance by Taylor Mali pretty much sums me up. I’m the d-bag dinner guest in this story.
I used to tell myself that she was the bleeding-heart liberal and I was the capitalist dog. I used to tell myself that I did important work and that I was going places.
Now when I look at what I am doing with my life, I have to question a lot of what I am doing.
I could never see past the money. When I was together with Her, She used to tell me that I didn’t always have to be so excited when I got a good deal, or when something was ridiculously expensive. All I could see, when I looked at my sister, was that she was getting paid a tiny amount, to live in a shitty neighborhood, to teach people who the system gave up on.
But here’s the rub, now I think she was the one that was right, and I am the one that is wrong. I make two or three times as much as her, I live/work in New York City, I am a good ways along my own career path and I am doing something that has always fascinated me. My problem here is that, when I describe it, everything I say is about how my life impacts me.
My sister’s life is devoted to helping those around her. She was responsible for leading multiple classes of high school seniors to a 100% acceptance rate at colleges. These are students that she met with 3rd or 4th grade reading levels. She nurtured them to pass the SAT and get their applications in to colleges. Her school takes hundreds of students that the traditional school system has abandoned and just passed on, and created worlds of opportunity for them. Now she is starting a new school as an alternative to jail / juvenile hall for young children. As I understand it, it is a minimum security system that forces inmates to get a college / associate level education.
That makes her work more important. That makes her more successful. That makes her a better person.
I used to be so proud of the fact that I was running Ownership interests in a major development project. The work that I do is interesting, challenging and very, very cool. I get to design and build hotels. I work with a family that has the ability and vision to try and drive sweeping changes in a neighborhood. There is always the issue of gentrification and the preservation of historical value that I have to deal with. There are always the people who do not like the work that I do. But at the end of the day all I am doing is making money. I am not working towards a grand plan. I am not doing city planning or have grandiose views on the creation of external value due to the development. It’s just like working with LEGOs. I get to build something cool, and I get to point at it when it’s done and say “I did that”, and then I will walk away from it and try to find the next cool thing to build. I will have had zero direct impact on creating value in anyone else’s lives but mine and the people that I work for. And that hurts and depresses me in ways that I did not ever consider before.
Human Endeavor is something that I hear a lot about in passing. I think it gets thrown around in the sci-fi novels that I read, and in the science blogs that I skim through. But it has never really sunk in. It is one of those things that people like talking about and pretending to understand. Like the literary tards who claim to have read and fully understood Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; or the science semi-buffs who like to pretend to understand the significance of the Higgs Boson particle discovery; or the political commentator who likes to discuss partisanship and the implications of special interest groups; or even my college professor who failed my analysis of a poem because I would not agree with her that the poet who loved baseball, wrote a poem about baseball because he loved it, and not because it was an allegory for the Cold War. It makes you sound smart to talk about things like this so you talk about.
My understanding of Human Endeavor has now clarified itself a little bit more. Human Endeavor is not a complex concept, it is not something difficult to grasp. It is merely the work of humans to expand the growth of humankind. It is exemplified by the teachers who teach for the sake of future generations, and the scientists who study for the sake of unlocking the secrets of the world/universe/galaxy. It is altruism for the sake of altruism, generosity for the sake of generosity, learning for the sake of learning and it is individual growth for the sake of individual growth. It is the ideal that only through the betterment of self and those around us will you truly succeed. It is the ideal that success should be based on contributions to society as a whole and not on individual growth at the sake of others.
Faith, Insignificance and New York Epiphany #2
As an individual, I am insignificant. Success cannot be judged by the strength of my resume, the size of my paycheck, or the social groups I run in. Success needs to be judged solely on the impact that my life has had on those around me; on the people that I have been able to support and help grow, the causes that I have helped champion and my own contributions to Human Endeavor.
Believe me when I tell you that this was a very, very sobering realization for me to make. I have been brought up in an environment surrounded by people who are traditionally very successful. My extended family has more doctors, lawyers, bankers and real estate moguls than anyone really needs to know. I was raised in an environment that applauded financial growth, smart investments and progress along a very narrow selection of career paths. After my undergrad, I was groomed for a career in consulting and checked all the right boxes to apply for a top MBA program. I fully expected to be working for a large consulting firm in my 30s, making obscene amounts of money, driving around in my standard-issue-Palo-Alto-BMW (I guess it’s Tesla’s these days).
Largely, that is still kind of what I am doing, but just in a different field. I want to make a lot of money. I want to be rich. I want to own a yacht and to build my own hotels. I want to be able to support myself and my family and never have to worry about money. This was never questioned. This was always the goal.
But now, I don’t know why. So what if I make a shit load of money. So what if I live on a 100’ yacht, drive nice cars, wear nice clothes, or retire at 45 to travel the world? There is a company in Seattle that fascinates me. It is funded by a private, independently wealthy person/family. They do work in the real estate space. They make money, pay their expenses… and then they donate everything else to cancer research. They get no press. No one talks about them. They basically don’t exist unless you know exactly what you are looking for. But they are such a better company than every single other company that makes billions. But no one cares.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Only that I’m having a crisis of career and I’m not sure how to resolve it. When I was in the little exploratory part of the museum, this little girl and her brother were sitting in the model space capsule when she turned to her dad and said, “Daddy, we are both going to be astronauts and explore space together.” I sat very quietly and waited for her dad to respond. What he said was “That’s awesome (daughter’s name I forget). We need more scientists and explorers.” High five dad. High fucking five. I took this picture to remind myself this happened.
I do not think that anyone really wishes to be insignificant, and it is very easy for each person to convince themselves that they are not insignificant. In the current state of the media, it is very easy for people to stand on their own little soapbox to push their own agendas.
I’m not sure where I’m going with that either. I find myself arguing about what I am actually trying to say in this post. I feel like I have so much to say, but none of it is coming out the way that I want it to. I want to talk about insignificance and how little what we actually do on a daily basis matters. I want to talk about why it is important to accept the insignificance so that you can try to make a more significant impact in the time you are allotted on this earth. I want to talk about faith, and the belief in something greater. I want to expound on my beliefs that the system is broken, we focus on the wrong things and how in the end, it will lead us and Humankind to ruin. I want to talk about all of these things, but they are too complex to talk about in a stream of consciousness. I promise that my next one will more effectively say what I am trying to day.
But now, I can’t find the words for any of it. It has taken me two weeks to write what I have now and that is too long. I leave you with another quote from Carl Sagan out of Pale Blue Dot:
“But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
And here’s a picture of Banana teaching me how to read architectural drawings because I forgot to bring him to the museum. Sorry Banana.
Of Dice and Demons 