Have You Made Your Arrangements II?

Grant’s Tomb

The mourning process is constantly changing. Just as attitudes towards sex have evolved over the years, so too has mourning. Once an activity associated with sadness and remembrance most mourning today is about real estate, with a good deal of remembrance being handled in The Cloud. When people think of mausoleums they are often frightened away by images of Grant’s Tomb, but today the mausoleum is fast becoming the burial vessel of choice since it offers space for the kind of amenities that are guaranteed to attract loved ones. Even though most mausoleums can’t travel,  many can be like RV’s to the extent that the most modern ones come equipped with kitchens, bedrooms, showers, televisions and even small gyms (which allow visitors to remain aerobic while they are paying their respects). Moore’s law predicts that microprocessors will double their capacity every twenty four months, resulting in the fact that increasingly large amounts of data can be stored on smaller and smaller chips. This means that most computers can handle memorializing on a greater scale than ever before. You don’t have to worry about remembering or being remembered when you know there's a computer taking care of the whole process for you. Moore’s law can also be metaphorically applied to the question of remains, for those who are not interested in being interred in either a mausoleum, crypt or grave. Modern methods of cremation have allowed for human ashes to be reduced to increasingly smaller units. In one recent case a young woman carried the remains of her recently departed aunt in her pierced navel.

Starstruck

                                                    NASA

According to the Times (“In a Breathtaking First, NASA’s Voyager 1 Exits the Solar System," NYT, 9/12/13)  on August 25, 2012, Voyager I, originally launched in l977, passed from “solar plasma” or what is known as the heliosphere to “the plasma of interstellar space.” In lay terms Voyager I exited the solar system to begin the next stage of its journey. Travelling at the speed of 38,000 miles per hour it will take about 40,000 years to reach its next destination “a dwarf star dispassionately known as AC+793888 in the constellation of Camelopardalis,” according to the Times. Reading the Times story at first creates a feeling of déjà vu. You may not have heard of this star or that constellation but it all sounds like an episode of Star Trek. The Stars My Destination is the title of novel by the sci fi writer Alfred Bester, first serialized in Galaxy Magazine back in l956. What’s hard to awaken to is the fact that this isn’t science fiction and that the self-same level of capability that sent Voyager I into orbit could easily have sent off a much large ship, say something capable of carrying a biosphere. Following Moore’s Law computer chips keep getting more and more powerful. According to the Times when Voyager I left the earth 36 years ago it had computers “with one-240,000^th the memory of a low-end iPhone.” If those computers took it the first ll.7 billion miles to the edge of interstellar space, one can only imagine the capability of future Voyagers powered by quantum chips. The story made it to the front page of the print edition of the paper, but containing all the usual diagrams, it looked like a lot of pieces that have been written about NASA space missions. However, if you looked closely at the photo, you could see the chrysalis of the spacecraft that would some day transport generations of a dying civilization to their new home on a far away star.