Now you're talking, BMR! Just as there are fish and shrimp farms these days instead of relying only on the oceans, perhaps they will need someone to build and run the factories where the nanoclothing will be loaded with the nutrients we need - nanoclothing that will feed nutrients through the skin according to the signals it is receiving from the monitorbots swimming around in our blood. Is that wild or what?
The wisdom of Louis L'Amour ------ Are you a Louis L'Amour fan? I am. I especially like his Sackett series - his series of books about the Sackett family that came to the new world from England and ended up being legends (fictional) as the American West was won. The Sackett family in this series may have been a fictional family, but the books were written with a great deal of actual world and American history interwoven into the stories. In addition, Louis frequently threw in bits of his personal beliefs and wisdom for all of us to consider. This first example I will give you is from the book, The Warrior's Path, which is the 3rd book in the series. Books 1 and 2 were about Barnabas Sackett, why he decided to come to America, and what he did after he arrived. This set the stage for all of the other Sackett books. Barnabas Sackett's first son was Kin Sackett. His second son was Yance, and his third, Jubal.
In this book, which is primarily about Kin and Yance, we find them in unexpected places on unexpected missions. Kin decides he must go to the West Indies. (I'll let you learn why yourself if you don't already know.) On his way back, he is out on the deck of the ship feeling the effects of a storm that is tossing them around.
The Warrior's Path (a Sackett novel) by Louis L'Amour - from Chapter 18 - circa 1620's
Strong blew the wind, dark the angry clouds, vivid the lightening. Upon the deck, near the mainmast shrouds I stood, one hand upon them to steady me, my eyes out upon the sea, its dark, huge waves lifting like great upthrusts of black glass, raged along the breaking edge. My father had gone to sea in his time, but I had no love for it. He had bred a landsman, whether he preferred it or not.
There was a challenge in the storm, a magnificence in the power of the sea, and I rode the deck like a gull upon the wind and confessed inside me that while afraid, I was also drunk with it. Salt spray, stung my face; my tongue licked it, tasted it, loved it. She put her bows down and took a great sea over them, and the water came thundering back, the decks awash, the scuppers sucking and gasping.
John Tilly came down upon the deck and stood beside me. "Tis a raw night, lad, a raw night! We be sailing north with the coast out yonder, and many a proud ship gone down in weather no worse than this!"
"I'll be glad when I'm ashore," I told him frankly. "I want my feet upon solid earth."
"Aye!" he said grimly. "So think we all. We think ofttimes in the night that once the storm is over and the storm gone, we will go ashore and stay there. We'll tell ourselves that in the night watches, but when the day has come, and our money is spent ashore, then we go seeking a berth again, and off to sea it is."
"I am a man of the hills and forest."
"It may be so. Your father made a good seafaring man, though, and belike you could do the same given time. You are a strong one and active, and you've a cool head about you. I saw that ashore there."
"Ashore?"
"In the fight with Bogardus. Ah, lad, I feared for you! I've seen him with a blade before, but you had him bested --"
"My father taught me, and the others."
"It showed. I could see your father's hand there, but you've the greater reach and height. He never beat a better man than Bogardus, but you did not kill him."
"I have no wish to kill. A man's life is a precious thing, though he waste it. A life is greater than gold and better than all else, so who am I to take it unless need be?"
"He intended to take yours."
"He has not my thoughts, nor my wishes nor my desires, and if he lives, life may bring him to wisdom. Who knows? It is a good thing to live, to walk out upon such a deck as this and feel the wind, to walk in the forest on a moonlit night or out upon some great plateau and look westward --"
"You, too?"
"What do you mean?"
"Ah, you are your father's son! He looked to the westward, too! To his far blue mountains. But was it the mountains? Or was it that something beyond? We need such men, lad, men who can look to the beyond, to ever strive for something out there beyond the stars. It is man's destiny, I think, to go forward, ever forward. We are of the breed who venture always toward what lies out there -- westward, onward, everward."
We were silent then, riding the deck as it tipped and slanted. She was a good ship, even as she had been in my father's time, and she bore a good name (his mother's name, Abigail).
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After the Columbia disaster it was night for a while. Then, the sun came up, the next space shuttle was made ready for flight into space, and another crew of astronauts flew off to their glory, and, with them, the hopes and desires of many people who believe that our destiny is, indeed, to go to the outer reaches of the universe.
I've had a couple of people say to me, "If people start living to be hundreds of years old because of advances in G, N, R and medical science, how is the earth going to be able to handle all those people?" Ray Kurzweil matter-of-factly states, "It's simple. All this exponential growth in technology will allow us to go out into the universe which is what man wants to do anyway. It's our destiny. We will want to extend our knowledge and our intelligence (by then a combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence), and that is how we will do it. There is much more to learn out there." I believe Louis L'Amour understood this.
