Sunday, January 19, 2014

Olympic Dreams

This will be less a blog, and more of a statement about how and why I choose to strive for the goals which are my vision of life ahead. I recognize that life and our actions within it are often a result of seemingly random things coming together at just the right time. This Olympian's Manifesto is a result of just such a confluence of a few things in my life recently.

Perhaps the first thing that I should explain is why the title Olympic Dreams. One of the random coincidences of life is that just now, when we - the would-be settlers of Mars - are beginning to work toward our goal, the Winter Olympic Games are about to start again. the Olympic Games are named after Olympia - the site in Greece where the ancient Olympic Games were held, but the name calls to mind Mount Olympus, home of the Greek Gods of mythology. This, in turn, calls to mind the Mount Olympus which was named for the Greek peak, but which resides several million miles away on an entirely different planet in our solar system. Where Olympic athletes might be said to aspire to ascend Mount Olympus to dine with the gods, we potential Martians aspire to live in the shadow of Mount Olympus (quite literally. the likely landing site for Mars One's colony is quite near to Olympus Mons) an entire world away.

The first thing to impact my life to begin these Olympic Dreams was not the Olympic Games, of course, the first piece of the puzzle was myself. I'm just a guy, no different from billions of others on the planet, except that I am what Michael P. Kube-McDowell described as a starhead in his book The Quiet Pools: "There was something simultaneously delightful and pathetic about the starheads. They knew the schedule for the center's one LTO runway better than most allied staff, knew the difference between a Pelican and its near-twin Martin Rendezvous, knew the nine satlands and the governor of the Mars colony and the latest news and gossip from Ur. They came to the ob deck at Johnson Field as a solemn pilgrimage and then turned into wistful wishful children, noses pressed to the window on a rainy day. ... The starheads were obsessed with dreams they could never fulfill, and so came to touch with their eyes the only piece of that dream they could reach."

The first thing to come into contact with the incredibly fertile ground which is myself was, of course, Mars One. Mr. Lansdorp, Mr. Wielders, and the rest of the Mars One team has brought forth a plan of such complex simplicity that dreamers like myself can clearly see that it cannot be stopped and its unstoppable necessity makes the possibility of my Olympian dreams - which had been cold and dead for decades past - coming true. Mars One has relit the fires that propel me and changed my life from a pleasant plodding from comfortable  home life to comfortable work life to comfortable band life and so on until I comfortably and pleasantly plodded into the grave into a life with passion and purpose again.

The thing that caused me to write this out for the world to see was the Metamodernist Manifesto by Shia Labeouf which I ran across yesterday thanks to twitter. Reading through that document brought to mind Mars One so many times that I felt a clarity of thought about the venture which allows me to express it perhaps more clearly now than I could have before, and so I shall endeavor to do.

My Olympic Dreams are a paradox as the Metamodernist Manifesto describes so well. Since Mars One began to be talked about there have been doubters aplenty who will go on endlessly about all of the reasons why Mars One's plans cannot be realized and they seem to think that we who have applied to be colonists don't know these things. They think that we are ignorant of the dangers, unknowing the obstacles, and in need of education about all of the things that will stop us. The truth is that we know all of what they are saying. We are well aware of the dangers. We also know that those dangers cannot stop us. We have embraced our informed naivety and go forth in a spirit of magical realism which no obstacles can hinder. This pragmatic romanticism is exactly why mankind has not been stopped in its grand designs of years past. When we embrace the paradox, we can go from nothing to a moon landing in ten years with less computer power than you carry in your pocket today. As the Metamodernist Manifesto says "Existence is enriched if we set about our task as if those limits might be exceeded, for such action unfolds the world."

So come along on the journey with us. Today we are the1058. Soon that number will dwindle until there are four of us sitting on a firecracker and then it will grow again as we populate another world.

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