Jose el Retardo

Have you noticed a definitive lack of exciting concepts coming out of our scientific community of late? I have. There is nothing happening in the world of science today that makes me excited for tomorrow. I know what you’re going to tell me: Jose, what about the Hadron Collider? When they flip the switch on that bad boy in mid-June, we’re going to find out what happened at the heart of the Big Bang! When everything around us happened! The birth of the galaxy! We will plug the holes in the standard model of physics and in doing so come that much closer to understanding ourselves!

What a yawn-fest. Plug as many holes as you want, but until you plug the gaping hole that plagues my bank account, you’re not really going to impress me. As far as I can tell, the only exciting thing that this collider might produce is a mini-black hole that would be strong enough to suck America’s colossal credit card debt into another dimension. Maybe whatever weirdo that happens to be in charge over there can deal with it—we sure as hell can’t.

Here’s another snoozer: Stem cell research. I am bored to tears hearing about it. It seems like even the most optimistic of researchers think it will be DECADES before any real benefit will come of it, and that’s if we get very lucky and all the religious zealots opposing the study of this field assemble together tomorrow under one roof for an anti-stem-cell-research fund-raising ball, and that roof gets struck by lightening, and they all become paralyzed. That would actually be freaking hilarious, because then we could all place bets on how many of them would suddenly have a change of heart regarding the very research they were gathering to prevent. I digress. My point is how can I be excited about something that won’t be doing society any real good until long after I’m dead? Sorry future people, with your infrared viewing eyes and your permanently hard abs, but I just don’t care about you—but then again, you don’t really care about me either; long dead with my ashes scattered to the four corners of the earth (which is exactly what I will insist upon in my will—heads up).

The sad part about it all is that we don’t even dream big anymore. As a matter of fact, we dream small. Thinner televisions (which are convenient but not inspiring at all), smaller computer chips (somehow it all adds up to more hours in front of a screen), smaller mp3 players, smaller phones, smaller DVD players (what a bunch of squinting morons we are becoming); these are the items that occupy the thoughts of our best and brightest product designers. All we do is take our existing inventions and make them less substantial.

It didn’t use to be this way. We used to dream GIGANTIC, and then we made those dreams a reality. Alexander Graham Bell called Watson in 1876. In 1879, Edison invented his light bulb. In 1885, the first gasoline-powered auto was built in Germany.

In 1903, the Wright Brothers took flight. The first pictures viewed on a reflected light television were field tested in 1927.

All of this took place in a span of 51 years, people. Can you imagine? If you were five years old when the first telephone call was made, you would only be 56 years old when you heard about the television on your new radio. It makes 1960 to the present day seem like a monumental waste of time. Go ahead and throw space travel into the mix, with the moon landing taking place in 1969 leading up to the international space station today—but look at the achievements listed above and think about how these inventions changed how the entire world lived their lives. Space travel has netted us very little in this regard. So we found out how ants build in zero gravity. Big fucking deal. How is that going to teleport me across the room? How is space ice cream going to warp-speed me to Alpha Centauri? Give me a break. NASA, you make me sick. You are a bunch of pathetic losers, and I am so ashamed of you that I can barely even look at you. I have never been more disappointed with an agency in my entire life. Go to your room. We will talk about this later. I SAID we will TALK about this LATER.

Yes, the internet is cool. I will give you that. The interconnected society created in the first-world nations and spreading to the third world is truly awe-inspiring, and is the reason why I can complain to such a large number of readers with such reckless abandon. Kudos to you, Al Gore. Thanks for the intertubes.

Regardless.

I will say this: When the robots take over, I will feel much better about things. At least this might give us the motivation to finally make the move to another planet, and we can all kiss this rock goodbye forever.