The Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) arrived in lunar orbit today. It’ll enable us to learn more about the moon’s lumpy gravitational field and internal structure of the moon. This year, school kids will begin controlling the lunar platform and snapping pictures of the moon using the UCSD Moonkam.
Pause to consider. This will be the only boring, drab, normal world that today’s 12 y.o.’s have ever known. Their world view: “Yes, of course I can personally control and perceive the universe through sophisticated robotic platforms orbiting other bodies in space; who can’t? Duh.”
It’s always boggled my mind that these are the kinds of everyday experiential and perceptual deltas that so-called normals utterly fail to incorporate into their puckered expectational world model. Yet millions of everyday futurists like us immediately, instinctively echo, “Duh? No Duh!” I’ve always wondered how and why is it that so many humans can immediately and vividly comprehend just how rapidly the perspectives of today’s 12 y.o. will come to shape the entire world, while so many others believe that 12 y.o.’s (or children of any age, 12 to 62) are powerless snot-faced punks to be “put in their place.”
May 2012 also be the year of the 12 y.o. Let’s listen and learn where the future is going from the people who are right now best positioned to decide and execute such visions. It ain’t you and it ain’t me. We’ll be long gone, six feet under, while they may be setting foot on moons orbiting the sixth planet from the sun, without the slightest reservations about whether or not robotic embodied cyborg reality is reality.
It’s all RL.
