Unlimited …Endless (part 1)
I read a Sci-fi book as a 12-year-old; I don’t remember the title but do recall a passage. The passage that I paraphrase describes a young boy examining a strangely-shaped-and-shiny-piece-of-metal. He stares intently and is mesmerized. Night is falling as he leans back to rest against a large tree in his backyard. Then it happens.
First the bark, then the trunk itself gives way and he is at once swallowed by the tree and falling through a portal. There are bursts of light, massive stars, fiery comets and planets — all blurry and rushing by. Suddenly, it stops in a field of wavy green grass; he finds himself softly landed on an alien world.
Strange isn’t it? I don’t recall anything about the book before or after this passage. But this passage has been with me for my entire adult life. I grew up in a troubled and disruptive family, troubled by my mother’s mental illness and disrupted by my father’s attempt to normalize. Maybe that’s why, this notion that there may be a way to just go somewhere…anywhere and be in a new world, with a new life — well, it stuck with me.
It made me think of the nature of the world we live in, the world we share with each other. And I imagined what different shapes it might take if we had access to a tree like the one in the story. A way to change life instantly, unrestricted by the laws of physics, unrestricted by man made boundaries. What would it be like to live in a world of unlimited resources and endless frontiers?
Think about it. Enough stuff that you never have to take it from someone else. Enough space to never have to crowd each other. What kind of government would you have? What kind of economy? What kind of religion? I laugh at the thought. Just fantasy. Just a boy’s wish.
Gravity is real. There are no frontiers left — it’s all property deeds and national boundaries. “There is no tree,” I whisper to myself exhaling smoke from my French knock-off cigarette. I purchased a pack from the PX earlier — a little store for soldiers and expats working in the middle of nowhere.
Anyone who has lived in the Himalayan foothills will testify to the incredible beauty of the nighttime sky. Without any light pollution you can see the Milky Way. It is awe inspiring, a majestic ribbon of stars and planets parading before your eyes. Here I lay on the roof top of a temporary building watching it, when the obvious occurs to me.
Our world has unlimited resources and endless boundaries. I’m looking at it. It’s there spinning above our heads and before our eyes — more than we could ever want, or use, or even need. Space so vast its measured in the time it takes light to travel in a year! It’s natural revelation, and whatever else it may be saying — clearly it’s shouting to you and me that unlimited resources and endless frontiers do indeed exist! (To be continued)
