Ask The Galaxy Brains

Each lunar cycle, a human will be allowed to ask The Galaxy Brains a question. In this session, the human will have a choice of answers to consume from three different Galaxy Brains. Please send all questions, be they advice, desire for human-life coaching, knowledge of future or past, or merely interesting recipes,  to mm@michaelmurray.ca.

This lunar cycle there were some temporal distortions and the question arrives to us from what the humans would understand as “The Past.” In the earth year 1713, a humanoid named Enoch wrote a question down and placed it in a bottle which he then threw into the immortal oceans, which has just now washed into this time line.

HUMAN QUESTION:

Is there, do you think, a large part of the world still left to discover?
–Enoch, 1713

ANSWER #1 FROM GALAXY BRAIN PETER SIMPSON:

Dear Enoch,

Yes, I do — though exactly what remains to be discovered, and where, depends on how you think about it. How inspired are you to think beyond the world as you know it? We’ve learned much in the 308 years since you wrote your note, but we’ve also learned to take our progress for granted. These days it seems that every amazing discovery or human-made techno miracle elicits but a collective “meh” from a jaded public.

I said to The Missus, “I fear that we have all lost our capacity for wonder,” and The Missus said, “You might be right. I often wonder what I’m doing here.”

I don’t mean “wonder” as in “I wonder what The Missus meant by that?” Rather, I mean “wonder” as in our ability to look upon the stars and the heavens and be struck with wonder by the scale of it all, and by the dizzying pace of technological and digital progress that brings it ever closer to us.

Is the type of wonder that takes your breath away even possible in an age when techno progress makes everything seem not only possible, but also inevitable and imminent? When every bored billionaire can build a rocket and spend Sunday morning penetrating the onepercentosphere?

But, Enoch, I digress into future things that are unknown in your age, even though by 1713 da Vinci had drawn and built “flying machines,” not to mention submarines and robotic knights, which in today’s world go by the name Terminator. I will give away no further future knowledge that could allow you to alter the timeline of history and make things happen weirdly differently, e.g. a timeline where I am not born at all, or perhaps am born but as a tadpole.

So, yes, there are parts of this world yet to discover, though none is easy for touristing, which I mention because your letter bears the precise date of the signing by England and France of the Treaty of Utrecht, so I presume you are feeling optimistic and planning a grand tour of distant, exotic places. You can take your grand tour and at the same time become a leading thinker of your age, by tweaking how you think about the “undiscovered.”

First, what you mean by “undiscovered” is lands that have not yet been seen by Europeans. Explorers from the Europe of your day would arrive at distant shores and declare the land “discovered” even as they encountered whole societies of indigenous people who had obviously lived there for eons.

Europeans were so fond of discovery that they sometimes discovered the same lands more than once, for example Newfoundland — which Europeans discovered at least twice and yet still named it a “new” found land. If such explorers lived today they’d be flying into foreign airports and claiming the arrivals concourse for king and country.

Now there’s the question of where you discover — or where you look. I suggest that you look to the horizon and then look way up and far away. Turn your eyes to the heavens and feel that breathless sense of wonder as you discover how almost incomprehensibly vast and varied our universe is.

Did you know there’s a cloud of dust called the Tarantula Nebula that is 1,800 light years across, or about six trillion miles? That’s about the distance that the average explorer’s ship in 1713 could travel in a million years — just to cross one cloud of dust that is but one of billions, trillions, megajillions (a word I just made up out of necessity) of objects out in space, and is nowhere near the biggest one.

So, Enoch, almost every single thing that exists in the universe is yet to be discovered. If you look up to the sky and discover a heavenly body, you can even name it after yourself. Welcome to the Enoch Nebula. Dream of it, Eno. Be proud of your cloud.

So there’s your answer. Now, I just have to send this reply back to you in 17. . . Oh, er, I see a problem. Please hold while I transfer you to tech support at Boston Dynamics, perhaps they can send it back with a Terminator. I assure you that when you see the new model your reaction will not be “meh.”

HUMAN QUESTION:

Is there, do you think, a large part of the world still left to discover?
–Enoch, 1713

ANSWER #2 FROM GALAXY BRAIN JANE WILSON:

( If anyone listening has a loved one with a brain tumour, here’s a link to the article describing the ocean micro-bacteria that has shown such incredible results and the scientists/doctors who are working on it.)

HUMAN QUESTION:

Is there, do you think, a large part of the world still left to discover?
–Enoch, 1713

ANSWER #3 FROM GALAXY BRAIN KATHRYN McLEOD:

Well Enoch, let me just say off the top that I consider my job here to be that of an advice columnist, and since you don’t appear to be asking my advice, I’m at a bit of a loss as to why I’ve been tasked with this assignment.

Fortunately, my experience as an office temp, a lifelong career which began in 1981 upon my graduation from university with an arts degree and a C average, means I’m used to being assigned tasks that may or may not have anything to do with whatever I was hired to do. This is because it’s generally left to a co-worker of the person I’m sitting in for to show me what that person does all day. So instead of doing that they often just assign me tasks like colour-coding the spines of books in an old library or cleaning out the fridge.

Being assigned these tasks is office code for: “It’s not my job to figure out what the hell Nancy does all day and the manager is in meetings until your assignment is over so welcome to the team and if I don’t come back to sign your timesheet it means I’ve retired so go to the 9^th floor and ask for Bob and he’ll make sure you get paid”.

Of course, this was all then, in before times. Now office work is digital and done from home – even in government. Indeed, a global pandemic we’ve been in since March 2020 forced our government’s hand, and a 5-year plan to go digital was condensed to a weekend, and office temps now work from home just like Directors General.

And 18 months later I go in to the office once a week to do the mail, which is the same as it was in your day, Enoch, and even though I’m a temp, it’s like I own the place. I’ve even started using the men’s washroom because I can and it’s closer than the women’s.

Oh and “digital” just means instead of… quills? and… ink? (my degree is in English and History but that’s really all I remember about it now) we type letters on a keyboard. Then technology, which is driving us mad, happens and the letters show up on a screen. Most of us don’t have a clue about technology, so you really wouldn’t be at a disadvantage popping in to today’s office, even from 1713, Enoch.

And yet, when technology first became a thing in offices, I was highly valued for my technological skills. Temp agencies fought over me, Enoch, they really did. But that was back when computers were called word processors and came with manuals. I was a whizz at bullshitting about having experience on a Micom 2000 or Xerox 860, while frantically flipping through a manual the secretary I was replacing kept in her desk.

Most of my assignments were with TOSI, an agency in Toronto, and I can’t tell you how many prizes I won for getting through them, even when I had no idea how to use the word processor the agency would have assured the client I was an old hand at using it. Hats, tote bags, mugs. As soon as I’d arrive to the assignment I’d call my contact at the agency, totally panicked, and she’d cheerlead me through to the end of the day and maybe the next day until I’d learned the system and could see out the assignment so we’d all get paid.

I remember one assignment at… a travel agency? something to do with a proposal to… buy the Turks & Caicos? and the regular office staff was literally hanging over me for two days straight during which I had neither lunch nor pee break, irate because they’d figured out I had no idea what I was doing and they had a deadline to submit the proposal to… the government?

Anyway, I was such a star performer, such nerves of steel, not to mention the bladder of a camel, that I got it done. Although as far as I know we don’t own the Turks & Caicos, so I guess the proposal didn’t go through. Just as well. Canada already has a bad reputation as the Bermuda of the North.

Tax havens, Enoch, the scourge of all our societies. Governments may as well throw in the towel and forget about taxing the rich. Or at least not let them go on our streets and sidewalks until they pay up.

So to your question, do I think a large part of the world is still left to discover? Well yes and no. Yes, if you include space, which we made our business a while back, but no if you don’t. And right now space is really just all about Mars, and for me, the people who want to make the one-way trip to Mars.

I mean, imagine being so committed to space that you want to go to Mars, from which there would be no coming home, like Tom Hanks leaving land to go live in the sea with Daryl Hannah in “Splash”.

Nooooo, Tom Hanks! There are plenty of fish in the sea on land! Anybody can be your soul mate if you put their mind to it!

Still, and closer to your time and place, Enoch, I suppose that’s exactly what it must have been like for Susannah Moodie when she emigrated from pastoral England to forested Canada in 1832. No going back for her either. Especially after her stupid rellies started pestering her in letters from England about using the correct dessert spoon for pudding when she was eating pine cones for dinner.

Hey, maybe that’s why she emigrated – rellies. And maybe that’s why people want to go to Mars.

But no, not even including space, because in 1992, Roberta Bondar, who made it all the way from my hometown of Sault Ste. Marie almost to the moon, took photographs of the world, the one I think you probably mean, Earth, where our ancestors once crawled out of the same sea Tom Hanks returns to in “Splash”. And it’s through these photographs that we can plainly see, no, there is nothing left of our world to discover. It’s all right there. Earth. A great big finite ball.

Yes, sure, we knew this already – heck, you knew it, Enoch – but there was something about her photographs that really hit home. This really is all that matters, this great big finite ball, and there’s nothing left to discover about that.

And anyway, even before Roberta Bondar came along and got almost got to the moon, Tom Stoppard wrote a play called “Jumpers”. And a few years later I found myself watching it. And unlike any of my courses from university, I remember it – not just because Dottie, the main character’s wife, is nude for the entire play – but because she’d gone mad. Why? Because landing on the moon, which the Americans did in 1969, ruined the world of wonder for her.

And now, so many years later, living in this technocracy we’ve created, I’m Dottie, slowly going mad as one technological breakthrough after another destroys my world of wonder.

Trust me, Enoch from 1713, you’re really not missing anything. You’re really not missing anything at all.