Twelve things I thought about while watching

I drove to Joshua Tree last weekend. Brought a blanket, a thermos of coffee, and nothing else. Left the phone in the car.

The sky out there is something else. Away from the city, the Milky Way is visible, a smear of light across the dome of the sky, and you remember that you live inside a galaxy. Not near one. Inside one.

I lay on the blanket for three hours. Here’s what I thought about.

One. The light from Polaris left 433 years ago. Shakespeare was alive when that photon started its trip. It’s been flying through nothing for four centuries and the first thing it hits is my retina in a desert in California.

Two. Perseverance is on Mars right now. Right now. Driving around a dead lake, drilling cores, listening to the wind with a microphone. It’s night there, I think. Is the rover doing anything at night? Sleeping? Do rovers sleep?

Three. LIDAR creates a point cloud of the world. Stars create a point cloud of the universe. We’re inside a point cloud. Everything we can see is a data point in a scan made of photons.

Four. The chip shortage is still happening. Somewhere in Taiwan, a fab is running 24 hours a day making the processors that make everything work. The engineers there are probably not looking at stars. They’re looking at wafer defect maps. Both are beautiful in their own way.

Five. If I could send one message to the future, it would be: we tried. Not “we succeeded” or “we figured it out.” Just: we tried.

Six. A self-driving car in Phoenix is navigating a roundabout right now. At this moment. A machine is making a judgment call about when to merge, and a passenger in the back seat is either watching or not watching. Both options are interesting.

Seven. Someone is training a neural network right now. Feeding it data. Watching the loss function decrease. Waiting for it to learn something. That person is doing, on a small scale, what evolution does on a large scale: trial and error until something works.

Eight. The James Webb Space Telescope is being prepared for launch. It’s in French Guiana. On another continent. Being loaded onto a rocket that will send it 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. 344 single points of failure. I’m terrified.

Nine. Coffee is better in the desert. I don’t know why. Something about the cold air and the silence makes it taste more like itself.

Ten. If robots ever become conscious, will they find the stars interesting? Or is star-gazing a biological quirk, something that evolution gave us because tracking celestial patterns helped with navigation and agriculture? Would a conscious machine look up and see beauty, or data?

Eleven. I haven’t checked my phone in three hours. The longest stretch in months. The world didn’t end. Nobody needed me. Or they did and they figured it out themselves.

Twelve. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. I’m going to live for maybe 80 years. That’s 0.0000006% of the universe’s current lifespan. And I get to be here for the part where we build thinking machines and land helicopters on Mars and put telescopes in space that can see the birth of galaxies. The timing is absurd. I’m absurdly grateful.

The coffee ran out. The desert got colder. I packed up the blanket and drove home.

None of these thoughts are finished. That’s the point. They don’t need to be.

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