BREAKING FREE

 

Very old people and very young people want to break free.

Very old people want to free themselves from an aging body.

Very young people want to free themselves from the constraints against driving fast cars, sex or drinking.  Humanity wants to be free from this earth, the solar system and finding other beings from other galaxies.

 

My second husband was a good man but rather stingy.  He was good looking, even at seventy.  And, he was nice to me in bed!  He had a very bountiful pension from NASA.  He was the man who affixed a plaque to Pioneer 10, the first object to escape from the solar system in 1972.

 

Carl Sagan designed it to inform extraterrestrial beings where this vehicle came from and when it was launched.  It showed a human man and a human woman and a hydrogen atom.  This spin-flip of a hydrogen atom up to spin-flip down can specify a unit of length.  I cannot believe that Frank Drake actually claimed that there were negative reactions to the plaque because the humans were naked!  My husband was proud of it but his mother who was 92 would have been shocked by nakedness because she had very firm convictions, including that white people were better than black and brown or Asian.   I cannot conceive of what she would think of extraterrestrial beings.

 

Her 92 birthday was coming up soon and my husband’s brother who lived close by their mother was planning a big party for her.  But my husband complained to his brother about having to make a big trip (800 miles) to attend their mother’s 92 birthday party.  His brother, inadvertently or maybe unconscious sibling rivalry, told their mother that my husband didn’t want to spend the money to attend the party.  Their mother commented about my husband, “Does he think he will be able to take his money with him?”  Perhaps the fact that extraterrestrial beings won’t have money makes them inferior?