Future is unpredictable

Hello there, again.

First, two things.

1. Hitchhiker's quotes? No. That would be unfair.
2. Mom and dad are saying you don't answer their messages about when it'd be a good time to fly over. You might want to do that.

I have spent the last few days thinking about the quote from Looking for Alaska (? I haven't actually read it, but I think so. Also, I'm sorry if I got the quote wrong.) that John Green brings up every now and then:
"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia."
I've been trying to really understand what it means, and I have finally figured it out. It was for some reason surprisingly difficult. Probably because I didn't before really listen to what it says.
Anyway, now I've figured it out, and even though I've heard it only completely out of context, so I can't be sure that it is supposed to mean the way I see it (what do you mean bad grammar..?), on it's own it's pretty brilliant.

I've been thinking about this, because I've been thinking quite a lot about the future. I have been at school for four weeks. (Really, just four weeks?) And I have already developed a want not to be there. Or rather, be in a different school.

Don't take it wrong, journalism is interesting, though I've only had one course of that and three of philosophy so far, but that's about to change. Media is so much everywhere all the time and has a huge effect (affect? dammit, I hate those words) on the way people behave and see the world and themselves. And by media I don't mean only journalists and anchors, and all the people working in media companies. In today's society media is more and more about connections and people and communication between normal people. Just look at us, I'm right now actively creating media content.

This is not what I was supposed to talk about.

I was supposed to talk about evolution.

The point is, I began studying a human science (well, I guess journalism isn't technically a science, but basically I'm trying to talk about fields other than natural sciences. Is there a term for them in English?) and I already realize my mind is sliding back into wanting natural sciences. Especially biology, genetics, evolution and astrobiology (which is a combination of astrophysics, evolution, the science of origins of life, chemistry, geology and basically anything you might need in figuring out in what conditions and what kind of life could begin and evolve, and where places with those conditions might be). Simply because they are mind-blowingly amazing and beautiful and sciences.
Which is something apparently everyone doesn't understand. I have also spent some time lately on YouTube, watching videos of people trying to argue against evolution. It really just makes me really sad, since a great majority of the arguments you find are something along the lines of "There is no evidence from a species evolving into another species." (Yes, yes there is. Please, just open your eyes and look, you will see it too.) "I had a dog for ten years. It's still a dog." (I don't even know where to begin. Why don't you go to Wikipedia, read a page about evolution, and then come back.)  or "Evolution says sometimes, when there's matter and energy, new life forms. But if I have a jar of peanut butter, which is matter and there is some heat and light around it, but I never find new life in my peanut butter." (If life would begin that easily, there would be life everywhere. There is in fact a whole field of science dedicated to figuring out what kind of conditions are necessary for life to begin.)

Oh, right, back to that.

So, at the moment, I would really, really want to study this kind of things. The world is fascinating. The only problem is, I can't study even the basics of university level biology where I live, and I really don't want to move away. Astrobiology (if I've understood correctly) you can only study in a few universities anywhere in the world. So, that's not going too well for me. But who knows, maybe I'll decide during the next few months biology wins and move somewhere I can study it even though I very much don't want to.

I am also fascinated by evolutionary isolated places, like Australia (the animals there have really developed weird) and Mauritius, that I found some day last week. Mauritius is a ~40km x 50km island some 900 km east of Madagaskar, in the Indian ocean, best known as the place where dodos used to live until the human came and ate them away in the 16-17th century. Which, again, is very sad. I would love to one day go to an isolated place where there are no non-native species that have changed the ecosystem. Once again sadly, I'm not sure there are places like that left.

Since I began with John Green, I will finish with Douglas Adams:
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

I actually think the garden is more beautiful if it's gotten there in it's own rather than being put there by faeries. Or anyone else.

~matu