There are dreams that are achievable, unrealistic dreams that can be achieved but where the odds are hugely stacked against you, and then there are those dreams that are just… dreams without any chance of achievement.
Achievable dreams would include that cherry/unfired WWII-era 1911, the restored & modernized E-type Jag, etc. They are out there, you just haven’t found one yet or else you don’t have the moolah on hand to buy it when you do.
Unrealistic dreams… well, there’s that night in bed with Salma Hayek, winning Powerball, finding that cherry/unfired WWII-era 1911 for only $500… you get my drift.
And then there is that category of dreams where there’s no chance in hell of success. And here’s where I’m going to get into trouble, but oh well:
Space travel and extraterrestrial planet colonization.
What bollocks. Given the vast distances between planets, even-vaster distances between habitable (by us) planets, it requires not only advanced science of a degree unimaginable — which may be possible — but most of all it requires a bending of the laws of physics (e.g. the time/space continuum, the frailty and short shelf life of the human body, etc.), which is not so easy.
So while it’s all very nice to ooh and aah over Elon Musk’s latest wizardry, at some point realization is going to set in and we’re going to discover that it’s just an impossible dream.
Nice song, great lyrics, but that’s no way to go through life.
Let’s face it: we’re stuck here on good old Planet Earth, and that’s the beginning and end of it. We’ll just have to deal with it, and come to terms with the fact that in a few million years’ time, this planet will become uninhabitable (swallowed by the Sun, our own red star in the making) and all life as we know it will cease.
(I don’t want to hear about Mars — when our sun becomes a red dwarf, it too will be swallowed into the eternal fire / black hole whatever.)
And then, to quote Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of Great Britain (1902 – 1905):
“Imperishable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.”
He may have got the dimming of the sun wrong — it’s more likely the opposite — but the final outcome will be the same.
At least it’s in the very distant future, so there’s that.