USS Clueless is just about the first thing I read of a morning. It's the site that I was introduced to blogging by (via the monthly Stardock newsletter, of all things), and I spread out from there. I had read some stuff out of Mr. denBeste's Essential Library, but not his Manifesto. So today's post was the first time I saw this quote from it:

I finally realized a while back that to many people the world is a magical mystical place, full of gods and spirits and ghosts, with things happening for no obvious reason. They flick a light switch and the bulb goes on -- but they don't know why. The inside of the refrigerator is cold, but it's a miracle. They look at a stereo, or a computer -- or a person -- and see only its skin. They don't know what's inside.

The world is not like that for me. I look at a refrigerator and in my mind's eye I see the pump, the circulating fluid, and the application of laws of physics. A refrigerator is beautiful to me in a way that someone who only sees skins will perhaps not understand. I look at a computer and I understand it on many levels. I know the software. I know the chips. I know the transistors. I can see the signals passing around.

I look at a person, and if I wish to I can see inside. I see circulating blood. I see organs performing functions. I see neurons switching signals around. I see genes turning on and off; I see proteins being made; I see enzymes catalyzing reactions.

These are miracles, but I use that word in a different way. To me a "miracle" isn't something inexplicable; it's something extraordinary and complex.

I look at what everyone looks at, but I apparently see what few see. I've been trying to let you all see through my eyes, to communicate my way of looking inside things. That's why I don't link to things unless I have something to say about them. My purpose is to find things which have aspects most don't see.

Which sums up my worldview nicely. I believe we live in an age of miracles, brought about by science and technology. I have been around the world as a very small child - by plane. I've read of the trips of Magellan and Drake around the world, and the difficulties and danger faced by travelers even on short voyages of the period are unimaginable to me, because I live in an era where many of the obstacles faced by those travelers have been overcome by technology.

Likewise, I am a communications freak; I hate to be out of communication with people. The cell phone, the two-way radio, even instant-messaging programs, they all allow me to communicate with other people who are not near me, relatively instantaneously. Via TV, radio, and the Internet, I can feed my desire for news, pretty much as it happens, no matter where it happens on the earth!

I visit my mother on a somewhat regular basis. She lives 250 miles away from me. This is a 5-6 hour drive for me on the US Interstate system. By train it's around a 6 hour journey (the train is quicker, but getting to and from the train station is a bit of a pain in the neck). Prior to the train, however, it would be over a week's journey by foot or horse, or several days by ship. On a smaller scale, I lived less than 10 miles from my last job - 2 hours by foot, perhaps a little over an hour by horse, and a mere 25 minutes by car on residential roads. In 1998, my commute was 45 miles - a trip that took me 45 minutes most days by car. A commute by rail would not have been possible (no rail stations near my workplace), and effectively impossible as a daily commute by foot or horse.

These are just some examples from my own life of the age of miracles we life in. Most of them are travel-related, it's true. That's the mood I'm in right now. But medically, environmentally, agriculturally, we have have things that would boggle the minds of someone from a previous era. Our lives are the longest, our water and air the cleanest, our agriculture the best, and our opportunities the greatest in recorded history.

I've been a boy scout, and I go to Renaissance Faires. I've read history (both writers contemporaneous to their time periods, and more modern historians looking back), and the Neo-Luddite movement doesn't make sense to me. Back to Nature? Back to having huge families because half or more of children die in childhood? Back to spending all of my time raising my family's food by hand, leaving no time to do anything else? Back to a time of raiders and bandits running wild because it is easier fro them to steal my crops and goods than to grow and make those things themselves (and the authorities being unable to catch them because I can't summon them in a timely fashion)? I don't think so. I can see nature right out my window - there's a lovely tree. Coming into the parking lot at night, I have to be careful of deer. A little farther on is a creek, with a band of wild area around it. A short drive takes me to any number of natural areas, where I can enjoy myself, and still come back to my modern conveniences after a day or a weekend in the wild. And I live in the most densly populated state in the Union, next door to the most densely populated area in the world. In this same state, there is the least densely populated area in the Lower 48 - the Pine Barrens.