Musings From the Backseat of a Cab

(From Tim Runge)

A few weeks ago, I was in an Uber from my hotel in Melbourne to the airport to catch a flight back to Toronto. 

You can lean a lot from an Uber driver.

For example, did you know that Mars has already been colonized by earthlings? Yup, as we speak there are people up there are up there doing whatever one does on Mars.

And did you also know that there is technology that Elon Musk could be using on his Space-X program that would reduce the number of rockets that end up in the dustbin called “zero-gravity propulsion”? And apparently this was all developed under Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich.

What convinced me that this was all true is that my Uber driver says he “knows things” and only talks about things for which he has “evidence”. Given that he was talking to me about “things”, one could conclude that he had “evidence”.

Now I am no physicist but am pretty sure that gravity is one of those forces of nature that Dr. Einstein wrestled with and is pretty much everywhere.  No one knows why there is gravity, a mysterious force that attracts two objects. Furthermore, one of the weird things about gravity is that it exerts a force all the way through space and is a force that does not need to travel like light does.

So that fact that I was told that there is something called “zero-gravity” propulsion, despite what my learned driver told me sent my “bullshit” sensor into overdrive. Right up there with Mars already being colonized.

Let’s be serious: there are people out there that believe this nonsense. My uber driver is not the only one that “knows things”. The world is full of these people. The world is full of bullshit.

Perhaps like never before we are in a time and place where solid intelligence is needed to dispatch beliefs…..