[Crossposted to both my blogs]

I'm overjoyed to announce that at 2:05 AM on Monday, July 30, our son Matthew Thomas was born.

He's a 9 pound 5 ounce bundle of joy. He's sleeping well, nursing a lot (gaining his ounce a day -- hardly lost any weight after birth), and his big sister loves him, as you can see :-)



Michelle, my wife, is resting and recovering, along with taking wonderful care of him. I'm taking time off work to care for them both, as well as for our daughter Sophie.

We are incredibly blessed. And what's more, our family is now complete. After having two oversized kids, with difficult births both times, we're done... we're going to count our blessings, quit while we're ahead, and move from child-birthing to child-rearing for good.

PHEW!!!!!

Thanks to everyone who's sent congratulations and other good wishes.

Enter the Fourth Trimester

Sounds very Twilight Zone, in a way....

We have one child right now, a two-and-a-half-year-old named Sophie. She's one of the most joyous humans I've ever known, and my wife and I are crazy about her. And now she has a baby brother on the way -- my wife is on the verge of giving birth, literally only days from now. Of course you never know with birthing... it could be today, it could be three weeks from today... but all the signs (several big contractions a day, baby's dropped into the pelvis) are moving in the right direction. Batten down the hatches, clean the house, pack the hospital bag, finish up the last big chunks of code for work, have all the handoff meetings, GET READY!

So soon I'll be vanishing for a little while -- no promises about every-two-weeks -- until we've all gotten the hang of how to juggle two kids, and until Sophie's come to terms with actually having a sibling.

The first three months of a new baby's life are sometimes called the fourth trimester, which really makes sense to me at an intuitive level. The kid's spent his (in our case) whole life in a warm, dark, noisy, gravity-free environment, and suddenly gets dumped out into a cold, bright, (relatively) quiet, and most of all REALLY, REALLY HEAVY environment. Talk about a stunning shock! It's no wonder that really young babies sleep so much -- they can't entirely cope with the world yet.

The first three months are really about easing the tiny one into their new world. Keep it calm, let them rest, let them nurse whenever they want to, be very tender to them. Let them know that this crazy new place they're in isn't entirely all bad. It's a twilight time, a transition time.

That's where we'll be for the next while -- in the fourth trimester. (Or at least, that's really where my wife will be; I'll be half there and half in toddlerville, where everything is explosive and rambunctious and demanding and cuddly.)

The Lobster Pot

As you know if you read my earthquake post, I'm a believer in preparing for the worst. In fact, "preparing for the worst" is a label I'll be applying to quite a few posts here.

But that doesn't at all mean that I'm a pessimist. Totally the contrary, in fact! I am completely psyched about the future and I think that in general things are likely to get a lot better for ost people. Or at least, I hope so.

So "hoping for the best" is another label you'll see showing up here a lot. Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. That's the best way I know of to live a cautious but joyous life.

And it's also the only attitude that's compatible with the increasing drama of the world we live in. By that I mean that there are incredibly powerful trends in both directions in this world, trends that are much deeper and faster-moving than many people realize. Which brings me to the title of this post: lobsters, and pots.

You put a lobster in a pot of cold water, the lobster is relatively happy. Put the pot on the stove and heat it up, and the lobster still takes a while to realize what's going on. By the time the pot is hot enough for the lobster to get worried, it's just about too late.

That's the situation all us humans are in on this planet, in at least two major areas: global warming, and technological development.

I'm completely convinced that global warming is real and is getting rapidly worse. This affects me and my family very directly. We live in Northern California, and California in general is experiencing a lot less snowpack than in previous years. The trends are not positive, either. It's entirely possible that in another decade or two, California will be in a major water crisis. Already this year, Los Angeles is under voluntary water restrictions and mandatory water restrictions aren't out of the question. I would strongly advise people who live in Southern California to start considering where to relocate to.

Preparing for the worst, in this case, means taking seriously the question of whether Northern California is where we want to stay. We have young kids. In a few more years they'll be entering school. Do we want them to live in an area that is under continual threat of drought? To my mind, drought is actually a worse adversary than flooding -- flooding is terrible, but when it recedes, you can clean up and cope. But a sufficiently severe drought can make the entire area nigh uninhabitable for a large part of the entire year.

So we've been scouting the Seattle area -- lots of high tech jobs (good for me) and no shortage of water now or in the future. Yes, they have snowpack issues, but all they need is a few more reservoirs and they're set; there's no indication that Seattle will suffer lack of average total rainfall anytime in the next century or two.

I thought that I was the only person thinking this way until I contacted an old friend (hi, Nadine!) who told me that she and her partner were actively looking for land in Oregon, for exactly this reason: avoiding the coming drought threat here in Northern California.

Almost everyone else we know is pretty much business as usual here. But it looks like Nadine and I are the heat-sensitive lobsters making a break for it. Are we overreacting? Or is everyone else _underreacting?_ Time will tell.

Full disclosure: as you already have noticed, I think a lot about the worst-case scenario. In 2000 I was prepared for major social disruption from the Y2K bug. That never happened. So I know that preparing for the worst is sometimes overkill, if the worst never happens. It's Chicken Little in action: the lobster who jumps out of a pot that never heats up.

Now, what about the converse trend? I'm also a firm believer in the basic idea behind the Singularity: that technological development is accelerating exponentially, and continues to do so in increasingly more areas. The implications of that basic premise are that in much less time than many people expect, the world is going to be an amazingly different place.

I've been a deep believer in these ideas since I was a teenager. In fact, these ideas directly set me on a career path that was [ahead of its time]. This is kind of the Chicken Little scenario again: making plans based on assumptions that are too _optimistic_.

But it doesn't take much looking at the pace of scientific and technological development to believe that things are changing more quickly now than they ever have before, and plotting that trend line is a really exciting prospect. And again, it's one that many people aren't aware of. There's a real chance that, within thirty to fifty years, we'll have self-driving cars, average lifespans (in affluent nations) of over a century, search engines that can answer questions asked in plain English, and computers with direct interfaces to the brain. All of these trends are well underway today, and once all these things exist, the next advances follow even more quickly.

There's a lot of debate about the concept of the Singularity. In a sense, the Singularity is the point at which the lobster pot starts boiling -- the point at which the world becomes unreccognizably different. But here's where the metaphor breaks down, because -- hopefully! remember, we're hoping for the best here! -- there's no point at which technological development kills us all. It may be that the world just keeps getting stranger and richer and more interesting, and each new thing makes people better able to adapt to every other new thing. In that case, we're lobsters who learn to love the hot water, and the hotter it gets the more we like it.

The Singularity is defined as the point in time when technical progress surpasses our ability to foresee its consequences. It's where predictions break down. But by that definition, the Singularity is relative. Talking about this concept with my mother, she said, "I feel like we're already IN the Singularity!" It's dependent on your perspective. So it's very possible that the Singularity will continually recede into the future, even as we continue accelerating towards it.

These themes will come up again and again in this blog: preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, pondering trends in both directions, and thinking about what pots to jump out of and when. Life's an incredible adventure and you'd better pay attention! Let's pay attention together.

Every Two Weeks

[Crossposted to my other blog.]

Blogging's still new to me. The only thing I really know about it so far is that while there's an infinity of posts to make, there's only finite time to make them. And that time is in high demand, mainly from family, but also from all the other great projects that aren't blog-writing.

So I have to set some kind of deadline for myself. And that is: two weeks. I must, and will, post in both my blogs at least every two weeks.

I'm setting that deadline because I notice my reaction when going to other blogs: if I see the latest post is a month or more old, it's a sign that the person's really way too busy to blog, and that the blog's an afterthought to them. It's also a sign that who knows when the next post might be?

But if the last post was a week or so ago, that's still timely. Two weeks is pushing it, but based on my experience so far, it's the most I can commit myself to.

So, that's my promise to you: I'll update both my blogs every two weeks at most. Feel free to flame me if I don't!

...Except for the next month, because we're expecting my wife to go into labor sometime in the next three weeks, which means all bets are off :-)

The meaning of a really long life

You know the three topics that should never come up in polite conversation: sex, politics, and religion.

Fortunately (or not), a blog is a very one-way sort of conversation. This blog, in particular, is definitely going to do some talking about religion. This entire area is incredibly fraught with peril, since there is so much room for offense... but that's a risk I'll have to take, and that's what the comments section is for. Don't like something here? Say so, please!

Most of the religion posts here will be about the uneasy interaction between religion as we know it and the world as it is becoming. Technology is rapidly changing a lot of fundamental human assumptions, and religion / spirituality is so tightly interwoven with humanity's history that there's a lot of tension between tradition and the coming changes. Yet, optimist that I am, it seems to me there's still room for more harmony than we often see. That's the space that interests me, and the space that I'll be blogging about here. (I'll say more in future posts about why that space interests me so.)

First topic: life extension.

There's no doubt that human life is getting longer. Exactly how much longer is still quite unclear. There are certainly no shortage of radical life extension researchers who are quite convinced that within the next forty or so years, medical science may extend human life by, say, an average of twenty to thirty years. And within the next twenty or thirty years after that, medical science could make even further leaps, extending human life by another twenty to thirty years. And, potentially, so on.

In other words, these researchers believe that if you are of an age to live another forty or so years in reasonably good health, then there's a chance that medical science could keep you living for a very long time indeed -- easily over a hundred years, and possibly quite a bit more.

I don't want to debate whether that possibility is realistic. I want to assume it is realistic, and talk about the consequences. Specifically, the spiritual implications. (Even if you don't think it'll happen that soon, it's certainly plausible given another few centuries of scientific development.)

One classic and frequently cited statement about religion is that it is one means of coming to terms with the inevitability of death. Personally I am a Unitarian Universalist, which means that I'm a member of a religion with no central creed or defining statement of belief. (I'll be blogging more about Unitarian Universalism, and about postmodern religion generally, later.) But even such an open-minded religion as this -- a religion with open-mindedness as practically its defining characteristic -- says straight up front, in The Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide, that confronting the reality of death is one of the key reasons the religion exists. Death, the statement is, gives meaning to life.

That's the central claim that I question here.

The historical inevitability of death has indeed been the source of many of the world's beliefs about what happens after death. These beliefs about the nature of post-death existence are always religious in nature, since they are necessarily matters of pure faith.

But there is another, and much more relevant to the living, component of religion. Religions are also guides to how we should live now. What is the best way to live? What gives meaning to life? I contend that many of the world's great religions -- those that teach compassion, charity, service, gratitude, and love -- are essentially teaching lessons that are not rooted in the inevitability of death.

Quite the contrary. If a religious perspective, or any perspective, gives meaning to life and helps enrich life, then that religious perspective could -- and should -- become even more meaningful the longer we live.

In other words, I don't see that a deeply meaningful life, one which is based on clear principles and a deep reverence for life, is necessarily rendered any lesser for being longer. I do not see that death gives meaning to life. Life gives meaning to life.

What death can do is force us to consider how we spend our life. If an unconsidered life is not worth living, and if death forces us to look at how we live and consider it, then the prospect of death can make life more worth living. But Lord knows there are countless people who live heedlessly and without consideration now, despite their impending deaths, and who may or may not ever reach a point of deeper harmony and peace with themselves and the world. For those people, death doesn't serve that purpose... or at least not until far too late.

Two other points: First, there are certainly a number of religions, especially fundamentalist ones, that believe that a better world lies beyond death. Suicidal zealots derive much of their motivation from an expectation that their sacrifice will be rewarded in heaven. So in those cases, arguably death makes life less meaningful.

Second, death confronts us with our limitations. But even in a world with hugely extended lifespan, our limitations remain. We will never know all there is to know; there will always (hopefully!) be billions of lives we will not live; we cannot see everything there is in the universe. Humility and awe -- reverence, as our minister named it in a recent sermon -- are emotions that any thoughtful being must feel, regardless of their lifespan.

So it seems to me that a religious foundation for life -- or perhaps I should say a compassionate and grateful foundation for life -- does not have to be grounded in the finitude of life. What gives meaning to life is how we live each day, not just how many days we live.

There are myriad other issues with indefinitely extended life, among them social justice (who gets to live longer? only the rich?), societal sustainability (what does it do to population pressure when people live much longer?), impact on the young (will young people become less common, less powerful, or both, in a world skewed towards the old?), and many more. Those are topics for future posts. I'm not saying that living longer is universally good; I'm just saying that it isn't inherently and intrinsically at odds with having a deeply fulfilling and meaningful life.

Permission

It's interesting that even though a blog is supposed to be a totally personal soapbox, still it's possible to feel like you need permission to post certain things.

I don't mean personal things -- while I do plan to post some personal things on this blog, none of them will be controversial or sensitive enough to offend any of my immediate family or friends, who're the only people I would want to get permission from.

No, I mean other things. Highfalutin' topics. The header of this blog says that this is about spirituality, family, futurism, and "anything else that's worth thinking about." So theoretically if you're reading this, you've bought that ticket and you're game to take that ride.

But still, I'm having a hard time stepping on the gas. A lot of the thoughts I have on futurism and spirituality have been floating around in my mind for years, clamoring for a chance to escape onto a page. But now that the very page they want is right here in front of them, I'm getting cold feet. Somehow.

So I'm writing this post to vent those jitters. And it seems to be working. Because in this case, the only person I need to get permission from is... me.

Permission hereby granted. Post away! Full speed ahead!

First experiences

This morning, as most mornings, I went into my 2.5-year-old daughter's room to get her up. She'd woken up a few minutes before and I had her wake-up milk in a sippy cup. (She's thirsty first thing in the morning.)

The first thing she said to me was, "I want first experiences!"

"What did you say, sweetie?" I asked, not quite believing my ears.

"I want FIRST EXPERIENCES!"

Well, I'm sure you do, I thought to myself. You have your whole life ahead of you. I want you to have LOTS of first experiences! I can hardly imagine how many first experiences you have yet to have! Good for you, sweetie!

But what are you talking about? You're only two and a half, how can you be asking this?

Then I noticed she was looking at the bookshelf, and a colossal light dawned. She was talking about this:



Great book. So we read all about getting a new puppy, and going to the hospital, and going on the airplane. And I was relieved.