Moving sucks, or why Jedi really developed the force

I just helped two of my closest friends pack up for the move from the Albany area to Oregon yesterday, so I have moving on the brain. So some thoughts on moving, in no particular order.

First, the dirty secret of the Jedi order is that the force was an evolutionary adaptation to having to move. Seriously, given a modest 2% economic growth rate per year for all the years until interstellar travel becomes possible, can you imagine how much stuff we'd have? Look at how much crap Americans in 2009 have compared with Americans in 1909! A hundred years ago, what did the typical American own? The bible, farming equipment, uncomfortable wool undergarments, and a very short life expectancy. Rich people also owned a piano. Kids played with dirt and rocks, and if they were lucky they could get a sticks. There was no need to rent storage facilities for all the crap that you couldn't jam into your house, because there just wasn't enough material wealth for people to own very much. Think about it: would you rather be the richest person in 1900 or make the median income in 2009? I'd rather make the median income today because even if I can't buy everything the richest person can today, I can still go to a useful doctor and buy an iPod and I didn't die in childbirth.

(So another quick aside about sparseness in home-decorating: One of my favorite details of Brokeback Mountain was that when Heath Ledger's character visits his Jake Gyllenhall's parents farmhouse, it's nearly completely empty, and everything is dusty and worn-down, because that's how a lot of ageing farmers live. Another quick aside on the topic of re-using things is that the Greenland Norse couldn't produce their own iron, so they re-used metal tools until there was just nothing left. Archaeologists have found knives with a handle bigger than the blade in Greenland.)

Anyway, so in 1909 America there were no beanie babies collecting dust in attics or baseball card collections languishing in basements. People didn't own that much stuff because the economy couldn't produce that much stuff. 100 years later Americans have quite a lot of stuff, most of the stuff in the world according to Affluenza. Now imagine these trends continuing unabated for centuries or millenia, up until humanity can colonize distant galaxies. Can you imagine how much material wealth we'd have by then? And by material wealth, I of course mean stuff. You think you have a lot of collectible mugs now? Imagine in 1000 years when you have around 398 million times as much disposable income as you do now! This is why I've never understood why Duncan MacLeod wasn't absurdly wealthy. He should have just invested a little money in the Royal Bank of Scotland and then waited 400 years. Silly immortals...

I think it makes sense that only Jedi, with the power to move objects with their mind, would be able to keep up with the constant need to move into bigger and bigger houses or palaces or spaceships. Imagine the sophisticated mating calculus that would go on... "Let's see, this girl is beautiful and smart and loving, but this other girl can move objects with her mind and would allow me to accumulate limitless amounts of junk and move it into bigger houses without throwing out my cybernetic back again... Jedi-girl, here I come!" Not to mention some of the less-than-PG sexual implications of Jedi sex.

Another incredibly dorky thought I've had about far-fetched sci-fi paraphanelia is that if transporter technology a la Star Trek ever arrives, it will be heavily used for immigration. You think it's hard to keep Mexicans from crossing the border now, wait until they can beam themselves into the country!

One of my favorite aspects of science fiction is that sci-fi writers take something to its logical conclusion. I especially like the notion that sci-fi writers don't predict future technologies, they predict the human implications of future technologies. So they don't take buggies and engines and imagine cars, they look at cars and imagine road trips and traffic jams (I read this from Robert Sawyer, though I don't know if he said it originally).

So I figure that there's a lot of potential for sci-fi writers to expand on sci-fi concepts themselves, like Jedi and transporters. Much of this has probably showed up in fan fiction or in other blogs that I haven't read yet.

So the take-home message of this posting is that moving sucks, but it was great to see my friends before they head to the west coast and I don't see them as much anymore. And we had a lot of laughs, for example Chadd's response to Debbie's frantic worry about us packing up the broom before she had a chance to sweep: "Honey, we have 79 boxes of stuff to put into the moving truck. Packing up the broom is the last thing on my mind. And everything needs to go outside at some point anyway. It's not like we're going to get so confused about what to move that we start moving things from the truck back into the apartment." I guess you had to be there, because at 87 degrees and 65% humidity in suburban Albany, that was a hilarious line!