The fright of freight.

When you enter into a long-term, long-distance trek across space you resign yourself to being freight for vast quantities of the duration of that trek. You are merely weight or mass being calculated into the ship's course as it is being plotted.

Being thrown across space in a ship dramatizes the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This dasein--this "thrownness" into the world, this living, as it occurs, already along a trajectory--is the very specific context for travel's occupants. And both living and alive they are reduced to that very thing as noted above: freight.

Space travel, as it was penned in the late 19th century and marketed to the world after World War II, reflects a pinnacle in science, technology, development. The next stage, the new tomorrow, the future, exists out there, up there, anywhere but here. Yet, the concession we make as half-animal half-ideology cyborgs is to become the basest of things in an equation furnished by science to calculate and plot a course.

What is our destination?

Up.

What is up? In most instances beyond the obvious, sensory kind, up is a metaphor with a positive association. Up is the proper orientation to many economic trends, yet the manufacture of these perhaps operates upon a presumption of reporting the kind of news that underlings want to report to superiors and the rosy-lensed eye that business owners want to cast upon their outlook. These owners, those superiors are in the up orientation in the vast and vaguely pyramidal structure of social organization. If anything it is our beholdness to certain spacial metaphors as value orientations that are grafted upon the world that smuggles in a reality to back those values up. And it is these metaphors that will distract us from the base existence we live as we submit to the ever-long journey of progress toward up and out.

What does it feel like to pilot a billion dollar ship? Any more I would suggest that the captain of that ship, this floating nuclear-powered city is simply dressing for the steering wheel. I had this dream once, as a child, of my parents' and my aunt and uncle's automobiles driving themselves. That, to me, was a terrible nightmare. That is the manifestation of spooky action at a distance.To float effortlessly across a distance, unaided by any known force goes against a deeper understanding of one's relationship to the world as an ambulatory organism. To float down river has meaning. The river is the means of one's conveyance, and its broad banks provide a brief outline of an immediate future in that course. To roll along the ground in an unpiloted automobile is something stranger, spookier. It forces an unknown upon the journey.

Scientific and technological progress, as we frame it through space travel, pushes the envelope of human constraints. Tucked into a capsule, hurling through space for a long period of time, the occupant is not piloting the craft to mars, that vector was programmed into the craft itself. Maybe, just maybe, the pilots will have some control over the final orbit and descent to martian soil. And what is the pilot to do? The traveler, after traversing a great length of space for a great length of time, will take soil samples, some pictures, and walk about. Strange isn't it? This bleeding edge of science and technology is rife with mental fitness for a long high-tech journey of solitary confinement. This bleeding edge of science leads the captain of this trip to simply follow the orders programmed into the ship and the journey itself for the sake of what ever scientific imperatives there may be. This traveler in the capsule is a seed, a living remnant wrapped inside a non-living, yet highly sophisticated shell for the means of protection and conveyance to a distant land.

And the finality of embodying one's scientific habits into habitable technology leads that very subset of the originator of ideas into an operator of its mechanisms. So the person becomes a thing, the very thing, which is the condition for thinking: communication.

The person, as speaker, becomes the dramatist for spoken ideas.