Summer blindsided me more than I expected. I'm taking scuba lessons, studying for my MCSE/MCSA, designing a website, working extra hours (I'm supposed to be gallivanting around the world right now, but I guess this fall or winter will be a fine time for a vacation), and catching up on my reading. So, my blog went to the back burner. A good while ago I said that I would be returning to a more normal blogging schedule, but it hasn't happened yet. Soon though. Real Soon Now.
I do have an excellent post written up on my laptop, maybe I'll go to the Hotspot later this afternoon and put that up. It's a follow-up to my post on moral relativism. I wrote it on my laptop and haven't managed to get it posted on the web yet. I can bug out of work early today since I'm working tomorrow.
Tomorrow I have to go to the dive center and rent my equipment for diving. I bought my mask, fins, snorkel, gloves, and boots; I have to rent my wetsuit, BCD, hood, and airtank. Next weekend I'll be going down to Monterrey for open water diving and I will then be a certified scuba diver.
I've been scuba diving and free diving and snorkelling a good few times and it's one of my favorite things ever. It's an odd adrenaline sport. It's relatively sedate and serene, but still a damn good work out and definitely gives you that rush. I think it's the curiosity factor. Scuba diving means exploring an entirely different world.
I read a blurb a little while ago about science fiction, and the writer questioned the vision authors have for their alien races. The general Sci-Fi alien is usually a bipedal critter not terribly far removed from humans. I guess in the world of motion pictures, it's much easier to create a humanoid critter than a super-intelligent shade of blue, but it doesn't seem to rhyme with what we see in our own world.
If you take a gander under the waves you see life forms that appear wholly unrelated to humans. Colonies of coral, sponges, tunicates, fish, shrimp, crabs, none of them appear to be even marginally related to humans until you dissect some of them or examine their DNA. A trip into the distant past gives us an additional glimpse of how differently life might evolve on other worlds. If we look to the cretaceous period, the world is dominated by giant lizard-like monsters, and a sprinkling of mammals. It looks nothing at all like the world we inhabit. Who's to say that one of them couldn't have evolved speech and intelligence equivalent to that of humans?
It's a fascinating thought and one I've considered fairly frequently. I'm always somewhat disappointed in the aliens I find in works of science fiction. The aliens in Ender's universe were properly alien. The aliens in Star Trek looked like humans in costumes. The Aliens in Aliens were . . . hungry? drippy? toothy? The aliens in Star Wars were somewhat more varied and interesting. But they still seem to be the product of evolution in more or less earthlike conditions. It is our only frame of reference, so maybe it's hard for us to imagine different forms that life could take, but coming full circle, you can see the different forms life might take when scuba diving.
None of the critters I've seen or read about in science fiction is as shocking or strange as those living under the water. The colors and shapes and processes that one finds under the waves are more varied and wondrous than anything you can find on land, and what's truly amazing is that we can are distant cousins to these things. And for all we know about life and how it works, we know almost nothing about these cousins, simply because their environment is alien to us. They evolved here on earth before us and beside us, yet if we weren't able to see them first hand, we would never be able to imagine animals taking on the shape of a carnation coral, or an anemone.
So, that's what I like about scuba diving. It's the closest I'm ever likely to get to exploring a different world. It feeds my curiosity. I can look at the startling colors of cold water ecosystems or the diversity of warm water systems, I can examine the plant life in fresh water, explore caves that haven't been in touch with the rest of the world for time out of mind, and every time I look, I will see something new, something I had never dreamed of. It's not quite the same thing as setting foot on a different world, but it's damn close.
