Yesterday was my birthday. A few years ago, when I was in a bad place mentally, I didn’t answer my dad’s phone call to wish me a happy birthday. He left a voicemail in which he sang the song to me and hoped I wasn’t just working at the pizza place and went out with friends.
That was about a year before the isolation of Covid times led him to start drinking vodka on the regular. He was never able to stop more than a few months at a time after that, even with rehab, therapy, and AA. It felt like a race between him figuring out how to quit and how long before his body couldn’t give him more chances to do so.
At the start of September, I moved him across the country to be closer to family while he recovered from another round of binge drinking and starving himself. I had quit hard liquor a couple months prior after getting too drunk too fast for comfort at my friend’s wedding. After this weekend I stopped drinking everything else.
At the end of September, he lost the race. He managed to call an ambulance when he realized this detox felt different, walked himself outside to meet them and only passed out when he was on the stretcher. A day later in a medically induced coma complications ended his brain’s faculties and he died. The only sign of what he had been thinking was the book he brought to the ambulance. The last marked page ended with a character scared after an encounter whispering to himself “still alive, still alive.”
I have not drank for 9 months now. I was headed that way before, but now I feel I can’t drink. To do so would disrespect what my dad went through. Yesterday was my birthday. I made plans with my friends for a full day, but before I left I listened to that voicemail for the first time since he left it for me, before I had reason to worry about him, when I was the one he worried about. I miss him so much. I hope he would be proud.
It’s been over a decade since I learned this, so my memory is fuzzy, but I recall that for at least the first several decades of space exploration propulsion technology was advancing at a fast enough rate that it was a real consideration to wait on a mission for better tech.
If a probe launched now would take five years to reach its destination, but propulsion speeds are on track to double in two years, it would make more sense to wait the two years, use more advanced sensor/communication/etc. tech that developed during that time, then still have the new probe arrive before the first would.
I haven’t paid a lot of attention, but I’m guessing the tech is no longer advancing that quickly, so the thought process may not hold as much water, but it’s rooted in practical thoughts. And couldn’t you say it’s rather defeatist to assume that better tech won’t develop, and optimistic to believe that it may?