Dispatches from Yesterday’s Future #2–"The Knowledge that you’re brilliant…

…does not make up for the knowledge that you’re odd.”–Bill Patterson

I still remember the day that I walked into Fermilab’s B-Zero twenty-five years ago. I had grown accustomed to being on a life-long skiing trip down the right-hand slope of the bell curve. The shock of walking into a entire room full of high-energy physicists was enough to strike me speechless for the better part of a week.

This is probably the biggest collection of fully competent people that I have ever witnessed in person. Fortunately, I no longer have the problem of being tongue-tied, so I’ve had conversations–for the most part non-stop–since the last dispatch early yesterday morning.

Last night I was at an impromptu song-fest in which amateur musicians (sometimes in neighboring keys) sang of the love of danger, the frontier, of the changes wrought by a new, electronic culture as well as pieces inspired by Heinlein’s Saturday Evening Post articles of the 1950s.

One of the singers that brought down the house was Jordin Kare, a physicist/electrical engineer from Intellectual Ventures, a company competing for the 2007 NASA prize for Power Beaming spacecraft with laser light–a new method of propulsion. He was singing a song in which the people in the chorus were “proud of NASA’s heroes, but would rather raise a glass…” to the bloody bastards that will get us into space in order to become rich.

Mankind’s going to space. It’s not going to be tomorrow, although for only $3700 you can experience first Martian, then Lunar and finally zero-gravity in a converted 727 aircraft. (That probably won’t be tomorrow, either, unless they’re open on Sundays.) However, I am convinced that the conquest is inevitable.

At breakfast this morning, I watched a system designer suddenly realize that some of his creations would work incredibly well on a cutting-edge platform on the edge of space. When he gets back to work on Monday, the first thing he’s going to do is bring his boss on board and contact the other outfit. His idea was so chillingly brilliant that I signalled the waiter to bring more ice, lest my techgasm be too obvious.

This kind of synergy is happening all over the place. The social panels are bringing together folks who have been studying relationship architecture for twenty or twenty-five years. Amanda Davidson of Wax Creative Services presented an unfinished short feature on Line Marriage that had been produced by Parabolic Pictures from her script. While it was still a rough cut, there were nuances within the story that were true enough to life that my eyes misted over.

At supper last night, Mike Taht of Postcards From the Bleeding Edge had returned to America for the conference from his new job in Nicaragua, where he was working on the One Laptop Per Child project. As we sat around the table at the sports bar, he discussed the political atmosphere in a country where the mayor of a town might be a former Sandanista and the city council dominated by ex-Contras. His enthusiasm colored his talk with optimism even as he admitted that sometimes it was hard to tell when the citizens of a town were bullshitting the man from El Norte that knew only high-school Spanish.

Just before I raced to my room to pound and polish this dispatch, the theme of the last two days came to me. Every one of these individuals were brilliant–stellar in their knowledge, their understanding and their grasp of three or four unrelated fields. Every one of them were overachievers, exceeding the expectations of even the most demanding of careers….

And virtually every one of them are notably different–not only from the mainstream of society, but also from each other. That’s when it hit me: This is what the edge looks like. I am not the only person who is this strange, there are others and I’m going to be eating supper with them in about an hour. None of them are strange like me, though, it’s a rainbow, a sand beach, a star-filled sky of brilliant strangeness.

“Oh my God, ” I think, tears welling into my eyes as I finish this last line. “I’ve lived just long enough to finally reach home.”

Tom