Rubenerd

This was originally written on Tuesday, but I forgot to commit it!

I had a brief I’m living in the future moment this morning. I didn’t get a photo in the peak hour crush of people, but I saw a scrolling advertisement on the train platform for United Airlines:

Dallas, gateway to your world.

This is the only era in history where that could even be close to conceivable to a Sydneysider, let alone plausible. Wolfram Alpha reports Dallas being 13,818 km away. It’s not quite on the exact other side of the planet, but it’s striking distance. It’s so far away, it’s almost a day behind; another mind bender generations not that removed from us would not have had to contend with.

We spend so much of our lives in our own little bubble, whether it be a city or a rural town. It’s everything to us. But in between there are these vast expanses of space. If we could walk on water, it would take us years to cross that distance.

That’s not to say the future is comfortable; Clara and I flew to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to New York and Philadelphia in 2016, and it was a long flight! But again, faster than any other method right now.