Greetings from the Great Plains! Or at least the pretty good plains.
I love to share the answers to the questions I’ve already asked; the more hard-won my knowledge, the more fulfilling, the richer, the greater the satisfaction of giving the gift of my earned learning.
Between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains is flyover country. It’s the view out the airplane window. It’s big; really big. You could get lost there. But there is actually ‘stuff’ there. A lot of people are there, a lot of life is there and life is all about playing the cards you are dealt, when you are dealt them. As a firefighter, I both get a lot of time to wait and think, and a perspective on the transient nature of life and youth. How you play your cards matters.
As Confucius paraphrased,
‘Now that you are there, what do you do?’
Science is built, layer by layer, on other peoples’ work. If we each needed to ‘start again’, from scratch in every generation, we’d still be in the stone age. Back in graduate school, one of the faculty always professed, “Asking the right question is 90% to getting the answer.” I’ll propose that there is a bit more to the task, that is asking the right question to the right source is key. Men don’t ask other men for directions because men already know other men have a hard time just saying they ‘just don’t know’; that tends to get you a ‘bad’ (erroneous) ‘directions’ answers, so game theory, men don’t ask men.
It’s better not to ask a question that just gets you bad data. But if we don’t ask the question, relying on our collective human knowledge, we’re back in the stone age.
How do you get the right answer at the right time? Just use time travel; that is when you have the answer, you send the answer forward into the future, for the next person with the same question. When you need an answer, first try time travel, back into the past, if the question has already been answered.
Where should I go, what should I do, will I like it, are the questions of life, the ‘90% of the answer’. But time travel is the real key to pulling from collected human knowledge; getting the answer from the past to me now.
Eclectic as it seems, the common thread 9,000,000+ Google views is information, hard-won by me, that could benefit someone else; it’s our social contract.
You could write a tour book. You could publish a magazine. Are they the most efficient or economic ways of getting your knowledge through the proverbial time machine to the next person asking the same question?
Instead, a non-linear trail of bread crumbs, a path that can be followed, shares the knowledge. If I have the question, someone else has asked the question before, and another will ask that same question in the future.
I stand on others shoulders to see farther; others stand on my shoulders to see farther, for my home, my community, my country and my world.