Time Travel is Way Cooler in a DeLorean

This morning on the bus, the electric banner that scrolls the time and date for the passengers read February 21, 2026. For a minute I thought I might have woken up on the wrong side of the Twilight Zone. Then I realized my bus wasn't flying and my iPod was still a separate entity from my body, so I figured some drunken MBTA worker must have programed the bus this morning. That made me feel a whole lot better.

To get my mind off of drunken bus operators, I was pondering what the year 2026 might be like. I will be 44, which is the worst thing I've ever heard. And that's about all I can really say about the 2-6er (what I think we should call the years by then). So, I decided that if there's anything out there that I think could look into the future 19 years and bring me back a glimpse of the world it would have to be Google. Surely the omnipotent master of the cyber-universe would find me the answers.

Turns out Google is just the pimp and Wikipedia is its bitch. The first page on my Google search was for the Wiki, which already has a page solely for the year 2026. Talk about being on top of your shit. Here's what it tells us about the future (insert Wayne's World sound effects and motions here).

In the year 2026:

• New Year's Day will be on a Thursday. Yesssss! Thursdays rock!
• The Aurora Programme will send a mission to Mars. Really? Mars? That's original. Won't we be living on Mars by then? That's not going to be a very exciting mission.
• The U.S. will celebrate its 250th anniversary as an independent country. Par-tay!! Maybe by then we can clone the fore-fathers and get our groove on. I call dibbsies on John Adams!
• The southern section of the BART will connect the East Bay of California to Silicon Valley. It will make it a much easier commute for the AIs to come kill off the humans every morning. They will be very appreciative and might spare people who look like Will Smith or Tom Cruise.
• According to the TV section of 2026, if we were in an episode of SeaQuest DSV this would happen - "An economic summit takes place that places hundreds of thousands of undeveloped basins back on the market." I have no idea what the means, but if I can have a talking dolphin, I don't really care either.
• And according to Star Trek: Enterprise, World War III will begin in 2026. A date they must have gotten from Ms. Cleo, since all signs point to that shit storm starting much earlier.

Lastly, my favorite event of 2026 will be the actualization of Heinz von Foerster's "Doomsday Equation". In 1960, Foerster published an article in which he divulged a formula for future population growth. "The formula gave 2.7 billion as the 1960 world population and predicted that population growth would become infinite by Friday, November 13, 2026. " Happy Birthday to me! Awww, the end of the world! You shouldn't have!

So in pre-celebration of the apocalypse and my 45th birthday, which I will be spending on Mars with my talking pet dolphin Darwin, an AI ass-kicking Will Smith and my John Adams clone, here is a video of how I think the world will actually end. Enjoy.

Is Xenu for You? Find Out With a Free Stress Test!

Thanks to Tom Cruise, almost everyone not living under a rock has heard of the Church of Scientology. I've heard it ridiculed, I've seen the "Free Stress Test" people, and I know a small amount about it (basically that it is based around the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard - a former sci-fi author, there are some strange ideas and practices surrounding it, they don't condone psychological practices, and celebrities like to hop on the Scientology-wagon and then jump on couches).

Really, it all seems a little crazy and cult-like. However, before I totally made up my mind about the group, I decided I had to at least become more informed about what they are really all about. That's when I realized that it is almost impossible to find something written on Scientology that is impartial. There are either sites sponsored by the Church of Scientology that are obviously not going to bring up any problems with the religion, and there are sites extremely opposed to the religion and only talk about the negatives.

The site that comes closest to impartiality is definitely Wikipedia. Whoever wrote the article, at least brought up the church's denial of their stranger practices. But just for the sake of showing you something really interesting, here is a segment from the Wikipedia article that talks about advanced teachings that have supposedly leaked out of the church (although the church claims they have been taken out of context and distorted by the media and dissenters in order to make the group look bad). However, I'm not aware of a way that this could ever be in context and not still sound crazy:

"Xenu (sometimes Xemu) is introduced as an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living."

Say what?!

I'm not exactly a true-believer of everything in the Bible either, but Xenu and Friends goes FAR beyond the realms of belief suspension I can accomplish. If I have trouble believing that two of every animal on the earth sat on a giant boat for 40 days and didn't tear each other apart, the step in Scientology where I have to accept the teachings of the Galactic Confederacy might be a little tough for me too.

My other strike against Scientology is that the list of celebrities who have left the church includes one Charles Manson. You've got to be a little weary of a religion that is even too much for that guy to handle.

I still recommend you research it on your own though, and come to your own conclusions. You never know, maybe Xenu is for you.