Science fiction once belonged to the genre of imaginative literature. Today’s media, fishing for intellectual thrills, have encouraged serious people with technological knowledge, industrial intentions and the money to back them to create our first “science factions.” Certain men of our civilization (and not women), devoid of irony and the slightest sensitivity to human psychology but possessed of great riches, have been planning to export our human psyches to other locations in the solar system. If the narcissist Donald Trump only wanted to build a wall, these builders want to build an entire techno-civilization.

During his inauguration, President Joe Biden appealed to us, American citizens, repeatedly and emphatically, to defend unity and truth against corrosion from power and profit. Fortunately, the bedrock tensions between unity, truth, power and profit have newly-discovered mathematical definitions, so their formerly mysterious interactions can now be quantified, predicted and addressed. So in strictly (deeply) scientific terms, Biden described our core problem exactly right.

Every publication has a worldview. Each cultivates a style of thought, ideology or philosophy designed to comfort the expectations of its readers and to confirm a shared way of perceiving the world around them. Even Fair Observer has a worldview, in which, thanks to the diversity of its contributors, every topic deserves to be made visible from multiple angles. Rather than emphasizing ideology, such a worldview places a quintessential value on human perception and experience.

Since hindsight is always 20/20, and now we thankfully have 2020 in hindsight, it’s time to celebrate. In particular, to celebrate a commercially irrelevant but wondrous technology that might allow humans to fly through the air under our own power, like birds. This is the stuff of dreams.