Starry Night
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Starry Night
A small journey from one dark sky to deserts, oceans, distant worlds, unfinished spacecraft, magic—and thoughts about what might actually be worth spending our time on.
You know, tonight I looked up at the sky.
It was unusually dark, and there were so many stars that for a moment the sky did not feel empty at all.
It felt enormous.
I stood there for a while, looking upward, and then—as usually happens— my mind started travelling before the rest of me could.
I opened Google Maps and wandered through different corners of Earth: deserts, forests, oceans, mountain ranges and enormous open plains. Places where almost nothing appears to be happening, yet underneath the silence there may be minerals, energy, water, history, life, and possibilities nobody has noticed yet.
Then I looked at maps of the Moon.
Then Venus.
And somewhere between one little field on Earth and another planet, a thought became very clear:
There really isn't much time for meaningless things.
Time will pass anyway.
Nights will become mornings. Years will move forward. People will grow older. Generations will change. Problems that seem impossibly important today may eventually disappear, replaced by completely different ones.
So if time is moving regardless, I think I would rather spend mine on things that lead somewhere.
I would rather spend my time searching for places where useful ores and materials might be found. I would think about where technology could be shared and how knowledge might help people and communities develop faster.
I would seek out those who have not yet seen how vast the world truly is and try to open a door for them—a door to tools, science, engineering, and possibilities they may never have known existed.
Then I would bring more minds and more hands around one table. Together, we could calculate how much material a spacecraft would need, how heavy it might become, how thick its shielding should be, and how best to protect the people travelling inside it.
That is also why finishing the Global Knowledge Ark matters so much to me. It could give us a shared foundation from which to begin, build, and continue engineering. Whenever we discovered a flaw, found a gap, or needed additional knowledge, we could update it so that everyone would understand what we know, where we are, and what needs to be done next.
Alongside it, I would continue developing the website as a living record of our journey—somewhere everyone could see how far we have come, what we are working on, and what still remains to be built.
From that shared foundation, we could ask larger questions. How should energy be stored? How could food be grown where it has never grown before? How might machines repair other machines? How could something that sounds impossible today slowly become ordinary engineering tomorrow?
Not every journey would have to take place in the physical world. I would also spend time meditating and living within lucid universes, waking to share what I discovered with those who cannot travel there themselves.
I would spend my time with the people I love, supporting and caring for one another while building a better world for all of us.
And perhaps most importantly, I would continue developing the art of healing, so that whenever the need arose, I could care for others and be genuinely useful.
But that time is already here, even if the reality of it is complicated.
That is how I would choose to spend my life: searching, learning, building, exploring, connecting, and healing—among people who genuinely love and care for one another, while together creating a world for all of us.
Those questions feel so much more alive to me than most daily dramas.
There is an enormous universe outside.
An enormous amount still hidden.
An enormous amount still to understand, build and discover.
And perhaps I know what is missing.
More people.
More minds around the same table. More hands building things. More strange ideas becoming prototypes, more prototypes becoming machines, and perhaps, eventually, more machines becoming spacecraft.
And magic.
Because isn't magic my thing?
Yes. I think magic is my engine.
Not necessarily magic as an escape from reality, or magic in terms of magic and healing, but the kind of magic that makes reality feel with love. The feeling that there is still something to create, something nobody has understood yet, something waiting to be discovered, learned, healed, built or transformed.
It is the part of me that looks at something ordinary and immediately wonders what else it could become.
An empty field becomes a laboratory. A strange mineral becomes a question. A piece of metal becomes a machine. A map becomes a journey. A dark point in the sky becomes somewhere we might actually go.
Maybe that is where I should be: somewhere between imagination and engineering, where impossible things are allowed to exist for a while before someone works out how to build them.
I imagine large tables covered with drawings, tools, minerals, half-finished prototypes, strange calculations, computers, wires, cups of tea and people trying to solve problems together.
More people than I have around me now.
A bigger team.
Someone understands propulsion. Someone understands materials. Someone understands biology. Someone understands energy, machines, electronics or software.
Someone knows something I have never learned. Someone notices an error everyone else missed. Someone asks the strange question nobody thought to ask.
And suddenly an idea that was impossible for one person becomes merely difficult for a team.
Somewhere beyond the tables there might be experimental machines, unfinished spacecraft and things without proper names yet.
Maybe one spacecraft becomes two.
Maybe eventually there is an entire hangar full of them.
Different designs. Different purposes. Machines for Earth, machines for orbit, machines meant for places far beyond home.
There would probably be failures too.
Experiments producing smoke instead of progress. Calculations that have to be done again. Parts that absolutely refuse to behave the way the drawing insisted they should.
Someone laughs. Someone finds another tool. Someone says, “Well, now we know that doesn't work.”
And then everyone tries again.
Maybe someone remembers food when everyone else has forgotten the time. Maybe someone brings tea. Maybe someone notices the sky is unusually clear and calls everyone outside for a few minutes.
And yes, perhaps while I am completely lost in some drawing, calculation or half-built machine, there are occasionally soft hands unexpectedly wrapping around me from behind.
Just for a moment.
No grand interruption. No need to turn everything into a story.
Just a small reminder that there are people around, that life exists beyond the calculations too.
Then back to the spacecraft.
Maybe I am not missing a quieter life. Maybe I am missing a bigger one.
More people.
More teamwork.
More knowledge moving freely between minds.
More workshops, laboratories and strange projects that require everyone involved to become a little better than they were yesterday.
More places where curiosity is useful.
More spacecraft.
More magic.
Not magic instead of science.
Magic as the spark before science.
The thing that makes someone look at an accepted boundary and quietly ask whether it really has to stay there.
First the wonder.
Then the question.
Then the calculation.
Then the prototype.
Then probably something catches fire.
Then another calculation. Another drawing. Another pair of hands. Another attempt.
Until one day something that once existed only inside someone's imagination is sitting there on the workshop floor.
And perhaps that is another thing close to magic: turning something that did not exist into something that does.
Maybe we can build spacecraft and still sit outside beneath the stars.
Maybe we can calculate radiation shielding and still remember to ask whether everyone around the table is alright.
Maybe the best kind of progress is not becoming colder or more mechanical, but becoming capable of building extraordinary things without losing curiosity, imagination, kindness or each other.
Learning. Building. Exploring. Wondering.
Sharing knowledge. Solving problems. Laughing when something fails. Helping when something becomes difficult. Trying again.
And every now and then, putting the tools and calculations aside long enough to walk outside together and look at the stars we are trying to reach.
Maybe that is closer to the direction I was trying to describe.
Not escaping the world. Not trying to outrun time.
Finding the people, knowledge, tools and courage to make better use of it.
Building a world with more curiosity than drama, more cooperation, more creation, more knowledge being shared, more impossible ideas being given a serious attempt— and more stars slowly becoming destinations.
A little science. A little engineering. A lot of work.
More people beside me. More spacecraft ahead of us.
And enough magic to keep wondering what we could build next.