Growing up in the clear desert air of Tucson Arizona, it
would come as to no surprise to those whom know the area
to learn that I grew up under the wing of an astronomer
and short wave enthusiast; Leon Edward Salanave, my
stepfather.

Later, after moving to San Francisco, I became acquainted
with computers, and was deeply involved in the San
Francisco Unified School District's scholastic computer
infrastructure - at the time, one lone HP 2000 with 16
serial ports, supporting simultaneous users, remote access
at the miraculous speeds of 300, then, 1200, baud - as a
junior high, and high school, student, I frequently
commuted to Wilson High School (now Sala Burton), on
Mansell, on Saturdays, to access the computer directly - a
sympathetic systems manager, Craig Saunders, went out of
his way to let us use the school facilities on Saturdays
(thanks, Craig).

One of my peers at the time was a fellow named Paul Vixie,
whom went on, it is is said, to invent the Domain Name
System, 'the glue that holds the Internet together', and
even the Internet itself. At the time, no one had any idea
that he would ever do such a awful thing, and if we had,
we surely would have stopped him. /-:

No one - not even Paul - had a modem of their own, back
then - we had to go to someone's school and use a TTY33,
a TTY43, or, maybe, if we were good, first, or strongest,
we got to use a CRT and go 9600 baud. This was important
because we used the computers to play games - specifically,
TREK73, a monster BASIC program broken into six different
pieces that CHAINed back and forth between the programs,
calculating strategy and redrawing the screen after
everyone's moves had been absorbed. Screen redraw time was
critical to winning and a CRT redrew the screen a lot
faster than a clanking teletype, delivering a serious
advantage to whomever was strong enough to claim and
retain control of the CRT.

It's twenty years later and, boy, have things changed. (-:

Julian Huxley wrote an excellent book called 'Evolution in
Action'.

I like to think that evolution compels us towards the
stars - it is a poetic image but there is no reason to
doubt it.

It is a fact that the atoms whose reactions fuel our
existence came from the deaths of stars, billions of years
ago, and there we have the illustration of a closed loop,
an ecology whose scale is so vast that words can not
describe it but whose existence remains clearly visible to
one's intuition.

A similar logic guides my understanding of the possibility
of life around other worlds. Some thinkers suggest that a
spacefaring race would be too intelligent to needlessly
kill, or that economies that span the distances between
solar systems do not permit plundering cultures to
flourish and succeed. It's all guessing; an aggressive,
broadcast-based search for ETs could attract all sorts
of problems.

And yet running away and hiding in the forest when no
sails have even been sighted on the horizon, would be
needlessly paranoid. Not looking for sails at all would
be, perhaps, even more naive.

In closing, it also needs to be noted that humanity
bickers amongst itself like small and spoiled children,
fighting over a bag of candy ... and that maybe the human
race needs some heavily armed, hostile, bug-eyed monsters,
to get us off our butts, and working together for the
common wealth. (-:

So I think of it (with apologies to Larry Niven) as
evolution in action. (-: