What Goes Up...

Aeroplanes thunder over my flat on a semi regular basis. There would probably more of them if the airport could get its act together. Huge metal beasts claw themselves skyward emitting prehistoric howls of effort. There are times when gravity must get quite discouraged. This would help to explain why its always so eager to take a hand when I miss my footing on the stairs.

Gravity shouldn't feel too disappointed though, ultimately gravity always wins. All the noise generated by aircraft is essentially a prayer. It is an acknowledgement of the tremendous effort needed just to get gravity to look the other way for a short time. If those prayers should falter, if the liturgy is a single note off then the hapless acolyte is smeared over the landscape. Worse still the Gravity Inquisition, otherwise know as the Civil Aviation Safety Authority will turn up to detail exactly what acts of heresy caused the dreadful event.

It is amazing how much time and effort the human race puts in to fighting battles that can't actually be won. Consider the resources that go into an airliner; metal, hundreds of metres of it, plastic, rubber, glass and a small ocean of avgas all so that a couple of hundred people can travel from one point of the earth to another without getting seasick. For a few hours, a day at most, gravity looks the other way but it knows we're coming down eventually.

The same applies to medicine. Doctors, surgeons, researchers all of them working day and night to heal injuries and cure diseases. Every single person they treat is going to die regardless. Every cure that is found simply means people are going to die of something else. There is a concern in the western world at the moment about the number of people dying of heart disease and diabetes. This shouldn't surprise anyone; we're running out of other things to die of. Eventually everyone will die of heart disease or diabetes.

Medicine is like flight, it all revolves around finding loopholes to the rules we all know exist. We spend immense resources figuring out ways of putting off the crash. As an example; we're supposed to die of bubonic plague but buried in the subclauses is our loophole. If we develop immunity, get a healthy attitude towards cleanliness, a sensible suspicion of rats and invent antibiotics then perhaps the contract can be broken. We did all that and bubonic plague is, if not gone, way done on humanity's list of problems to be dealt with.

Finding loopholes in the rules seems to be what we are best at. We never succeed in changing the rules but we can sometimes get them reinterpreted. As we get better at it we will be developing loopholes faster than the loops themselves can change. We will never beat death, or gravity, but one day we will be moving faster than they are. One day we are going to go up and never come down.

Fortunately I will be safely dead by then. Quite possibly of heart disease or diabetes.