An Aging Couch Potato Traveling at the Speed of Light

One of the reasons I doubt the presence of extraterrestrials in our atmosphere is that I don’t see how any creatures at all like us could stand the boredom of hundreds of years in flight.

Anyone who has taken even a 16-hour flight to Cairo, for example, knows the torture such flights become after one has read a paperback novel and a newsmagazine, watched a movie one would rather not have seen, and dozed fitfully between ersatz meals.

I cannot imagine enduring one week of such confinement, much less a century. Besides, what kind of creatures could live that long?

W. H. Brooke of Redondo Beach argues that it is “scientifically plausible” to accelerate a spaceship to very near the speed of light. “This simply means that time on the spaceship would contract, or slow down, relative to time on the home planet and the destination planet. As mass approaches infinity (the speed of light) time approaches zero.”

(That is Einsteinian theory.)

Therefore he says, a round trip to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, which is only four light years away, might take only about 15 years of Earth time, including a few years for exploration and return trip.

However, the crew, depending on how close to the speed of light their ship traveled, would have spent only weeks or months of travel time. Thus, a trip to stars even hundreds of light years away might be possible, but of course on their return they would find that hundreds of years in Earth time had passed, while they had not aged. They would be aliens on their own planet.

I have no desire to go to Alpha Centauri or any other possible planet system, having so much of Earth yet to be explored. I’ve never even been to Twin Falls, Ida.

I worry, though, that I have fallen into a state of suspended maturation something like that experienced by speed-of-light travelers. I’m afraid I have fallen under the spell of daytime television.

My wife goes to work every day and leaves me alone. I have work to do, of course, and that takes several hours a day. However, in the late afternoon I am idle and I have found myself sliding into the morass of TV.

I rarely check the listings. I just lie on my bed in a state of suspended animation and change channels with my remote control until something mesmerizes me. I try not to get hooked. Now and then, though, I find myself watching a game show. This is the kind where some welder from Boise knows the answer to what French king said “L’etat c’est moi.” I know that if I am ever going to be on a quiz show I have to read books, not watch television.

I also watch series in which there is a lot of gunfire and space machines and monsters. This prepares me for the heavy sex and violence I customarily watch later in prime time. (I don’t watch situation comedies. Too much slapstick.)

I don’t have any favorites except that I usually watch “Hunter,” probably because I liked its hero, Fred Dryer, when he played end for the Rams. Also, his partner, Stepfanie Kramer, is a very pretty young woman. I can’t believe it when she stalks through spooky warehouses with gun drawn hunting down vicious armed criminals, but that’s probably sexist. I also can’t believe that Dryer has never made a pass at her. That’s above and beyond the call of duty.

But the point is that I am not really experiencing this time as time. It’s as if I haven’t really lived, but have been in a cocoon, metamorphosing. I haven’t developed. I haven’t matured.

Sometimes I check the listings and watch movies. I like movies. I hate to admit this, but one Saturday I watched eight straight hours of old movies. My wife served my meals on a tray.

I have become exactly what she was always afraid I would become--a couch potato. I rarely read a book anymore, except just before going to sleep. Yet I have a library of 3,000 books. They sit silently on their shelves, like faithful dogs waiting for my attention.

I am like the space traveler, confined to quarters, moving at the speed of light while the real world goes on living. I have no recall of what I have seen. If you asked me what happened in yesterday’s “Hunter” I wouldn’t know.

I might as well be on that spaceship. At least when I got back I would have the advantage of being younger than everybody else. But what would I have done on the spaceship all that time? Watched television?

The worst thing is, I’m getting older.