Is it just me, or do you feel slightly better about your break knowing that on top of the holidays, New Year’s and awkward visits with old friends, you also survived the end of the world? Well done, friend. Our first week back in school will be rife with the obligatory answers to how our break was, and now you have a clever reply to use over and over and over again.
Oh, you know. I just survived the end of the world. No big deal.

Did you ever see the movie titled 2012? Me neither. Probably because you don’t need to see the world destroyed with special effects assaulting your eyes and ears for 158 minutes. According to the movie, we should have been expecting cataclysmic natural disasters that would definitely kill you and me.

(Let’s face it. Neither of us is fit enough to dodge flaming meteorites while simultaneously leaping across magma-filled cracks splintering the earth …)

Thankfully, it didn’t go down like that. If you are like me, then you’ve been hearing the whisper of 2012 prophecies since middle school. Something about the Mayan calendar. Some sort of ancient prophecy. It was never entirely clear –– mostly because it is all hogwash.

And this hogwash has succeeded in little, save an easy party theme. Our shallow apocalyptic anxieties have been loud enough to deafen those who look at 2012 as a reawakening of critical consciousness. I don’t intend to criticize other ideas or interpretations of 2012. There are countless theories on 2012 that range from plausible to nonsensical, but they all rest on a common criticism of society: It is not working.

Perhaps here we can look toward social movements in South America that call upon the concept of “Buen Vivir.” The rough translation is “living well,” but the deeper meaning is far more expansive. Buen Vivir is a fullness in life that cannot easily be measured quantitatively –– no GDP, no paycheck amount, no number of friend requests. Part of living well is learning how to give value qualitatively. After all, how can we assign a number to that which we value for spiritual, cultural or environmental reasons?

But, how do we begin to accomplish this? Let me share with you a story from my own winter break.

It must be written in parenting guides that the best place to lecture your son or daughter is in the car. This is exactly the inescapable place where my father recited the lecture entitled “What You Should Do With Your Life.” Let me save you the details and suffice to say it is a long list that includes internship and career fairs, applications, phone interviews, pantsuits and a formidable amount of ass-kissing. You’ve likely heard it before, too.

I explained in response that before I could feverishly send off resumes and excitedly register for my free LinkedIn account, I needed to find paths of work that aligned with my values, or how I felt I could live well with others.

“Yes well, you need to make money, too.”

Yes. Yes, I do! But the world doesn’t need more successful people. It needs more people with the sense to actively balance their values. Our lives have increasingly reflected an emphasis on economic value and have done so at the detriment of community.

Buen Vivir, on the other hand, asserts that living well is only possible within the context of community. Here, the definition of community is extended to non-human communities such as the ecological and the spiritual.

So, how do we create balance amongst our values?

Perhaps striving for a perfect balance is unrealistic if not impossible, but we can strive to minimize what we feel is an imbalance. In this way, balance is a goal to constantly move toward. One of the difficulties with balance is that it takes time. Often, this is time that we may not have or may not feel we have. But perhaps, here is a starting place.

Let us be aware of any imbalances with the way we use our time. After all, if you were counting down the days until the end of the world, I bet you’ve got a lot of free time on your hands now.

To brag to ELLI PEARSON about your 2012 predictions, email her at epearson@ucdavis.edu.

Could the worlds of Star Wars ever become a reality?

Are the neon-streaked battle scenes between Jedi — space Buddhists — and Sith — space Nazis — that filled my childhood imagination something that could ever become a reality? Before we go discussing the likelihood of ever finding a force crystal for lightsaber construction like those on Ilum, the question that I’m really being drawn to is a xenobiological one –– will humans ever meet a sentient species from another planet?

The difference in technological development between the Native Americans and the Conquistadors seems very insignificant in comparison to an alien civilization out there that may very well have developed the iron forge some 4 million years ago. Given that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, even if an alien species were to be within only one million years of technological or evolutionary development of us, such a minor difference would seem monumental.

Simply put, any alien species that humanity is likely to come in contact with is going to seem a god, with us seeming a bacteria, or vice versa. A galaxy-spanning government filled with bickering aliens of different species is not a very likely future to ever happen.

The next issue that I would take up with the worlds of Star Wars is their naval ship allegory for interstellar flight. Han and Kirk playing the role of ship’s captain to a crew of people all being sustained within an artificial biosphere hurtling through interstellar space is a dated fiction that I feel properly belongs much more to my parents’ generation than to my own.

The human body is a very sensitive thing, not particularly resilient to the vacuum of space. Sustaining a biosphere during interstellar flights does not sound very energy efficient in space, a veritable desert when it comes to resources and the distances between them.

While spaceflight around our solar system looks soon to be the territory of private companies like Virgin Galactic, what I think is far more likely for interstellar flight is something of a more transhuman nature. The speed at which prosthetic and nano technologies are progressing here on earth dwarfs, in my opinion, the speed at which even private companies are expanding technologies to be used out in space.

Humanity does not fully yet understand sentience — it most likely not being a finite thing at all — or what makes us different from the animals and machines. How does humanity know it deserves to be a spacefaring species when its current history is fraught with war and unabated consumption? I think it is, perhaps somewhat poetically, that through answering some of these questions here on Earth we will develop the ability to travel the many light years between stars.

I imagine interstellar travel looking a lot like beaming someone’s digitized consciousness and memories into a cybernetic body previously constructed by rovers or foglets or whatnot on the desired planet of travel. To me, progress in fields that try to move around the question of “how to pick up a box full of delicate human bodies and throw it to a planet orbiting another star” seems as though it is going to be a better use of humanity’s time than the alternative does.

Realism factor aside — not that I don’t suspend most of my disbelief when dealing with most media anyway — last I heard, Disney approached Lawrence Kasdan to write Star Wars Episode 8 and Episode 9. He is — get this — the guy who wrote The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The birth of my future child will never make me as happy as I will be if Kasdan brings Boba Fett out of the Sarlacc like they did in the Expanded Universe content.

MICHAEL FIGLOCK is a Jedi Master, is in touch with the Force and enjoys long walks on the beach. He can be reached at mpfiglock@ucdavis.edu.