In Search Of Appreciative Life

The recent and prodigious commenting of reader Lemonade714 has gotten me thinking again about the other side of the gateway which I try daily to break through with my writing in an effort to reach some kind of audience. Self publishing makes it all too easy to get to the point where you can make that attempt, but it is all the harder for not having gone through the process of winning over a publisher. I happen to know that I have a least a few readers, making it easier to expend myself in service of this blog.  Many in my shoes are wracked with worry that there's just no one out there seeing their output.

For them (and still for me to some extent), it's something like when NASA sends out a deep space probe. They know its sensors will receive and transmit data, but they hope it will be intercepted by intelligent life. We know this because each probe invariably is laden with a recording or engraved metal plate meant for such life to absorb and therefrom learn about humanity. It's a lingering sign of the scientist as the wide-eyed, hopeful dreamer, not the humorless walking lab coat with whom one cannot relate and who delights in evidence of trace amounts of water on vacant, empty, distant worlds. Perhaps the effort to communicate with alien life will be scrapped in future owing to budget cuts, which would be sad. It would seem to be one of NASA's most supported missions.

I suppose we don't really know whether any form of life has gotten our message from Viking, Voyager, the Mars Rover or anything of the others. To our knowledge, none have acted on said message, but we don't really know that either. We might expect the sensors to register encounters with life, but who knows how effective they might be regarding unknown forms of life? I feel exactly like that about some of the methods by which I try to measure response to what I'm doing. There are subscriber counts, hit counts and more, but the only things which are any real assurance are comments online and in real life from human beings.

Automated measurements can at best tell that my words ran across someone's screen, but they can't say that anyone read, understood or liked them. It's one more encouraging sign that there's still a place for us among the machines. Thanks to Lemonade714 and all my other human readers who wield the power to read, analyze, think and write. I know you're out there, and your support means much more than that of emotionless, inscrutable automatons.