hupwhat

I believe the children are our future.

Thanks for doing this - it's absolutely fascinating. I have a couple of questions:

1. Having seen the power of a nuclear detonation up close, how do you feel about nuclear power plants? I personally didn't know it was possible to fly through a mushroom cloud and survive - do you think the dangers of radioactivity are talked up by the media too much these days?
2. How do you feel about the military for putting you in that position? Do you think they thought of you as expendable in any way?

I don't mean that last question to sound disrespectful - I just wondered if your perspective had changed with the passing of years. You do have balls of steel, and it's because of guys like you that we sort of know how to deal with nuclear situations, like what's going on in Japan right now. I salute you, sir!

How do you know you're actually lucid and not just dreaming you're lucid?

Sight gone.

One thing I never hear anybody talk about but which fascinates me no end - what was the first actual thought? I mean, I get that life began in a primordial soup with various chemical reactions bubbling away (which must have produced all sorts of weird one-off things that could be called "life" - much like the slime that gathers at the bottom of my fridge), but then one developed which was accidentally able to replicate itself so lived on, then mutated and mutated and mutated and so on ad infinitum until fish had feet and then dinosaurs and monkeys and stuff. I get all that, but at some point a stream of intermingling chemicals (or "stuff", as I like to call it) shifted from just being blind reactions to stuff being able to form an impression of the world around it. Dumb chemicals and elements somehow conjured up something apart from the stuff it was made from - that is such a massive thing. It's literally like a stone learning how to talk. All these inert things came together somehow to somehow conjure thought - matter creating its own representation of other matter. That's crazy to me. And now we're all trapped within those representations despite being just matter ourselves. What are your thoughts on this insanity?