Welcome to "Travels with Cherie", who is pictured above, along with our traveling companion Jake and our RoadTrek RS Adventurous, which we have variously called "The Trekkie", "The Enterprise", "The Camper", or just "The Van". Personally, I think I prefer "The Enterprise" since what will follow will certainly be an enterprise of sorts. BTW, I'm using the future tense here because we haven't yet set out. Meanwhile, we're anxiously trying to figure out what to take and what to leave behind, for space is quite limited as we have already discovered, and you too may discover if you read along with us.
Before we get to "where are we headed, and why?" let me briefly introduce the travelers. Steinbeck fans will doubtless have noticed a certain similarity of title. This is because I think his travels and ours bear a certain similarity of purpose. However, while his companion was his faithful dog Charlie, mine is the love of my life, my best friend, and wife of thirty years, Cherie. Our dog Jake, faithful though he is, will be a minor player on this trip. Cherie is, by far, the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me, or that ever will happen to me -- just so you know.
So, here's the first of possibly many digressions I will make on this blog that have nothing to do with the trip. It's sort of like commercial TV. Even when the show is a good one (and I hope this one will be) you realize that they've gone to all the trouble and expense of putting on that good show so that you will watch their commercials and buy their products. While that's not completely true here, I doubt that I'll be able to resist the opportunity to hawk my views on philosophy, religion, and The Meaning of Life as we go along. So, for our first commercial break:
I've often remarked on how common it is for lucky people to fail to properly credit their good fortune. Instead, they delude themselves into thinking that they're exceptionally astute decision makers, or that they have brilliantly foreseen whatever lucky event is was that came their way, or that they are incredibly talented in some (or many) ways, or whatever. You get the idea. I think this is symptomatic of a general human failing: fear of randomness. We don't like the idea that the world is a random place, but it most certainly is. To paraphrase FDR: the only thing of which we can be certain is uncertainty itself. In fact, the Earth itself is, with very high probability, an accident. "But," complain the intelligent designers, "How could such a beautiful place with such wonderful, intelligent people living on it, possibly have just been an accident?
To understand this, I invite you to conduct the following thought experiment. You are shown a video of a volunteer flipping a coin 20 times and getting heads every time. Then you are asked whether you think that could have possibly happened by chance. Being well-versed in the laws of probability, you quickly respond "No way! That would be better than a 1,000,000 to 1 shot. Someone must have designed that coin to land heads up." But then you find out that the actual experiment consisted of 5 million volunteers each being videotaped flipping a fair coin 20 times, and that you were shown one getting 20 heads. Uh-oh! Math whiz that you are, you now realize that it was a virtual certainty that at least one of the volunteers would get 20 heads, because the odds in favor of that are better than 100 to 1. So what happened here? You were a victim of an extreme example of what is called "selection bias". Instead of being shown a randomly selected example, in which case your original conclusion would have been valid, you were shown a carefully selected video in which the rare event actually happened. And of course the actual volunteer in the video you saw would very likely have been convinced as well that someone had designed his coin to come up heads every time. But he would have been wrong.
Now keep in mind that there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and there are billions of galaxies in the Universe. So even if we assume that the chance of a star chosen at random having planet like the Earth by accident is very very tiny, the chance that somewhere in the universe there would be such a planet is much much higher. So, is the Earth just a random planet, or is it an example of extreme selection bias? Obviously the latter, because if the rare event hadn't happened here, we wouldn't be here speculating about how it might have happened.
And now, where are we headed, and why? Well, I'm turning 70 in three weeks, and we've rented a beach house in San Diego for the week of my birthday and invited our extended family to join us. So we're about to hop aboard The Enterprise and head for San Diego, with a few stops along the way, of course. We thought it would be a good opportunity to see some Americana that we've heard about but never seen. We'll be spending the better part of the summer in California, and then towards the end of the summer, the real road trip will begin. Our plan, such as it is, is to wander somewhat aimlessly through the western US and Canada. The trip out to San Diego is really just a warm-up. So stay tuned.
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