A Thing, y'ken?

So I had slightly skewiffy day, in a good way. Didn't so much skip college as overshoot it a little, decided to walk there since it was such a nice day outside (seven or eight miles to wells, probably more considering I took the scenic route, then a bus ride to Glastonbury). But I've got a brilliant excuse for tomorrow "Of course I was doing coursework, I was doing the most important bit: daydreaming, mostly).
One of the many things I've been pondering, in parallel with the social layout of Aquarius floating settlements and the possible applications of P.M.'s "Bolo'Bolo" concept, was yet another train of thought concerning the concept of Utopia.

Utopia is widely recognised as the ultimate aspiration of any (nice) society, and various ideas have been bandied about (especially in science fiction) about how it could be acheived... There have been a thousand conjectures about the methods, about how it could go wrong, all the grizzly and unfortunate problems underlying the concept of a perfect society. I was thinking about it in relation to The New Millenial Project and my "History"'s take on it, and was reminded of a rather good passage in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (read that, by the way)

Hiroko and her assistant Iwao were always tinkering at the endless project of maximising the closure of their biological life support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working on it [...] Success in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. thus for every substance they recycled
K = I - e/E
where E was the rate of consumption in the system, e the rate of (incomplete) closure, and I a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected value. The goal, K=I-1, was unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the biologists' favourite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existance on Mars

The lesson that I took away from that (perhaps weirdly) was a clearer idea of the value of asymptotes in planning things. And this afternoon whilst walking around and enjoying the bluebells and trees and what have you, is that Utopia, as a concept, is an asymptote line runnig through the plotted goals-vs-sucesses of every society.
Just like thanks to the laws of thermodynamics there can be no such thing as a truly closed system, thanks to some very deep traits of human behavioural evolution I don't think there can be any such thing as a 'perfect' human society - a true Utopia - without severely compromising the values that such a system claims to stand for, most significantly a sense of freedom and personal value for individuals... But as the biologist's favourite hobby demonstrates, you should always keep trying to get closer to the unreachable.

Reinventing society and economy, reformatting the human body to whatever purpose, enlarging the subgenual prefrontal cortex, whatever... None of it will bring us a utopia, but despite the final bar being an infinite distance away, it can always bring us closer. That's got to be a nice thought... right?