In 1948 the members of the Beat Generation had already coalesced. Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Lucien Carr had already met and the mutual osmosis of ideas had already begun. Burroughs was now living in New Orleans, Ginsberg had moved to an apartment at 1401 York Avenue in New York City and Kerouac was living in Queens with his mother.

By the 1990s the Beat Generation had become popular and reconsidered icons on cultural radar screens. To the right is a table representing the number of web pages indexed by the Google Search application on March 10, 2007.

Event Calendar for the 2007 Season

March 15	Regular Playing Season Begins
April 15	Spring Meetings in Boston, MA
June 28	Open Player Draft
July 20	Summer Meetings in Staunton, VA
September 30	Regular Playing Season Ends
October 9	Fall Meetings in Washington, DC
November 22	Cosmic Universal Series XXVI
January 26, 2008	Winter Meetings in San Antonio, TX
February 11, 2008	2008 Rookie Player Draft

The unofficial "cosmic underleague"

l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux (said the Fox to the Little Prince)

The "league history" of the Cosmic Baseball Association is still being written by a team of scholars at the Cosmic Baseball Research Alliance. Several rough drafts of several, but not all, chapters have been circulating for some time. The available records make compiling a rough chronology possible.

CBA Executive Bulletin No. 8 31 December 2001

CBA's first regular playing league was the Sharp League, created in1981. The Sharp League consisted of the first cosmic baseball team ever created, the Paradise Pisces. The CBA's second official league was the Flat League, which was created in December 1981. The Flat League served as a pool that the Sharp league fished in for new talent.

In 1985, the Sharp League morphed into the Overleague (with five teams). The Flat League was renamed the Underleague. Like its predecessor, the Flat League, the Underleague, with its non-restrictive membership policy, served the purpose of developing future cosmic players and teams. This league structure remained in place until 1997 when a third league, the Middleleague, was sandwiched into the picture.

The three-league system was used until 2004 when the CBA returned to the two-league design with the deactivation of the Middleleague.

In 2006 as a result of "contraction" only four cosmic baseball teams remained active and the two league system was replaced by one official Cosmic Baseball Association Regular Playing League. (The CBARPL remains in effect today.)

Contraction advocates argued that reducing the number of teams would free up resources for more creative pursuits. Number crunchers were pitted against poets and the scribes were wrapped up in arguments that became purely tautological. Expansion advocates argued that the increase in data creates opportunities for the imagination. Despite the implementation of computerized systems including advanced office automation applications, the task of managing the statistical data alone has become complex. But not impossible to manage, claim the expansion advocates.

A report was recently published by the Cosmic Baseball Research Alliance (COBRA) that researched the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project and its plans to manage a phenomenal amount of celestial data. The COBRA report suggests that an overwhelming quantity of data can be managed and mined for useful purposes. The LSST is expected to generate 30,000 gigabytes of data per night when it becomes operational in 2013 atop of a mountain called Cerro Pachon in the Andes in Chile. The telescope itself is being built at a cost of $467,000,000 and will account for data quantities that will be in the petrabyte (quadrillion) range (1 petrabyte=1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes; 1 gigabyte=1,000,000,000 bytes; 1 megabyte=1,000,000 bytes, 1 kilobyte=1,000 bytes, and 1 byte=8 binary digits ("bits"). The ability to search and analyze so much data led the online internet company Google to join the LSST membership roster. Other members of the LSST Corporation [it is a 501(c)3 corporation] include a variety of universities and astronomical organizations. At the heart of the project is the construction and emplacement of an 8.4-meter telescope with a 3 billion pixel digital camera on a mountain 8,800 feet above sea level. The telescope is designed to observe and take pictures of the heavens.

LSST will provide useful data on Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). Some NEOs could present a hazard to life on Earth. For example, in December 2004 there were reports that asteroid Apophis had a 1 in 37 chance of colliding with Planet Earth. The chances were later recalculated and in 2006, there was a 1 in 45,000 chance that Apophis would collide with Earth. LSST advocates point out that the telescope and the data it collects will help scientists predict potential space-based hazards aimed at Planet Earth.

Some of the teams garnering attention in the unofficial "underleague" include a team of United States states, and a group of teams from a loosely organized league of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). The PHA league has a potential pool of 848 players. Another interesting team in the "underleague" consists of characters drawn from Saint-Exupery's novel The Little Prince. A team drawn from the membership of the Association of Space Explorers (300+ members) is alive in the ersatz underleague. The Cosmic Baseball Association's newest team, the Interland Domains, was born from an internet domain league absorbed into the CBA's subleagues. Whether or not these teams, and the others competing below in the proto-subleague will coalesce into a neo-Underleague is a question still to be answered.

Our hope is that enough new teams will be elevated to the regular playing league structure, requiring league mitosis and the re-creation of an official subterranean cosmic underleague.