Archive
Jump back in order to move forward
Before Aristotle came up with his idea that everything was static, unchanging, and in its place because it had been put there, another Greek chap by the name of Thales had some other interesting ideas. Most of them we take utterly for granted these days, to the point where you probably havn’t even heard of him.
He was a bit of a grim looking bloke, really.
This was at a time, nearly 3 000 years ago, when the rest of the world was very heavily involved in myths, gods, magic, and other views of nature, which didn’t explain anything about the world around you save to say that it was none of your business. Any questions like “where do thoughts come from?” or “where do memories go?” were answered in long, confusing ways, designed to get the asker to effectively shut up, and get back to his ploughing.
And it was Thales who started an idea of looking at the world with mechanisms in mind, rather than magic. He noticed that a lot of the stuff he saw came in opposites: hot/cold, light/dark, up/down, cause/effect. Much like the opposite sides in a business deal, sparking the concept that things did things because they got some benefit from it. Quite a small step these days, but back then it was a giant leap for mankind.
The other really important thing that Thales did was nip off to Egypt for a bit of pyramids, and he came back to Greece with a new fangled thing called geometry. The Egyptians had used geometric concepts to build pyramids and measure land, and that’s about it – they were pretty lazy, and happy with going through their day not wondering about anything much. Thales applied his new ideas of asking questions to geometry, and figured out how to do some really neat things – measuring how far a ship was from land by getting the cross bearings from two view points, and using the idea that a circle contains 360 degrees, so a straight line must contain 180. These marvelous ideas about logic and systematic deduction turned Greece around. By about 500 AD it’s how they were running their cities – arguing opposite points of view in a structured way turned into a way in which the cities could be managed more effectively. Today we call it politics.
The expansion of cities really then took a step forward. But when you have a group of people in one place, and another group in another place, chances are they’ll want to talk to each other. So we come to trade, mapping, navigation, and some curious people called the Portuguese and what they did with Africa.
As above is different from so below
Blessed are those with hindsite, I suppose. Here we are, two thousand years after a bloke with a beard was nailed to a tree after saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change. And look at what happened? The world wasn’t exactly turned upside down, but its location in the universe was certainly moved around a bit. But it took a while for this to happen.
The earliest signs of Christianity taking hold are of paintings and so on, dating from around 200 AD. There were isolated pockets, mostly around the Mediterranean, and some in Continental Europe. But it wasn’t till after Atilla and his Huns had had their big showdown with the Roman Empire that all of these were effectively joined up, and it became the new colourful toy in the playground that was 7th century Europe.
The spread of Christianity through Europe. The darker blue is around 325 AD, while the lighter blue is around 600 AD.
The main point that was stressed so heavily in those days was that this life is fairly minor, when its compared with the next one. If you do well, you’ll go to heaven, and be eternally happy, if not, then you wont. The main thrust of it came in the form of something like “dont bother looking around, and checking out what’s going on now. Concentrate on getting into heaven, because that’s what really matters”. Things like learning and education were somewhat frowned upon, and the whole idea of research by trial and error in order to discover something was completely bananas.
As a result, the Church had it more or less their own way for a fair while. What they said was right, and what anyone else said was wrong. This was mostly down to a bloke called Aristotle. He was pretty sure that everything was unique, and had its own special set of characteristics that set it aside from everything else in the universe. I am different from the tree outside, which is different from the cloud over there. That’s logical.
He put the Earth in the middle, because it was the most important. Everything else spun around it on very precise and fixed orbits, defined by concentric crystal spheres around the Earth.
Aristotle’s view of the Universe. A bit out, as it happened.
His thinking was magnificent – so brilliant and perfect, in fact, that it is what the Church adopted, and stood by. As it turned out, when he died in 322 BC, he could not possibly have known that his model for the universe would remain unchallenged for the next 1 865 years, until a Polish astronomer published a book that turned it all around. All he’d done was actually look into the sky, and write down what he saw. And by changing what we as people knew, he changed what we are. His name was Nicolaus Copernicus.
My Ultimate Ten Car Garage
Im a big fan of the BBC Sunday evening show Top Gear. At one point they mentioned that every motoring enthusiast has, over time, developed an ultimate “Ten Car Garage”. In affect, money notwithstanding, the top ten best cars. Ive finally managed to finish mine off, so here it is, in no particular order. Thanks to Jezza, Dick and Jim for all their hard work.
1. Porsche 911 Carrera
I love the look of this car – I know that its old enough to have been driven by primitive examples of neolithic man, and that the engine is in the wrong place, and that Porsche employs some of the laziest car designers in all of time. But it has one of the best “sports car” looks – the steep windscreen, and sloping back.
2. Bugatti Veyron
The fastest car in the world? Oh yes. Im not keen on the Supersport model. Im not too keen on stripped out versions of normal cars – and the normal car in this case can still do over 400km/h. Sigh. I love the Veyron because it is just a huge leap forward – compare it to the Saturn V rocket. Nothing like it has ever been made, and in this day and age, with oil prices doing what they’re doing and the way the world economy is going, I dont think we’ll see something even like this for a long long while.
3. Aston Martin DB9
A very pretty car. The best long distance GT car ever. I dont want a Vanquish – yes, its also brilliant, but this is a bit nicer to drive not-so-fast. I like the way Aston Martin have made it to gently suggest you through a journey – the car acts like a butler, taking care of complicated things, but makes you feel like you’re doing all the work, but it a nice way. It flatters you.
4. Caterham R500
I have big plans for this car. One day when Im rich and famous I’ll buy this as a 40th birthday present to myself, and build it with the kids. Caterham are known for their geeky, fast kit cars. And this is the best of the lot of them – to the point where most races have banned it for being too fast to race (ahem – what?!). It handles better and is faster than its bigger, more powerful rivals. Classic car rallies in this? Deffinately!
5. Rage Buggy
A go-cart for grown ups? Why not? Its like the Caterham – fast and nimble, but built to go offroad. I suppose its not much of a car – it doesn’t have brake lights and things, so its not actually allowed to go on the road. But for the pure fun of it, I think it’s great.
6. Wiesmann MF3 Roadster
I think this is a great car. Its modern – built around 2006 or so. But its everything a classic British sports car should be – a straight six engine in the front, rear wheel drive, a small cockpit, simple instruments, the lot. Except for one small thing – its actually German. I just love the way it harks back to the classics of the ’60’s and ’70’s, like the E-type Jaguars and Triumphs, but its also sort of modern.
7. Farrari 458 Italia
Yes, its well known for setting itself on fire, which can be a bit of problem, especially when using it in a pick-up line. But I will put my head on the block and say its the finest looking car Farrari have ever made. The end.
8. Farrari 250 GTO
When I first started building this list, I told myself I wouldn’t have two cars from the same maker – that’s just a waste. But the rarity of the GTO, and the fact that it has that awesome sports car shape (similar to the 911) just grabs me. Its the kind of car you’d buy to have not to actually drive.
9. Porsche Boxster
I figure, in for a penny, in for a pound – if Im going to break the rule of one car per manufacturer once, I might as well break it again. In terms of a two-seater soft-top sports car, the Weismann steals my heart. But in terms of practicallity, I would take this over its big rival, the BMW Z4. I think the Z4 is stunning to look at, but that’s where it ends. I dont like the way it tries to kill you whenever you try and go round a corner, or change gear. And besides, this has one of the best badges for reliability in the business.
10. Lancia Stratos
Possibly the most impractical car ever made. The steering wheel and the pedals aren’t actually directly in front of the driver. The space inside is large enough for a driver, and a passenger, but not if they’re over the age of 7. Or carrying a small bag of sugar. You need to get the assistance of a yoga instructor and a crane opperator to get in and out of it. But it won the World Rally Championship three times. And, after watching videos on youtube of it in action, Im addicted.
So there we are. I perhaps might be lucky enough to one day own one or two of these cars. But that’s the point – its a wishlist. If you feel the urge to have an argument about my choices, and berate me about the statements Ive made, please feel free to bugger off. Im not interested.
When we started becoming people
This new category – Annus Mirabilis – refers to a latin phrase, meaning “year of wonders”. Im planning on a new area of writing that is slightly more historical, more popular science, trying to unravel how we as people got to where we are today.
Something Ive been pondering on for a while now is how different we are to the people that walked around this planet two or three thousand years ago. On one hand, we’re exactly the same – ok, statistics suggest that we’re generally a bit taller, but that’s about it. We still eat more or less the same food, at the same sorts of times of day, we sleep and night and are active when the sun is up, we like to party and be social, we still have taboos and laws, and we rate our individual successes in much the same way. But on the other hand, we’re hugely different. Try telling an ancient Greek that if he were around today, he could use a device to have an instantaneous conversation with someone else anywhere in the world. And that it works using electricity, computers, and satellites in orbit. Not only will he not believe you, chances are he wont understand at all, unless you spent a fair while explaining things, starting with some very basic concepts.
So how are people then different from people now? The conclusion that Ive come up with is that what you are is defined by what you know. If what you know changes, then so do you. The shift in knowledge since prehistoric times has changed people from what they were into what they are. Because – as far as I can tell – nothing else has.
So, because I tend to do this kind of thing, I’ll begin with something else and come back to that later.
Having done a fair bit of looking around and thinking about how we got to where we are now, there is a strong element all the way through, especially in the last thousand years or so, which is when what I consider to be the big advances took place – a sort of millenia mirabilis if you will. That element is religion – specifically the Christian church. This seems a good place to start.
Apparently, according to wikipedia, the first signs of what we’d today call religion arose around 300 000 years ago, when we first begin to find signs of dead people being intentionally buried by people who were still alive. Why? There’s the practical answer – Fred was beginning to smell funny, and go a bit runny, so I thought I’d better get rid of him. Alternatively, people had begun to wonder if once your body stopped, was there a bit – the bit that was you, the bit that did all the thinking – that sort of carried on. They had just invented the idea of the soul. The body is just a sort of transportation mechanism for the thing that you are, and hopefully the thing that you are dosn’t dissapear when the body does. It goes somewhere else – either to another world, or is incorporated into another body, and begins a new life.
As far as Ive read, the Moon is perhaps one of the biggest influences and catalysts in early religion. It was far away – there was no way of getting there – it was pretty big, and dominated the sky at night (you could see it during the day as well). The highly educated early-man might have spotted that it has an influence on the tides, but most of all it changed shape. How? Its so far away, and so huge, how can it do that? Something must be making it do that – controlling it – something that we cannot possibly understand. Once this leap was made, the next big one was the link between the phases of the Moon and the timing of womens mestrual cycles. The Moon and the Givers of Life had something in common – clearly there was something at work controlling all of this.
So we begin the idea of a diety – something or someone who could be answerable to everything. All the good stuff, like tasty fish and good harvests, to the bad things like plague, sickness and the noisy people next door. Afterlife, good, bad, everyone being equal, but some being more equal than others. It was the first step toward making ancient people into modern people. The first step that defined us as not one of them.
A story of self denial
There once was a young man in the high mountain kingdom of Tibet. After years of working, tending his fathers yaks, he decided that enough was enough, that life was too easy, and he could not possibly hope to achieve enlightenment if he continued with his current occupation. He decided to join a monestary, and become a monk – living his life in preyer, meditation, eating simply, and purging himself of unnecessary and earthly things.
After packing a few simple belongings, he set out one day, walking over the hills and through the valleys, until he came to a famous monestary. Reverently, he walked slowly up the stairs, calmly at peace in his mind, happy to be taking these first steps to enlightenment. After finding a monk, and describing what he wanted, he was ushered before the lama – the most inportant and noblest monk in the monestry.
“Hallo, my son,” said the lama. The man said nothing, but bowed his head to the floor.
“What is it you seek, young man?” asked the noble lama.
“Oh great wise one – ” he began.
“Oh pish-posh. You can dispense with all that mumbo-jumbo rubbish. I am an earthly man like you – although by the smell of it, you’re maybe slightly more earthly than I am.”
“Oh – sir. I have come here today to seek a path to enlightenment. I wish to join your monestary, and lose my ties with the unnecessary, to dispense with that which is not justifiably required in life, to deny that which I desire, and to live a life in preyer and meditation.”
“You do, do you?” said the lama.
“Yes, oh grand – yes sir.”
The lama looked at the simple peasent, still kneeling with his head bowed on the floor in front of him.
“You want to lead a life of self denial, meditating on that which you do not have, and thus achieve enlightenment?”
The man nodded.
“Very well,” said the lama. “Go away from this place. Leave now – do not hesitate. Find the nearest ale-house and get monstrously drunk. Find yourself a good women, have her, and leave her. Find another. Do it again. And then a few more times. And not necessarily in that order. Find a wife. Have children. Get drunk some more. Get some friends to get drunk with. Have their wifes as well. Have a farm, grow rice, keep yaks. Grow old, and die happy. Live a life denying yourself of self denial. Meditate on that as you go. If you want to. Now bugger off and stop wasting my time.”
The necessity of space exploration
I think in the light of my last post, I feel its important to justify why I wrote it – why is there a need for us to cross the vastness of space?
Firstly, its the thirst we have for discovery. I think its something very deep seated in people – we’ve got big and complex brains compared to many other animals, and the increased cognitive capacity creates an active demand for knowledge, learning and discovery. Whether its early hunter gatherers wanting to find out what was over the next hill, or Juan Sebastian Elcano completing the first circumnavigation in 1522, or the Apollo astronauts going to the moon, or even finishing a difficult video game just to find out what happens. There’s a strong feeling of wanting to have a desire fulfilled – to be honest, Im not a psychologist or an anthropolgist, so Im just thinking about all this a little harder than I normally would. I dont have any background in it.
Secondly, as Carl Sagan put it in his Pale Blue Dot essay, “this [the earth] is where, for now, we must make our stand.” A cleverly deceptive sentance there: it entices us to be careful about resource expenditure, but eventually the earth will run out, hence the ‘for now’. Either we’ll run out of resources here, or the Sun will eventually explode as stars do, and effectively end the solar system (although that won’t happen for a while, and any Earthbound creatures will almost certainly be won’t be when it does). Whatever it is – and it may just be to assuage our curiosity about the universe we live in – there is a need to bugger off.
So this poses an interesting idea. If we detach ourselves from our emotional connection that we have with the Earth, and consider it for the time being as a finite cluster of usable resources surrounded by vast distances of – lets face it – not much, then why bother conserving it? Use the resources we have without restriction. Stop going to protest marches and being a vegetarian. Mine the Earth for what it is, and move on to the next mote of dust.
I think the one thing that stops us doing this is that we as people have a thirst for knowledge, but we have a massive lacking ability to consider anything really, really, really big. I did a lot of geology in undergrad, and I was always struck by the way my lecturers threw around the ages of – say – basaltic provinces, or mass extinction events as though they happened last week, and not hundreds of millions of years ago. We can say things like “the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event happened about 251 million years ago”, but when you actually sit down and think about that sort of amount of time, it makes your head hurt. The other part of this is the distance between planets, solar systems and stars. If the Earth was the size of a golf ball, the closest star (apart from the sun), would be about 44 000 miles away. So if its so far away, why go at all? We have it all here…
But that’s just it – we dont. If there really was suddenly a demand for resources, if the Sun was going to call it a day in a hundred or so years, then there would be a deffinate need for us to stop our political squabling and get a wiggle on. Unfortunately, we’re currently too tied up in international games of who-dun-it to care about the very-long-term future of humankind.
Space travel
One of the most profound experiences Ive ever had during an exam took place when I was about thirteen or fourteen. The exam itself was for our Life Skills class – I dont know of any other school that does something like it, but it basically taught students about trying to think out of the box, not take everything on face value. Maybe a bit over our heads at the time, but I do remember generally being quite positive about it. The exam itself was special because it contained a question (I cant remember the exact wording) something like: “You have been given the power to invent something that has the potential to change the world. If money were no problem, what would you invent and why? Give details about how it would work, and potential shortcomings”. My answer had something to do with inventing a new spaceship, which could travel effectively inter-galactic distances. But over the years, Ive taken it a few steps further, and modified things a lot more.
The Earth is a finite body. As Carl Sagan pointed out in his Pale Blue Dot essay, “this is where, for now, we must make our stand”. A cleverly deceptive sentence there; enticing us to be careful about resource expenditure, but one day the Earth will run out, hence the “for now”. Either we’ll run out of resources here, or the Sun will eventually explode as stars do, and effectively end the solar system (although that won’t happen for a while, and any Earthbound creatures will almost certainly be won’t be when it does). Whatever it is – and it may just be to assuage our curiosity about the universe we live in – there is a need to bugger off.
How would this be done? Well, to my mind, there are two main hurdles to overcome. The first is travelling across the inconceivably vast distances between solar systems. The second is what to do when you get there. I will start with the second, because it inadvertently helps with the first.
A space elevator is basically a satellite placed in geostationary orbit (ie it orbits around the earth at the same pace as the earth turns under it, and stays in the same place in the sky), with a cable connecting it to the ground. The advantage of this is you effectively shuttle things up and down the cable much more cheaply and quickly than having to use enormous rockets which occasionally blow up.
A sort of artists rendition of a space elevator rising from the island of Java
The big thing about space elevators is that it makes building an intergalactic spaceship much easier to build. You dont have to build it on the earth and then push it into orbit – you can ship all the bits up the elevator, and build it in space, where moving things around is pretty simple. Then, when you get to another planet and want to descend to its surface, you can simply drop a cable down from a geostationary orbit and down you go – although you’d probably need to send a preliminary party down first to make a base for the elevator and stuff.
The second part is the big spaceship that you’d actually use to get around between star systems. This would take a fantastically long time, and would need to be able to support generations of a crew for an effectively indeffinate period. Perhaps thousands of years. One of the hinge points of this is that you’d need the spacecraft to need no fuel. A solar sail is the answer. This is, in essence, a huge sail made of a special material, towing a small module, in which the people live. The sail is pushed along by photons given out by the sun. Although this may seem preposterous – a craft being pushed by light – it does have some actual physics behind it. Light particles (photons) are particles and thus have mass. If they bang into something, they push it along. The force involved is fantastically small. But if the sail is big enough, it’ll catch an aweful lot of light. Secondly, nothing weighs very much in spaces, and there’s not likely going to be much coming the other way. Because the photons will keep hitting and pushing the sail, the spacecraft will only get faster and faster, making very high speeds attainable.
A space sail. This one has the advantage that it has a sort of propeller shape, and will induce a sort of artificial gravity.
The pod it tows along would be the tricky part. By rotating it at a specific speed, you can make artificial gravity. But how would you sustain life in it for such a long time? Because there’s nothing going into the pod for thousands of years, there can be nothing coming out – otherwise you’d eventually run out of stuff. If you used human waste to fertilise soil, which you used to grow plants, which gave you food and oxygen, you’re getting close. Dead bodies? Cremated and added to soil. The heat energy generated would also need to be saved. If there was some way to have a net gain of energy within the craft, you’re winning. That could then be converted into virtually anything – food, oxygen, disposing of waste. What if the pod gets damaged? The obvious solution would be to repair it. Space suits would let you make external repairs in flight. But what about materials? They’re finite. Even if you took along enough replacement parts to potentially build another space craft, they too could eventually run out.
How do we get around this? I suggest getting warp drive up and running, and having a big spaceship called the Enterprise, whoes chief engineer “canna give you more than 15% engine capacity” when you need it most to escape vogons or something.
The possible traverse
It seems unfortunate that even with the discovery of George Mallory’s body in 1999, we still do not know one way or the other whether him and Sandy Irvine managed to reach Everest’s summit in 1924. There are a number of facts that we do know: They had climbed the second step, they had run out of oxygen and were descending in the dark, and they were roped together when they fell. Odell’s siting of them climbing over the third step, and artefacts found on Mallory’s body tell us this. But it will be the camera that was leant to Mallory by Edward Norton, the expedition leader, which will sway the mystery one way or the other.
But can we piece something together in the meantime?
When Mallory’s body was discovered, it was found that he had sustained some pretty serious injuries. He had a broken ankle, a dislocated elbow, a large forehead wound, and some broken ribs. The rope found around his waste was severed, and the broken ribs are a classic rope-jerk injury for the time. But had he fallen all the way from the Ridge, his injuries probably would have been much more severe, and his body in a much more mangled state. It has been suggested that he only fell from the top of the North-face snow field on which he was found – maybe a little higher (see the picture at the end of this post). From the position of his body, this is only about half-way to the summit ridge. Coincidentally, his body was found almost directly below where Wyn-Harris and Wager discovered Irvine’s ice ax on the summit ridge, in 1933. Whether or not that was dropped, or intentionally placed there is still not known.
I suggest that it was left there. Jake Norton, one of the climbers who discovered Mallory’s body, has said that the area on the ridge where the ice ax was discovered is “just about the only place on the ridge where you don’t have to worry about falling off”. Irvine left the ice ax there, with the intention of picking it up on the way down. So why didn’t he? Because they were descending by a different route. Just a few days before Mallory and Irvine made their summit attempt, expedition leader Edward Norton climbed across the North face into the Great Couloir, reaching an altitude of around 8570 m without oxygen – a pretty astonishing achievement in itself. When Mallory and Irvine climbed over the second step, they decided that descending it would be difficult and probably require abseiling. This would be made even more difficult if they had been benighted, and descending in the dark. So they chose to descend via the Great Couloir, and Norton’s route.
This is supported by two facts: the distance Mallory’s body fell, and Irvine leaving his ice-ax behind on the ridge. Furthermore, there is no indication that they did abseil the second step – the Chinese in 1960 do not report finding any rope in place, or any pitons at the top (although absence of evidence is never good evidence). Unfortunately, there are a number of spanners to throw into the works. Firstly, Irvine leaving his ice ax. The current thinking is that he left it behind because he wasn’t much of a mountaineer (but, to his credit, was an accomplished skiier), and prefered to have his hands free for the predominantly rocky ridge ahead. When the ice ax was found in 1933, it was suggested by Hugh Ruttledge (that expedition’s leader) that leaving an ice ax behind was foolhardy – even an unskilled mountaineer wouldn’t dream of it. And personally, I can see their point. Secondly, at the beginning of this year, Everest historian Tom Holzol potentially discovered the body of Andrew Irvine using some very clever computer doctering, and some super-high resolution pictures of the North ridge. The problem is, if it is Sandy’s body, then he died pretty close to the crest of the ridge and his ice ax – nowhere near where Mallory’s body was discovered. And we know they were together when the fatal fall occured – the rope around Mallory’s waste tells us that.This suggests that the ice ax does indicate where they fell from. It does seem a bit of a stretch that Mallory’s body fell the distance it did, and was somehow in the good condition that it was when it finally came to rest.
So there’s the theory. But what does it tell us? If it is true, then not only had they climbed the third step, but they were actually on the final summit snowfield (where the Great Couloir starts). This is only a small hop to the summit itself. Being as close as they were, its deffinately possible that they got all the way. But, as Ive said before, to prove it one way or another, we need to find the camera. It wasn’t on Mallory’s body, so leading detectives have used awesome powers of deduction, and suggested that Irvine may have it.
A mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam: Part 2
When the images of our solar system arrived back from the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990, the picture of Earth was hailed as one of the most important pictures ever taken. Carl Sagan wrote:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Apart from this being one of the most moving pieces of writing Ive ever read, I think there are two fundamental take-home messages here. The first is our utter insignificance. A lonely intersteller traveller in space would be forgiven for entering our solar system, getting pretty close to us, and then leaving again, thinking there was nothing there. The second is how important this tiny island is to us. We only have one planet, one chance. Lose it, and we’re lost. There’s nowhere we can go, nothing we can do.
I would think that the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything would probably need a thinking engine a lot bigger than the Earth, and would probably not be entirely built and commisioned by mice – they might have needed help from the rest of the rodent order at least. Bill Bailey, the well known British musician, actor and commedian, said “Maybe there is some divine spark in all of this. Otherwise its in an incredible accident – its an incredible solar fluke – all of this, just an accident of cosmic parking.” But then if there is a God, He must be incredibly lazy to create such an enormous universe and have His devine creation occupy one microscopically tiny little corner of it. But then Terry Pratchett also pointed out that the universe is big enough to contain practically anything, and so, eventually, it does. If you read a bit deeper into it, we’re the anything. A few seconds after the Big Bang, around 14 billion years ago, could anyone have predicted that Id be sitting here, now, writing these words? Probably not. But then, if you think about it, yes they could have. They could predict anything, and because the universe is just so damn big, and would go on for such a long time, and would potentially re-occur after it crashed back in on itself in a sort of Big Crunch, everything actually will happen. Everything. Which implies, therefore, that it already has.
Sorry, my mind is beginning to hurt.
Coming back to Carl Sagan’s essay, it shows all to clearly how brief and fleeting we each are, and how insignificant we are. Why bother at all? If you commited suicide right now, or lived a long, healthy and productive life, in 1000 years would anyone care? Would there still be people around to bother? If you think about it, about a thousand years ago, William the Conqueror was landing in Southern England. As far as I know, he had a second in command who was a distant ancestor of Bernard Montgomery, the British commander who controlled Allied forces in Africa and Europe during World War 2. Of all the other people that went over with him, I havn’t a clue. OK, yes these days we have far better ability to record things – with vidoes, audio recordings, and even good old pen and paper – which wasn’t readily available a melenium ago. But on the other hand, there are a lot more of us to keep records of. So in a thousand years time, will a life-or-death decision that someone somewhere made yesterday matter? Perhaps. But, chances are, probably not.
So what am I getting at? Well, not much. But that’s my point.
Dale writes 