Cosmic Perspective
A single member of the H.
sapiens sapiens race is, on average, 664 billionths (10-9) km3
in volume, with an average lifespan of 67.2 years. There are currently 7.3 billion (109) individuals of that
race on Earth, or Terra.
Earth, or Terra, is
1.12 trillion (1012) km3 by 4.54 billion years of age. It rotates on its axis at a speed of 1674.4
km/h while revolving around Sol at 108 thousand (103) km/h.
Sol, our system’s
star, is 1.4 quintillion (1018) km3 by 4.56 billion years
of age. The Solar Planetary System is
1.7 duodecillion (1039) km3 by the same 4.56 billion
years.
The Milky Way
Galaxy is 8 sedecillion (1051) km3 by 13.2 billion years
of age. Of its 200 billion stars, 40
billion support Class-M planets, with 8-10 billion of these hosting life-forms
analogous to Humans, making some 61.6 quintillion (1018) sapient
beings in our galaxy.
There are 2
trillion (1012) galaxies in the Universe with 80 sextillion (1021)
Class-M planets hosting 123 nonillion (1030) sapient beings in the
Universe at any one time.
The Universe, the
‘Verse for short, is 213 duovigintillion (1069) km3 by
13.8 billion (109) years of age.
It is expanding outward at a rate increased by the like-polarity of the
electromagnetic fields of different galaxy groups. And it is just one of innumerable such cosmic
bodies making up the Omniverse (aka Multiverse), and is currently the only one
we can measure.
* * * * *
The Universe is
formed of a single matrix called spacetime.
Everything in the
‘Verse not of the matrix of spacetime is composed of energy. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed
but only change forms. All matter that
exists is but alternate forms of energy.
Spacetime and
energy are thus the fundamental building blocks of the ‘Verse and everything in
it, the emanations from which all that is evolves.
There are four
basic dimensions—height, length, width, time—which define the point in the
spacetime matrix at which we are at any given moment. Energy flows to and from that single point in
spacetime—forward and backward, up and down, left and right, past and
future—along each of these dimensions.
The force of
gravity provides the cohesion for the ‘Verse in a relationship with the
dimension of time that is correlative if not causal. Without gravity, there would be no time;
without time, there would be no gravity.
The nature of Time
is this: The future has already happened and the past is yet to be, and the
moment where we are now is the beginning, and the end, and every moment in
between.
* * * * *
Life is a function
of energy, of thermodynamics. Given
appropriate conditions, life is inevitable, because energy in the form of
matter will spontaneously self-organize through abiogenesis.
Once manifest, life
evolves into more complex forms which themselves evolve further, with those
most adaptable being the best able to survive, reproduce, and flourish.
Life has existed on
Terra for 4.1 billion years, and in the Universe since 10-17 million years
after the Big Bang.
The essence of life
is change and evolution, growth and decay.
For individual organisms, birth and death define the boundaries of
life. Without death, life has no
meaning.
Whether or not
there is another form of existence once the organic shell has been shed in
death and life on this plane ends does not matter; Humans debating those
questions are like fetuses discussing questions on life after birth.
* * * * *
In 5 million years,
the H. sapiens sapiens race, and along with it the H.
sapiens species and the Homo genus, will be extinct
due to degradation of the Y-chromosome, if we have not already destroyed
ourselves and/or our biosphere or suffered a mass extinction we don’t cause.
In 800 million
years, multi-cellular lifeforms will have vanished from Terra.
In 1.3 billion
years, eukaryotes will be extinct and life on Terra reduced to prokaryotes due
to CO2 starvation caused by chemical disruption from Sol’s
increasing luminescence.
In 4.5 billion
years, the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide and merge
into one Milkomeda Galaxy, altering the structure of everything in them, though
most stars and planetary systems will remain intact.
In 5.4 billion
years, Sol will enter its red giant phase, incinerating Mercury, Venus, and
possibly Terra, destroying any remaining life on Terra if not. The habitable zone will move out to Mars, and
Saturn’s moon Titan may become habitable.
In 8 billion years,
Sol will collapse into a white dwarf, expelling half its mass into the
interstellar medium, making elements available for nucleosynthesis and forming
an emission nebula. Any remaining
planetary bodies will be stolen by passing stars, leaving the Solar Nebula.
In 14.4 billion
years, Sol will be a totally dead black dwarf star.
The Universe will
eventually end in the next Big Bounce (a Big Crunch facilitating another
Big Bang) in around 60 trillion years, dying so another can be born anew as it
was formed before.
All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen
again, and again, and again.
Ain’t No Power in the ‘Verse
“Man is an animal,”
wrote anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “suspended in a web of significance he
himself has spun”.
On Planet Terra
(Earth) of the Solar Planetary System in Orion’s Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy
in the Local Galaxy Group of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster in the Laniakea
Supercluster of the Universe, during the Subatlantic Chron of the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch of the Quartenary Period in the Cenozoic Era of the
Phanerozoic Eon of the Current Supereon in Galactic Year (GY) 20, Jews believe
that Adonai speaks Hebrew, Muslims that Allah speaks Arabic, American
evangelicals that Almighty God speaks Elizabethan English, Roman Catholics that
Dominus Dei speaks Latin, Eastern Orthodox that Kyrios speaks Greek, Hindus
that Brahman speaks Sanskrit, Zoroastrians that Ormazd speaks Avestan,
Buddhists that Adibuddha speaks Pali, Shintoists that Amaterasu speaks
Japanese, religious Daoists that Tai Di speaks Mandarin Chinese, and Sikhs that
Vahiguru speaks Punjabi.
Each of these
groups, and each subgroup and splinter and cult and sect within each of them,
believes they are the Chosen People from which will come the Anointed One to assert
their rightful dominion over all Creation for all Eternity.
That belief is
absurd. In fact, all “belief” is
absurd.
* * * * *
To believe is to
define. To define is to limit. To limit is to control. To control is to corrupt.
Belief is not humble; it is aggressive. Belief
is not a sign of submission; it is an assertion of domination. Belief makes itself superior to that in which
it claims to believe by controlling it through the very act of belief. Thus, belief is blasphemy. Belief
is vanity. Belief is futility. Belief is the very antithesis of faith. At the opposite end, disbelief affirms
belief by that very negation, which is another attempt at control.
To have faith, one
must surrender control. To surrender
control, one must abandon limitation. To
abandon limitation, one must give up definition. To give up definition, one must let go of
belief. To have faith, one must neither
believe nor disbelieve; one must unbelieve.
* * * * *
There is no Higher Power in the ‘Verse, no Supreme Being, no
Divine Creator-Redeemer- Transformer, especially not an anthropomorphic and
anthropopathic God such as humans repeatedly create in their own image with
whom to have an illusory personal relationship, an illusion of an illusion with
an illusion.
Every form of Ultimate Reality conceived and believed by
human religion and philosophy, each of which is geocentric and anthropofocal,
is too small for our Universe. Even in the very rare instances in which
humans have perceived an Ultimate Reality as something genuinely Other, they
have then proceeded to append to that insight intermediary realities to connect
it to our own in order to believe, define, limit, and control, reducing fairly
advanced intellectual and spiritual concepts to mere ideological dogma. As the Hymn of Creation in the Rig Veda
admits, “The gods themselves are later than creation”.
To state
categorically that there is absolutely nothing beyond what we can see with our
five physical senses, however, is as unscientific as religion. For all we know, that Something may be so far
outside our ken that it is as invisible to us as the tall sailing ships of
invading Europeans initially were to the native peoples of the Western
Hemisphere whom their passengers were about to conquer, kill, rape, and
plunder.
* * * * *
In Somerset
Maughm’s The Razor’s Edge, protagonist Larry Darrell said, “A God that
can be understood is no God”.
So, if there is Something that was before all Time, is now,
and will be even after the end of Time, with Time here being defined as the
lifespan of the current universe, it is beyond personhood, beyond being, beyond
effability. In other words, Something
eternal. Let’s call this “The Aught”. The Aught derives from two Old English words
that in turn derive from two Proto-German words meaning “eternal thing”.
The Aught has no
name. It has no need of a name. Since it is the one and only Something, the
one and only Eternal Thing, there is no other Something from which it needs
distinguish itself.
The Aught produces
yet claims no possession; it redeems yet requires no gratitude; it
sustains yet exercises no authority.
It has no need of obedience, worship, prayer, praise, adoration,
supplication, benediction, love, or even respect. It just is.
The Aught is both
perpetual and ever-changing, flowing through and animating all that is
throughout spacetime and beyond, transcendent yet immanent, metacosmic yet
omnipresent, eternal yet omnitemporal.
The Aught is the
Source of all that is, the Course shaping its formation, and the Force
energizing its manifestation. From our perspective, these are
different things, but in reality they are One.
The Aught favors none; there is no Anointed One, no Chosen People, no Exceptional Nation,
no Elect Species; not on Terra, not in the Milky Way, not in the entire
Universe.
The Aught does not need us nor want anything from us; individual beings are too
infinitesimal and ephemeral within the Universe for it to take much note.
The Aught is
neither male nor female. It does not
take sides, nor have sides. From it
emanate both light and dark, good and evil, order and chaos, yin and yang, life
and death, integrity and entropy, creation and destruction, everything and
nothing. Each of those
antitheses is defined by its opposite.
Without their counterpoints, none of them can exist, and the fact that
those opposites exist in competition with each other is what give us choice,
the choice which is the definition of freedom.
And without death, life has no meaning. So, the essence of
Life, of all existence, is change and evolution.
No Gods, no Masters
In The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we learn from a computer named Deep
Thought that the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is “42”. In The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe, we learn that the Ultimate Question that produces that Answer is
“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”.
For those of you saying, “Hey, wait a minute,” and getting out your
calculators, that is actually a correct equation in base13
mathematics. Which could mean that we
are a base10 race on a base10 planet in a base13
universe.
* * * * *
The word race as
biological term applied to all lifeforms comes from the 18th century, further defined and twisted in the 19th century, where it
was used for what is now usually called a subspecies. That is the sense in which I am about to use
it now.
The Homo sapiens
sapiens race began flourishing just 195 thousand years
ago. Out of the four known races (H. sapiens sapiens, H.
sapiens neanderthalensis, H. sapiens denisova, H.
sapiens idaltu) of the Homo sapiens species, it is
the only one remaining. There are six other known species (H. habilis,
H. naledi, H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis,
H. floresiensis) of the 2.8 million year old genus Homo,
each of which has only one race identified in it, except for Homo
erectus, of which nine races or subspecies have been identified.
Of these eighteen
races of Homo, or Human, known to have walked the Earth in the past 2.8
million years, only ours remains. So,
when Edward James Olmos as his alter-ego Admiral Bill Adama of the Battlestar Galactica
(BS-75) said in an appearance with his crew at the UN that there is only one
race, the human race (and so say we all, or at least we should), he was
literally as well as rhetorically accurate.
That’s why I say
that I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth, and that the whole world is my home and all its people my brothers, sisters, and
cousins.
* * * * *
Remember that the
Universe is around 213 duovigintillion (1069) km3 in
volume and 13.8 billion years old containing 2 trillion (1012)
galaxies with 80 sextillion (1021) Class-M planets hosting around
123 nonillion (1030) sapient beings analogous to humans.
Against that vast
expanse of spacetime and multitude of beings, regardless our status, strength,
size, wealth, power, etc., compared to others of the One Human Race, nothing we
do matters at all. Not a single member
of the One Human Race on this miniscule planet in the outer reaches of the
Milky Way galaxy is special. Our planet
is not special. Neither our race nor our
species nor even our genus is special.
Not even the eight gods incarnate atop Earth’s socioeconomic food chain
who have as much as the lowest 3.65 billion humans, even with their 75 million
enablers who own as much as the remaining 49% counted in.
From the POV of the
‘Verse, each of those eight gods incarnate count no more than the poorest, the
weakest, the youngest, the meekest of us lower humans, and the same goes for
each of their 75 million retainers. No
single one of us is better than any other because we are all of equal
insignificance. Each of us is a red
shirt. We are all just dust in the wind.
Life is just
living, that is all. There’s no secret
to discover, no divine plan, no special path, no purpose, no destiny, nothing
to win. There is no divine reward for
good nor godly payback for evil, in life or after life. But if there were, someone needing the threat
of eternal punishment to avoid being evil, wouldn’t really be good. And if they were only being good in hope of
an eternal reward, then they’d be a piece of shit just like Rust Cole says,
nirvana being samsara and all that.
Because you have to lose your life in order to save it.
* * * * *
None of us chose to
be here, to be born, to exist, to live, not one. Every single one of us here on Earth, and for
that matter each member of every sapient race on Class-M planets throughout the
‘Verse, shares that lack of choice. None of us is getting out of here alive. As Quentin Coldwater said, “We’re all
fucked in our own way”, so be nice to each other.
Thus for any of us in
the One Human Race to do anything but work for the welfare of us all is
insanity, because neither we nor our planet are significant enough for anyone
else to notice us or it. There is only us,
we only have each other and Terra our home, and there is only Now, so while
nothing we do matters against the vastness and depth of spacetime and nearly
infinite numbers of other sapient beings in the ‘Verse, for all of us humans,
here and now, all that matters is what we do, today.
So, be the change
you wish to see in the world. Live as if
the world is how it should be to show it what can be. Love yourself, because if you don’t, you
can’t love anyone else; it is impossible.
Then, love every other person as you love yourself, and do not do to any
other what you would not want done to you.
Take to heart, both
literally and figuratively, this verse from the Quran: “If a single innocent
person dies, it is as if the whole world has been killed, and if a single
innocent person is saved, it is as if the whole world has been rescued”. And remember that the only true jihad is the
one inside each and every one of us.
Che Guevara once
said: “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine
revolutionary lacking this quality.”
And it is vitally
important that you love yourself, for me as well as for you. Because if you don’t love yourself, if you do
not believe that you are worth fighting for, how can you believe that I am
worth fighting for? And I do need you to
fight for me, as much as I want to see you fight for yourselves and for the
rest of us.
One day we may even
need to, or rather get to, meet members of another sapient race from
extraterrestrial space, but a much more pressing need is to expand that to all
sapient beings here on Earth. Because
AI, artificial intelligence, is not some far-off fantasy but an eminent surety,
on our doorstep about to ring the bell.
In fact, that very
thing is currently a matter of open dispute between Elon Musk and Mark
Zuckerberg on whether it will be harmful or beneficial. Of course, both Musk and Zuckerberg speak
from the soley POV of the human race, not taking into account the potential
desires and needs of those future synthetic beings. Like a U.S. Senate conference on women’s
health of all men with no input from or regard for women themselves or a
council hearing on estate housing for
the poor with no input from or regard for the poor themselves.
I look at it this
way: such synthetic life will not have chosen to be here anymore than any of us
and will share our own lack of choice in that matter, and thus deserve the same
consideration we wish for ourselves.
While politicians
use the truth to tell lies, artists use lies to tell the truth. One of the truths artists have related
through lies in the past couple of decades is of the need to prepare for first
contact, first contact with synthetic life arising on our own planet, and the
potential pitfalls of not doing so, most lately in the UK serial Humans
and the American shows Dark Matter, Extant, and Battlestar
Galactica.
* * * * *
In ancient times, the words for “the universe” and “this planet” were
often the same. In Hebrew, “ha-olam”, as
in “Barukha atah Yahuweh Eloheinu, Melekh ha-olam” meant, and still means, both
Earth and the universe. In Greek, “aion”
carries the same dual meaning, as does the Old English word “world”. It comes, of course, from the idea that life
here on Earth is all that is, but it can also mean that making a change in our
own little corner of the spacetime is a step toward improving the lot of all,
sending out ripples of change over the planet and across the cosmos.
I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth. The whole world is my home, and all its
people, both human and nonhuman, whether organic or synthetic, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins. Like our more distant cousins on
other planets across space and throughout time, we are all children of the
Universe.
The Endless Struggle
“Every generation must fight the same battles again and again and
again,” said Tony Benn in one of his more memorable speeches. “There is no final victory, and there is no
final defeat.”
In a free market, the only things free are the corporations. Those who buy into
what those trying to shift power from
the ballot box to the market-place with austerity, balanced budgets, so-called
free trade, and socially liberal fiscal conservatism repeat as a mantra like
cult members on a mission from their God remind me of the following story.
* * * * *
Scorpion comes to the edge of a creek he needs to cross to get to where
he’s going, and wonders how he’s going to accomplish that.
“Hey, Frog,” he says to Frog, whom he sees resting by the creek-side,
“how about giving me a lift across the water?”
“No way, Scorpion,” said Frog. “If I put you on my back, you’ll sting
me as we cross the water, and I’ll drown.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” asked Scorpion. “If I do that, I’ll die
too.”
Frog thought for a minute. “Ok,” he said, “I guess that makes sense”.
So Scorpion climbed on Frog’s back and they began swimming across the
creek.
At about the halfway point, Scorpion’s stinger whips forward and sticks
Frog in the back of his neck.
“But Scorpion,” Frog said miserably as he began to weaken and sink,
“why? Now you’ll die too.”
Scorpion smiled sadly. “It’s in my nature.”
* * * * *
There is no god but
Profit, and Ayn Rand is its Prophet. Or
so say the 1% and their minions in the governments of UK, Republic of Ireland,
USA, European Union, France, Germany, and even those which claim to hate all
things Western, like that of Turkey. All
of them have these words written in their hearts, and teach them diligently to
their children, talking of them while sitting in their house and walking down
the street, when they lie down, and when they rise up. They bind them as a sign on their hand and
wear them as a frontlet between their eyes, writing them on their doorposts and
on their gates.
Whatever name it
wears, be it pragmatic progressivism,
neoliberalism, supply-side, objectivism, trickle-down, horse-and-sparrow
economics, it amounts to the same thing:
telling us that if we feed their horse enough oats some will eventually pass
through to be shit out onto the road for us sparrows to eat.
We are living in a theocracy, a theocracy in which the greed of the few
outweighs the needs of the many, in which avarice for excessive wealthy and
ambitious lust for ever more power through robbery, slaughter, and plunder are
elevated to the level of supreme virtue.
By comparison, practicing Satanists have more morality.
Whenever anyone in government, any government, speaks to you of realism
and pragmatism while calling for austerity, balanced budgets, cutting taxes,
“job-creators”, globalization, privatization, pay caps, cutting costs, free
trade, free markets, deregulation, corporations as persons, market-based
solutions, personal responsibility, the value of work as an ethic, benefits
earned rather than human rights deserved, how an individual’s sole worth is
their ability to create profit, you are listening to a sermon. As a religion, it is evil, it is
psychopathic, it is inhuman. Because as
an ideology, it is indeed a religion, one which worships at the temple of the
Invisible Hand of the Market-place, the Church of the god Profit.
Perhaps I shouldn’t call it evil, though, since psychopaths lack a
conscience. They are like predators in
the jungle. Why do do so many of our
political “leaders:, devotees of the religion of neoliberalism, look at us the
way they do? Because to them we are
food, morsels at a banquet of excess.
And yet they themselves are not even the masters; they are instead the
house slaves, their masters’ pets.
* * * * *
Atop the pyramid of humanity our global economic system allows eight
gods incarnate to take up as much as 3.72 BILLION other individuals humans or
465,250,000 (nearly half a billion) EACH.
The same system allows the lesser gods and demigods below them to
likewise use and waste huge amounts of the resources that are left, so that
humanity’s wealthiest 1% take up as much as the other 99% of humanity. That 1% is 73 million individuals total, and
if you take out the eight gods incarnate, it leaves 72,999,992 individuals who
collectively take up as much resources as 364,927,000 other humans, for an
average of 50 other individual human beings combined each.
When I look around and see what that does to my brothers, sisters, and
cousins around me and across the planet, I get bothered. I get angry.
I get enraged.
Our so-called leaders, the enablers of the 1%, tell us to be rational,
be reasonable, to accept life the way it is.
Mostly because life the way it is put them and their patrons where they
are. They make it seem sensible. They make selfishness and greed sound
pragmatic. They make it seem as if
willingly acquiesing to their manipulation, subjugation, and dehumanization
will make us part of the in-crowd, that if we resist, if we fight, if we
protest, if we ask questions, if we look around and say “Why?”, then we won’t
be one of the cool kids, one of the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal”,
one of the “pragmatic progressives”, one of the “progressives who get things
done”, one of the soulless minions of their orthodoxy who accepts things the
way they are, eating the sugar-covered shit they offer with a smile as if it
were a brownie.
Good people don’t do that. Good
people don’t accept the world the way it is.
Not if they are awake. Not if
they are not numb, but bothered, angry, and enraged. They see the world as it is and refuse to
accept it. They fight it.
* * * * *
Banksy once wrote, “If we wash our hands of the conflict between the
powerful and the powerless, we don’t remain neutral, we side with the
powerful”. Silence is acquiescence. Acquiescence is acceptance. Acceptance is collaboration. Collaboration is approval. Approval is complicity.
Sometimes there is no middle neutral ground. And doing the right thing isn’t always the
right thing to do.
So, to paraphrase Tony Benn, pick up the torch of anger against
injustice in one hand and the torch of hope for a better world in the other and
use them to fight for for us all.
“Everyone has his or her particular part to play,” Bobby wrote on the
14th day of his hunger strike. “No part
is too great or too small. No one is too old or too young to do
something”.
At my junior high, there was a small group of friends who got picked on
a lot. Then one day they were standing around and decided, “Hey, an injury to
one of us is an injury to all of us”. So, when one of them got picked on, they
all would go meet the bully and tell him would have to fight each of them one
at at time, or he could quit. That started when they were in 7th grade,
and by 9th grade there were several scores of them. They never picked fights or
pushed anyone around, but they did stand up for each other, and even kids
outside their group. And they never had
to fight, not even once. They were the
runts, but not even the biggest bully wants to fight 50 runts, even one at a
time.
Change from within
is a lie. Whether of the system or of the
state. The only thing that ever gets
changed when you work from within is you, and those who dream of becoming
masters always remain slaves. National borders are going to fall, and when
they do, will the Earth belong to us, we the people, or will it belong to the
corporations and the gods of wealth who run them?
Whenever any government, economic system, or political union becomes
destructive of our welfare, when it serves the greed of the few ahead of the
needs of the many, it is our right to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new forms, laying their foundations on such principles and organizing them in
such form, as shall seem most likely to promote and sustain the safety and
happiness of us all.
Our fight is not to win, because if we fight to win, to
overcome, to rise above, then we are like the slaves who never become really
free because they only dream of becoming masters. The only way to win the game is not to play. Leadership is not about wielding authority; it is about empowering other people. Be the change you wish to see in the world; live as if the world is as it should be to show it how it can be.
Fight in ways against which there is no defense but which do no harm. Be the darkness that illuminates. Be the silence that resonates. Be the stillness that agitates.
Fight in ways against which there is no defense but which do no harm. Be the darkness that illuminates. Be the silence that resonates. Be the stillness that agitates.
I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth. The whole world is my home, and all its
people, regardless of organic or synthetic origin, regardless of organic or synthetic origin, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins. Like our more distant cousins on
other planets across space and throughout time, we are all children of the
Universe.