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Wheresoever We May Roam
Saturday, August 15th, 2009 | Author: Moody
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Consider the warmth of the body in the chill of the night. Self-contained, a furnace; heat, the presence of life. We glow in the infrared. Our coupling makes us glow the brighter, and we appear to merge with one another. The backdrop for this is the cold eternity of interstellar space. This backdrop is the unknown. It is not unknowable, but it is far too great to comprehend in its entirety. Wheresoever we may roam in this universe, which has no boundary, it shall be as the center of it all.

Wherever you go, there you are.

But who are we? What is our history? What is our path, and how has it been determined? From protean, simplest life, we arose. In infinitesimal increments, by accident and, eventually, by intentional effort, by hook and by crook even, we found ourselves standing. Here. On the good earth. On the cruel ground. On this indifferent planet. And we proclaimed our will and ourselves in tools, in rituals of birth and burial, in artistic representation. We found our meaning in these things, and by these things we created a different world, a symbolic world. In our symbols we cached our sense of reality, found ways to communicate more and more complex ideas. History unfurled slowly until, at last, we began to map its roiling undulations, to illuminate (though still but dimly) that which forever falls away behind us.

After some 13.5+ billions of years, I, who have but one life that has endured so far for approximately 1/313,953,488th of the universe’s timeline,—I wrote:

I really do love the world. For all its pain, its sorrows and tragedy; I still love it. The full experience of being human, being alive, being conscious of this ongoing experience, is meaningful to me in a way that fills me with a sense of love. I cannot maintain such a state indefinitely; life’s pain intrudes, wounds, pulls me down at times. But even in the depths of such illness, such dis-ease as torments the mind with fear and repulsion, there is something profoundly grand about it all that makes me long for life. The worst storms pass. The worst pains end. One day, it will all be gone. And so I continue fighting for the joy, trying to find it, trying to make it, trying to share it. And I love that this is so. I don’t want “heaven”; don’t think the world is “hell”. I want this. I want the way you feel when we hug each other; want the way we feel together when we make love; want the passion of friendship more intimate than death itself. I love this world. All of it. I accept the challenge and will learn to fly without a net. And when I die I will be succored by all we shared and all I learned from you, and you, and you. It matters nothing to me that nothing follows. I love this now, and will until I’m gone forever.

This, then, is a meditation upon my human experience. It is different for everyone, and I am amazed at all the stories I come across, saddened somewhat to consider how many lives I will never even hear about. This life I have is the legacy of all that came before that had even the remotest influence on events. That I am here, who I am, could never have been predicted. The odds are, literally, astronomical. For any one of us to go back to the beginning of time and to guess where any atom would wind up, or to work backwards from now to the beginning, to predict where the atoms of our bodies came from…. It boggles the mind. And yet we can conceive of such a journey. We can turn our mind’s eye to the chance of it and grok the absurd odds of it. We are here, human, conscious; imperfect and mortal and dependent on so much for our existence. We are here, though. Present tense. For now, we exist. We have perdured as a species. The odds are that we will not do so forever. It will all pass away. But not yet.

Is that not enough on its own to shake us awake, to invigorate or refresh our passion for life, for living, to inspire us to aspire to more? From the murky depths of our prehistory our ancestors yet reach forward. Not in a teleological sense, but simply and profoundly as the impetus to live. Only, now we have the ability to define just what it means “to live”. We have the ability to define what is meaningful to us. We have the ability to order our internal representation of the world. I think it is fair to say that humankind is, by nature, the architect of its own meaning, and I think that it has been this way since the moment in our history when first we conceived the abstract idea,—that “We are here”.

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“You get what anyone gets—you get a lifetime”
Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | Author: Moody

Edvard Munchs painting of Rodins _The Thinker_

Edvard Munch's painting of Rodin's The Thinker

Life is precious. I mean, you have to realize it for it to be true—but once you do, you see how obvious it is. It helps if you read a lot, watch good movies, care about others and the state of the world and do something about it. I’m not sure how you can be taught to do that. I’m even less sure that it needs to be taught… at least any other way than by example.

Yet also it is true that “La contemplation rend souvent la vie malheureuse.” So said Nicolas Chamfort. But “the unexamined life”, as per Socrates, “is not worth living”. I know that contemplation and examination are not the same thing, per se, but maybe it is that we have to make ourselves a bit miserable—or have to be made miserable; have to have misery imposed on us, to some degree, by circumstance—in order for life to appear to us as precious as it is? Would this explain why, then, I find life so precious and worth living? And where is the balance point?

I’m just tossing this stuff up in the air to see what will float or fly, and what will fall again.

See, I’ve been re-reading my words here and considering what I’ve been saying. I’ve drawn some definite lines in the sand. I’ve erected some barricades (at least according to some people). I’ve done so because I have come to honest conclusions in my life. Conclusions about life; its nature, its origins, its outcomes, its end and its, life’s, meaning to me. I don’t know with 100% certainty what’s true. It galls me when people claim they do. But maybe I need to let that go. I know that I don’t know everything. I hardly know anything at all. But what I have learned in the last four decades of my life—mostly via trial and error—has given me the confidence to assert that life is meaningful insofar as we find meaning in it. I’ve said this before, I think. It’s worth repeating. I think now that it’s a matter of semantics, whether one says that life is inherently meaningful (or meaning-ready) or inherently meaningless (or devoid of meaning). It amounts to the same thing in the end. Why? Because we still must suss it out, discover it for ourselves, attach ourselves to it and value it. The ultimate meaning of life could be pinochle or the Glass Bead Game, or poker or The Sims. I don’t think it’s any of those things, but I’m saying that it could be and there’d be know way to know it as such unless and until I decided for myself that it was. The ultimate meaning of life could be reserved for bacteria or minerals. What kind of hubris does it take to say, “Yes, well, of course the ultimate meaning of life is this personal, human thing”? So let’s drop the ‘ultimate meaning’ thing here, right here and now.

Life, it seems to me, is meaningful. It’s meaningful because I find meaning in it or take meaning from it. I find meaning in it or take meaning from it because, as I live my life, events and things (verbs, and nouns with and without the vocative case) take on an intimate resonance through which I glean, or even grok, a sense of connective value. That value is, in the experience of it, timeless, even when it is realized because it is grasped in an inherently finite moment. In other words, ‘valuation’ is not in itself temporal (used here without any implication of there being some metaphysical eternal state).

Sorry for getting all convoluted there. Thing is, it’s difficult to say exactly why it is that life is meaningful, and “It just is!” is not at all good. Every question leads to several possible answers, and each answer leads to several definite questions, and so on. O!, Philosophie! Or do I mean Oy!—as in vey? Were I to wax poetic, as a non sequitur I’d have to assert that life is meaningful because Eros and Psyche are able to reflect on the song of a goat and not die. Eh…

Sorry for getting all non sequiturish on y’all. Anyway…

I think it’s time for me to go seek out a meaningful bite to eat, and leave the contemplation to my stomach for the nonce. Mostly, it contemplates things in the rich domain of gastronomy. Which reminds me that I must add the brilliant M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating to my foreshortened list of Must Reads. The other night I read Fisher’s “The Standing and the Waiting” (from the aforementioned book) to Kisha, at her request, and simply loved it.

Oh, and, speaking of reading, I’m within 45 pages of being finished with Infinite Jest. Not sure what I’ll be reading next, but I’m sure it’ll be good. Perhaps V., or Dance Dance Dance. Very likely I’ll supplement with a Walter Kaufmann book. And, too, I’m about halfway done with A Confederacy of Dunces, which I’m listening to in audiobook format at work.

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Day Off And So Forth
Friday, May 08th, 2009 | Author: Moody

Woke up around 6:50 in the AM to make sure our boy made it to the bus on time. Fixed some instant coffee (-like substance) and sat in bed reading Infinite Jest for awhile. I read before work every morning, which is usually the only time I get to actually sit and read anything not on a screen, so I figured I might as well do so this morning even without having to go to work. I’m almost done with the book; I’m into the 800s. After I read, I took my now-cool-enough-to-drink coffee outside to the balcony with me and I sat in the plastic chair with the metal legs and sipped from my Dia de los Muertos mug while having a smoke. The sky this morning is default daylight blue. No clouds. The promise of a hot day feels obvious. Like, there’s no need for an explicit promise; anyone from the neighbors to the bees could tell you it’s going to be hot today.

Sitting here now, the laptop is warm on my bare legs. A readout in the Menu Bar tells me the CPU is 131°F presently (actually, this temp keeps going up and down a degree or two by the minute).

I’ve not yet dived into the morning’s email. I subscribe to a few science-oriented emails via Google Alerts and ScienceBlogs and the AAAS, and every day I get at least six updates. Sometimes there’s nothing that really grabs me, or something grabs me but is over my head and I can’t therefore really get into what it’s saying even if the headline is intriguing. I wish I could be back at school, studying science and grokking even the nuances, but it’s like they say: if wishes were food, no one would go hungry.

So the reality is that my paycheck went to rent and fuel and necessities, and there’s less than $40 left to last from now until the mid-month paycheck. I’m not even considering the fact that, thanks to an untimely annual fee I didn’t see coming, I’m overdrawn in my secondary account. I console myself with the fact that at least I still have a job. My thoughts go out to those who have lost theirs, or who are still hanging on—after months, now—to some paltry unemployment check while they try to find work like the end of one particular thread in a ginormous bale of knotted strings. I don’t know what we’d do if I lost my job. As precariously perched as we are on the fence between emergent poverty on one side and safety on the other, the idea of being out of work is harrowing and stomach churning. Which is not to say that I am unaware that I am still living better than most people in the world, or that it is not without irony that I am sitting here with a MacBook and writing this post for my personal blog while science-oriented emails sit in my in-box as my partner of eight years sleeps beside me and our boy attends to schoolwork at his school. I mean, I may be worried about putting gas in it, but I have a decent car sitting out there.

So I’m in the strange position of being both under the sword of Damocles and grateful for my riches, wondering simultaneously how I’m going to parcel out my meager funds and what book I’m going to read next. This is, doubtless, a modern problem, the fruit of great wealth floating the boat of the nation like some huge swell so that even the poorest people often have cell phones even as they call a plastic tarp shelter a “godsend”.

And but so I’m thinking that I should probably re-read one of my Walter Kaufmann books, but maybe secondarily to one of the other books I’ve got that I’ve never read and have on my list. Reading takes me away from contemplating my pecuniary troubles while also serving to educate me further or enhance my understanding of the world. I prize anything that will better me, because it’s a worthwhile and never-ending goal that requires constant effort. And let us be clear here what I mean when I say that I want to better myself. I see bettering myself as one sure way to be better for others. I want to better myself so that I am better able to interface with the world, which is, for me, mainly made up of other people and their connections to others and possibly me. Actually, I find all this to be ethically necessitated by the social contract [see here and here; do not overlook Pateman's and Mills' invaluable critiques].

Ah… Well, the groundskeepers are here now. Leaf blowers and string trimmers are furiously abuzz and aggressively a-whine. My partner has pulled a pillow over her head. The tea kettle was heard recently to whistle downstairs. The day’s active phase is ramping up. But as for me, I’m already wanting to get back to the earlier quiet. A day off should have plenty of quiet, even if it’s not possible to keep the chatter down in the brain’s thought pool.

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Tree of Æons
Sunday, April 12th, 2009 | Author: Moody

Living Tree of Evolution

Living Tree of Evolution

From so humble a beginning as the blind dance of chemicals may represent, from out of the depths of unconscious ages in life’s Ultima Thule, the Tree of Life arose from the primordial chaos, sui generis, to grow through countless ages, to diversify its fruits, to send tendrils of spiral DNA, winding and raveling, into every niche, every nook and cranny of exploitable space, to thrive even in the face of massive threats to its very existence, to return from setbacks on scales that in their enormity beggar the imagination, to reach in its endless adaptations this age, this milestone, where we—but a part of its neverending, ever wending growth—may gaze upon it and perceive, however dimly, the ground from whence it rose up, while still not finished, and as yet remaining all but blind to the future of its existence.

Let us contemplate today the beauty of the natural world that we have the privilege of experiencing. Let us meditate upon it and consider the experience of living.

I recently read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book that transformed the life sciences for all time, and was struck by the beautiful simplicity of the work. Although we have moved well beyond Darwin’s understanding, in doing so we have in fact only refined what he envisioned; he saw truly and incontrovertibly the unshakable basis of how life evolves on our planet. In our refining we have expanded our knowledge of the Tree of Life, and in expanding our knowledge we have deepened our understanding of life itself. The mysteries of life yield, but in their yielding they teach us to love life even more. The science of evolution, and the fruit of the life sciences generally, has only become sweeter and more nourishing since Darwin’s time. We have learned that we are part of a whole undergoing a process that seems inherent in the fabric of existence. It is a process with no ultimate, crowning achievement.

Certainly though, among the particulars of its myriad manifestations, consciousness may be seen as a crowning glory. For without consciousness there is nothing.

So, let us today contemplate and meditate upon what it means to be conscious of the Tree of Life as it grows here on earth within the effectively immeasurable space of the universe. I went outside and sat in a lawn chair and gazed out at the blue sky with its diffuse clouds, and I imagined that my sight could penetrate the veil of the visible sky and see into the universe beyond it. I recalled in my imagination that in the tiniest patch of that sky there exist thousands of galaxies, each with billions of stars, and that amongst those stars there are countless planets. Some percentage of those planets will be suited to life, and it is certain that that life will also be evolving in some unique yet ultimately comprehensible manner. Such life as exists in the universe will forever be closed to me, but this is not a loss. What life I know is ample and rich, nearly endless in its expressions. Like infinity in an inch, there is more than enough to take my mind off the miles. So today I think about how the life right here on our little world has come to be.

Today I reclaim the most robust and enduring story: ours, the world’s, life’s story; grounded in real history, truly epic and mind-blowing, yet accessible to us in our conscious grasp of existence. I know of nothing greater or more wonderful.

Recommended viewing: Evolution is REAL Science #1.

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Humanitarium
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | Author: Moody

hu•man•i•tar•i•um noun 1a. a place in which the whole of our humanity may be viewed in a loving and compassionate manner. 1b. humanity as so viewed: with feelings of love he beheld all lives as one humanitarium.

Life is a Garden as Galaxies are Flowers

Life is a Garden as Galaxies are Flowers

One removes one’s shoes before entering, for here no artificial sole shall tread. The bare feet shall feel only the grass, the dirt, the concrete, the hard scrabble, the sand, the asphalt; the bare feet shall feel only the world as it is upon entering. Once inside, there are couches to recline on, so that one may gaze up and around at the space above. It is empty space, at first. This is important.

It’s important because one must be reminded that first there was nothing, nothingness, not-even-nothing. This emptiness represents (re-presents) the unconsciousness that came before life found conscious awareness.

The first sign of anything is a vague blur of darkness moving in darkness. Images flicker in near-infrared across the void, hardly to be perceived, more to be felt, groped at by the mind as it attempts to make sense of what it feels it’s almost seeing. There is a dim perception, a half-notion, that the movement is becoming more purposeful. Geometric structures seem to float by, losing themselves in clouds of obscurity before leaving a solid impression.

But slowly, steadily, points of light become known. One is thrilled by them, welcomes them, wants them to grow brighter, feels lighter as they slowly do just that. And as they do, they take on patterns. Or, rather, the mind begins to connect the dots, begins to see structure and form develop out of their initially haphazard appearances.

These structures are familiar to us nowadays. They are galaxies, galaxy clusters, nebulae and nurseries. Yet they are not these things. They are human beings seen from a far enough remove that seldom can an individual be made out. They are societies, peoples, tribes and kingdoms and countries.

They are beautiful.

But as this universe of humanity evolves there are scenes that also give fright. Stellar conflagrations on a massive scale: galaxies colliding with galaxies; great stars bursting and disappearing; waves of stars fading almost as soon as they have thrown their first light. Unlike the universe above, the human universe is more chaotic and events move more quickly. Also, all human stars or the remains of human stars eventually make their way to the center of the human universe. For there resides the great annihilator. All that is born is destined to eventually arrive there and disappear down the insatiable throat of the supermassive black hole: death. That is our end.

But it is known that no information can be destroyed. And as any one is pulled inexorably into the final spiral of existence, there is that which escapes (for however long, no one knows). Memories, letters, books, artwork, photographs, music, histories; we see them shed into the greater universe. There is always that which remains. And from those whose brilliance shone for a time, brighter than a billion others, others seem to gain in brightness.

One gazes at these scenes and is filled with wonder. Where terrible struggles, endured and perdured, seem in their gravity to be ineluctable tragedies beyond hope of any good outcome, yet there comes afterward a time of new building, new structuring, new activity. One sees that humanity goes on.

All that space in which humanity’s light stands out… How could it be that we would mistake it for naught? Bounded by laws yet almost boundless in potential… How could it be that we would think it pointless? As we gaze up and around at the great stage of human existence, see how we struggled into light and see how we struggle to stay alight, we see another facet of our own, personal, existence. In the dim, unknowable past there was a moment when first some ancestor of ours realized, for the very first time, that she or he existed. That sense was the most profound happening, surely. One can imagine her looking down at her own hands and flexing her fingers, turning her palm up, turning her palm down, and processing the realization that there she was, herself, alive.

In the humanitarium, these romantic thoughts may bear real fruit. Life is a struggle for existence. Life is so brief. Yet it is replete with possibilities to realize that it all matters, as much as we can make it matter. And to realize this for oneself is, in any healthy mind, the harbinger of that clarion call to help others toward that same realization. (How could one sleep unaware, child of the mountains or no?) What need must be fulfilled for us to admit that in our short lives there is nothing better or more important than bettering life for all—that it is the most worthy goal? Just look at all those stars! Look at us. See that, even rounded with a sleep, it is a beautiful pageant. Even in its sadness and tragedy, its foolishness and failures, there is an enduring, perduring, center of meaning that each successive generation lends its voices to for good or ill. Something so remarkable, so astounding as the fact that we are alive and able to see ourselves and this universe… How could I not want with all of me to give my joy to others?

And after one has arisen and walked back along the way, put back on one’s shoes and listened to the near-silent click of the doors as they close, it often occurs to one that there is no way (and no desire) to look at humanity the same way again. We are all a part of a dance that transcends us and makes us. When we are gone, it will be done, save that it likely would be carried on elsewhere by some others we know not. But there is only one humanity, and we are it.

It’s true that the analogy only goes so far, but as far as it goes it’s a good one for me. What do you think?

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I am beginning to think…
Saturday, March 07th, 2009 | Author: Moody

Poised on the edge of an abyss, we surf the wave of being into the future. It requires skill, and foresight, control, and concentration. One wrong move and, acutely unbalanced, we will topple into the crushing chaos of the massive wave. Karma is what happens at the point where intention meets action and action metes out results. As the force that drives the wave propels us forward, we are always at the mercy of its power. It is the great unconscious progenitor of our kind; blind, mute, deaf and dumb. Yet it is that it finds its expression in us. We are the consciousness of the wave; eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch—the body sensate, alive to its existence. The abyss is the greater unconsciousness that yawns like a bottomless maw, ready to swallow us, ready to swallow even the wave itself, to take it all into nothingness. But so long as we ride the wave, the future unrolls with us.

Please pardon the poetic language. I have lately been taken by a sense of our predicament that rather outreaches my ability to capture it in the usual prose. I want to turn my attention to it here at VWN, break it down into accessible entries that reflect my understanding, but it’s difficult for me. There are so many voices out there on the Web saying many of the things I’d like to say, only saying it better. I read them to inform myself. It would be foolish of me to presume to be equally as informative, when most of my time is spent processing pieces of paper in a smallish office. Hell, these days I’m just happy to have a job, right?

Then again, it’s the people at my job whose lives inspire me to attempt to put some things to words here. They inspire me because I have learned just how little concern people can have with regard to what’s going on in the world. Not that I don’t wonder if maybe I’m the fool here, because I pay attention to and worry about things that I really don’t have a lot of control over. I mean, what good does it do me to think about the peril we’re in? I still have to drive a car by myself every workday morn. I still have to buy food products whose very existence is virtually an affront to the planet’s ecosystem. I still have to participate in the madness of an American life. Don’t I?

It’s all well and good to say “Tune in, turn on, drop out”—until you are responsible for helping maintain a household that you do not get to set the rules for. It’s all well and good to say “I quit!”—until you realize that your options are strictly limited by factors you cannot alter, even out of necessity, without a significant investment of time and capital and you have neither.

And yet there has to be some sort of change for me, because I cannot stand idly by and just watch the bad things happen. I have a strong sense of responsibility where life on earth is concerned. However convinced I may be that we have passed a tipping point, bluffed too long with a bad hand and now have to lay down our cards and pay up, I feel that it is very important we face the treacherous future with our eyes wide open.

(More to come.)

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Time and Distance
Sunday, February 01st, 2009 | Author: Moody

Now is the time to break out that copy of Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène or maybe your Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline CD. Did you get it? O.K. Good. Put it on, and let’s take a trip…

Out into the big, lonely universe.

The next time it’s dark and clear out, go outside and take a look at the sky. What can you see? If you’re fortunate, you can see quite a few sparkling stars, maybe a placid planet or two. If you’re very, very fortunate, and away from any interfering source of light, you can see the ghostly, blurred, cloudlike swath that is the Milky Way as we know it with the naked eye. If you are fortunate enough to have a telescope, you may well see wonders that stagger the mind with their beauty and strangeness. You may even see whole other galaxies. Just imagine that. When you see a galaxy you are looking at tens of hundreds of millions of stars, or, actually, the light they are emitting into the void. You can’t generally make out the individual stars when viewing a galaxy through a backyard telescope. And to think, there are billions of galaxies. The Hubble Deep Field image showed us a piece of sky “only about the width of a dime 75 feet away” and revealed over 1,500 galaxies.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Given an estimated size of 156 billion light years wide, it is extremely unlikely any member of our species will ever see more than the tiniest fraction of it in person. It’s been around for 13.7 ± 0.13 billion years, and in that time it has been busy expanding. During its life so far, it has managed to produce effectively countless galaxies comprising unimaginably vast clouds of gases, quasars, proplyds, stellar nurseries, countless stars—including pulsars (which are rapidly spinning neutron stars) and magnetars (neutron stars with a powerful magnetic field), brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, red dwarfs, red giants, etc.—asteroids of metal and rock and ice, gas giants, rocky planets, life and, well, thereby us. And, quite possibly, not just us.

Our Milky Way galaxy is made up of some 200 to 400 billion stars, and we now know that a great many of them have planets in orbit around them. We do not yet have the technical knowledge needed to identify planets like ours, but we have advanced to the point where we can get actual images of some of these extrasolar planets, so it’s likely only a matter of time, effort, and increased technological prowess before we finally glimpse some planet of generally the same mass and in generally the same sort of orbit as our earth. That day will be a Red Letter Day, and certainly a Scarlet Day.

Of course, neither you nor I will ever visit such places in person, and even if we were among the first crew of ape-descended bipeds to set a spacecraft down on Pluto—which is so remote in our solar system that our own sun looks like a particularly bright star among many others—those galaxies would be, relatively speaking, not a bit closer. In fact there would be little appreciable difference in the appearance of the constellations we know here on earth. Stars other than our own beloved Sol are simply too far away. Even if you wanted to go visit the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, the next closest star to us, you would have to travel a distance of 4.28 light years. It may not seem like much, but consider that in just one hour light travels around 7.2 times farther (or 671 million miles or 1,080,030,758 km farther) than the distance between the earth and the sun, which distance is just about 93 million miles or 149.6 million kilometers (a distance referred to as an Astronomical Unit, or AU). Now, keep in mind that there are about 8,766 hours in a year. It takes the light from our sun more than five and a half hours to reach Pluto (at its mean distance from the sun, 5,913,520,000 km, or a bit over 3.67 billion miles), compared to the comparatively brief eight and a half minutes it takes to reach earth. But that is only five and a half hours out of that year. It’s strange to think that it is both a long and a short time, isn’t it? But really it’s a long time versus a far, far longer time.

At present the Voyager 1 spacecraft is around 108.75 AU from the sun, over 10 billion miles (16.2 billion km) away, and it takes over a day for round-trip lightspeed communication. That certainly sounds like a long way, sure, and yet the Voyager 1 spacecraft would have to travel over 587 times as far just to reach a light year in distance. It took Voyager 1 over thirty years to get to its current location. So, traveling at its recent speed of 37,800 mph., it would take approximately 17,580 more years to reach the distance light travels in one, and over 75,370 years to reach Proxima Centauri. Traveling to our neighbor at the top speed of the Apollo 11 spacecraft—the fastest manned spacecraft to date—would take 110,000 years (source). Clearly, we’ll have to fly faster than that if we want to get anywhere in space. But even the spacecraft envisioned in Project Longshot, utilizing a technically feasible nuclear pulse propulsion system, would take a century to arrive at the red dwarf.

Let’s say we decided to take that trip. Imagine that in the near future our technology has overcome the problems of radiation and our spacecraft spins to create gravity on board almost as strong as earth’s. We leave in our spacecraft in the summer of 2050, say, and head on our way. Utilizing some sort of deep hibernation that effectively stops the aging process (currently not feasible), we travel for a hundred years to see the red dwarf from up close. Our research lasts the better part of two years while we are there. Then we return home, again in hibernation, again traveling for a hundred years. We arrive home in the year 2252.

What might have changed? Looking back from today’s year, 2009, what can we say was different back in 1807? Well, the 28th of January was the anniversary of London’s Pall Mall being the first street to be lit with gaslight (the first electric light would not be invented for another two years, and the first true light bulb would not come along until 1854). Meanwhile, Napoleon’s Grande Armée had only recently in the month fought a horrific and indecisive battle with the Russian army. The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. The Tokugawa Ienari shogunate of Japan continued the longstanding effort to keep the nation secluded from the rest of the world. Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States. Lewis and Clark had returned but the year before from their most historic journey, and William Clark would soon be headed out again, at President Jefferson’s bidding, to look for mammoth bones in Big Bone Lick, KY. Charles Darwin had not yet been born. Charles Babbage was 15 years old. Human flight was still over ninety years away.

I list these diverse examples to illustrate a simple point: a lot changes in the course of two centuries. Our intrepid crew of astronauts (or, perhaps, taikonauts or cosmonauts) would be returning to a very different world than the one they departed. It becomes even more pointed an issue when you start talking about traveling to more remote locations. Just to get to Alpha Centauri AB, to which Proxima Centauri is nominally the third partner, one would have to travel an additional 12,000 AU or more. That’s over 337 times as far as Pluto is from the sun. Travel to Sirius and its companion white dwarf in our proposed NPPS spacecraft would take approximately twice as long as our trip to Proxima. We would be gone for over four centuries, there and back.

Hubble Picture of Sirius AB

Hubble Picture of Sirius AB

Assuming we were gone for 402 years and our launch date was 2050, we’d get home in 2452.

Run the timeline backwards from 2009 and we get 1607: Jamestown was founded in 1607, and John Smith met Pocahontas; flooding along the Bristol Channel killed over 2000 people; Pieter Bruegel the Younger painted “The Wedding Dance”; Johannes Kepler had not yet published his Laws of Planetary Motion and Galileo Galilei had not yet seen the moons of Jupiter with his telescope; Shakespeare was writing plays as usual, and one of the first ‘modern’ novels was becoming very popular: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote (published in 1605); the Ch’ing Dynasty was established in China; Muslim empires in what is now known as the Middle-East were, at the time, at the height of their power. In 1607 there were no trains, no planes, no automobiles; no computers or phones or televisions; no refrigerators, washing machines, or air conditioners. Less than 600 million people lived on earth. The population has grown over 11 times larger since then.

Bruegels The Wedding Dance

Bruegel's ''The Wedding Dance''

These voyages are all “short jumps” on the cosmic scale. Even with our very fast NPPS spacecraft, longer trips begin to look ridiculous.

Let’s assume a trip (with all the previous parameters) from our solar system to HD 189733b, an extrasolar planet orbiting its star some 63 light years away. Our round trip would take our heroic crew almost 3000 years to make. Following rough calculations, the equivalent time in the past for us now would be 935 BCE.

HD189733 and Dumbell Nebula

HD 189733 and Dumbbell Nebula

That’s around the time King Solomon supposedly died. The long-lived Zhou Dynasty was still going strong in China. The Lapita, the common ancestors of the cultures of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island, were burying their dead in Vanuatu. Nothing remotely like the world you know was extant. Can you imagine if a spacecraft were to arrive one day carrying people from some 3000 years ago?

What about a trip of just 1/10 the length of the Milky Way galaxy, 1000 light years, and back? That would equate to a journey lasting over 46,700 years. Our ancestors were busy wiping out megafauna on the continent of Australia back then. Neanderthals and humans were still sharing what would one day become Europe long, long after the Neanderthals had been pushed to extinction. The famous paintings in Lascaux were thousands of years off. Early on in the Upper Paleolithic or Upper Stone Age, humans were just beginning to create art of a sort. Dogs had not yet been domesticated. Society and culture as we know them were utterly non-existent and ages away.

Paleolithic Ornamental Shells

Paleolithic Ornamental Shells

In our hypothetical journeys we have come fact to face with a rather stark fact. Travel between the stars is, at this stage of our technological development, purely speculative. Space is too big, too spread out, and we are hindered in our ability to get anywhere by a great many factors that will remain insurmountable unless we discover hitherto unknown means of circumventing them. And yet, we must one day figure out how to leave our home planet and spread out into the vastness of our galaxy. We literally cannot stay here forever. In the long run the odds are stacked against us. The sun will one day die, and before then we are a sitting duck just waiting for that cosmic killer to fall out of the sky on us.

As we struggle to survive and thrive in the universe, we must tangle with our limitations at every turn. We live for such short spans of time, any one of us, and as a whole we have not been around for so long a time. We are very aggressive in our grasp for control, but in a way we are like adolescents who have real trouble thinking beyond ourselves and considering long-term needs. We are still living out our creation story. We are still living in the cradle of our human civilization. The impact we have had on our home planet is not a positive one, and we have yet to comprehend the results of our misunderstandings and reckless folly. But we are also industrious and clever, and we can move forward with care, leave behind our mistakes, having learned from them, and envision a greater realm where we belong.

It may be that one day a fleet of so-called generational spacecrafts will leave from our solar system traveling at four times the speed of our antiquated NPPS ships. In our super fast ships we will travel past Proxima in a mere 25 years, pass HD 189733b in less than four centuries. Our local region of space will feel more local. Still, were we to leave our own galaxy and attempt to reach the Andromeda galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away, our spacecraft would have to travel for 14,602,805 years. Were we to travel back in time for the length of just the one way trip, the equivalent age of the earth would be the Miocene Epoch. Human beings did not exist yet. That fleet would be leaving everything behind forever to make that trip. Nothing would be the same were it to return some 29,205,610 years later.

The Andromeda Galaxy

Our future as a species will, in all probability, be contained in our portion of the Milky Way galaxy. What we may become over the trackless ocean of time ahead of us is unknowable to us now. Yet it feels like a profound comfort to me that this is so. The possibilities will never really end, and the ways we deal with those possibilities will further mold us, change us, and possibly renew us in perpetuity. We may well become different species as we spread out from our original home. Evolution may lead to wholly new forms over the course of time, favoring those who survive better in interstellar space. It’s amazing to think about. All the history of humankind that we have been able to put together is the smallest blink of time compared to the deep time of the future. And the future, as always, is coming inevitably. However much this post has been filled with speculation and projection, it points to a future that will arrive as surely as the death of the sun. You and I will not be here to see it when it gets here, but we live in the age when the dream is gaining a structure in the waking world. Our descendants will look back on us as… what? What are we, now? Children just learning our real place in the universe? Young gods learning our powers? Herd animals in need of a shepherd from the stars? Responsible ancestors to our star-faring progeny? Who are we? Who do we want to be?

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Meaning Meaning
Saturday, April 21st, 2007 | Author: Moody

We cannot escape our human understanding of the world. We find meaning in life, in the universe, within the parameters of our human senses. Meaning itself is, as we know it and experience it, a human invention. This is not to say that there is only human meaning; cetaceans and avians may well have, at last among their smartest members, a sense of meaning unique to them. But for us it would seem that there is only our own sense of meaning. Were we able to talk with a dolphin, say, and discuss at length with that dolphin her sense of meaning, our understanding of that dolphin’s sense would still be a human one. We can never know what it would mean to be a dolphin understanding meaning.

Yet I am moved by what Steve Talbott says:

No one will deny that we experience meaning everywhere in nature. To sit in a quiet glade with the sun streaming through the trees; to endure the shattering power of a fierce thunderstorm; to enjoy the early greening of spring or the warm, rich colors of autumn; to stand beside a quiet pond or the rapids of a stream; to climb toward the summit of a high peak; to watch the unfolding drama of a sunset; to lie down and gaze up at the stars – every setting we encounter comes to its own meaningful expression within us. Everything speaks an inner language.

As I read those words the first time, I had what I humbly would describe as a moment of satori, or as a moment of pure, Zen-like Dasein. I was struck by the perception that my human sense of meaning does in fact interface with meaning in-itself, free of any particulars. The universe, life, means something. As a human being, however, the universe (which includes “life” in it) means something human to me and can’t really mean anything else or other, or can’t mean something some other way, because as soon as I start thinking about it I do so in my own human terms, within my human framework. I am aware of this. But there is nonetheless a wordless intimation that at the point of touching meaning in-itself there is a certain universal quality (not to say universality) that, even so frustratingly fleetingly, seems to be perceptible in what I will call a meta-human way (n.b., there is no metaphysical woo-woo implied in this). I am reminded of what Roberto Calasso noted in his Literature and the Gods: “In the Greek language the word theos, ‘god,’ has no vocative case…. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens.” The Greeks were very perceptive. You can’t point to “god” in the moment, you can’t address “god”, but you can say that the moment itself was “god”. So, then, when we are truly in the moment — what happens? That is, what is it we are perceiving when it seems to us that meaning in-itself is unfolding? Might it be said that there is no vocative case for meaning in-itself and, if so, that meaning in-itself is an essence that precedes the existence of any unfettered example of it we might name? Is finding meaning inherent in us?

Meaning bears the ideas of sense, significance, and, depending on circumstance, intention. It is, as we understand it, a quality to some thing, idea, or experience that makes sense, yields significance, or reveals intention to us in a comprehensible way. I suspect that the problem we run into with meaning in-itself is found in the fact that intention may be suggested by meaning. Words are meant to make sense, to yield significance, to reveal intention; words are meant to be understood. As our intelligence enabled us to flourish in the world, meaningful words propagated across the seemingly limitless spectra of human experiences. Vocabularies blossomed as human beings attempted to better meaningfully communicate with each other about themselves and the world they found so meaningful. But no matter how much or what our words are meant to mean, in themselves they are in fact meaningless. A banana is not a plátano a plátano is not a weegbree. Although the words refer to the same thing, they are obviously not the thing in-itself; you cannot peel and eat the word in any language. In fact, there really is no word for the thing in-itself. I do think it’s fair to assert that from the raw, wordless experience comes the description in words. But can it with equal force be asserted that from the raw, wordless meaning in-itself comes the meaning implied by words? Of that I am not so certain, and it raises other questions.

Did non-onomatopoeic words descend, as it were, from onomatopoeic ones? I ask this rhetorically because it points, I think, to a basic problem for us here. An onomatopoeic word, it seems to me, must be quite close to the experience that created it because it is intended to convey, as a copy, if you will, the experience of hearing the event in question. If our words developed from our reactions to and experiences in and of the environment, then they more or less were intended, like onomatopoeic words, to reflect them. Hence, the meanings we found in the world were encoded over time in words, as a byproduct of our experiences, as we learned to better express ourselves. So today we can be told in great detail what it’s like to climb Mt. Everest, and we likely can relate, to some degree experientially, to what we are told because words bear general meanings that most people can relate to, yet the actual experience of climbing Everest will never be known to any but those who’ve climbed it. Put another way, the collective meaning of the words cannot possibly capture the meaning of the actual experience no matter how eloquent and accurate those words are in their description.

When we speak of some experience and its meaning, the meaning in-itself is like a package of silence wrapped in descriptors. We can’t address the meaning in-itself; we can only point to it. However empathetic a person may be, he will not be able to grasp the meaning of my moment. After long description and explanation, clarification and honing in, in the end he will take away a map of some detail that shows where the meaning lies, but the meaning in-itself will not be contained in the map any more than a building is contained in its address.

What I have written here is evidence of what I mean.

The universe seems to me to be ripe with meanings that are inherent in its existence. Yet there is no way to capture these meanings in themselves, and they are not even necessarily the same for any two people. As a product of the universe, I sense that the meaning of the universe is equally inherent in me and you and rocks and trees and plastic eggs and paper and so on. In the moment of wordless being, the meaning of the universe is clear and perfect and accessible. So maybe it’s not that the meaning is different for each of us. Perhaps the meaning in-itself is the same… because, like everything itself, it’s us. Maybe it can’t be captured in language because it is all words at once, or the possibility of all words all at once. Maybe it’s everything and so beyond any particular word or dictionary that it can only be registered as silence.

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