Glory in the Morning...

"There's a glory in the morning because the earth turns 'round and a promise in the evening when the sun goes down." -- Crazy Bird, around 1975

I've been puzzling for some while over something. In fact, it occurs to me almost every time I go for my morning walk around the neighborhood where I live in the Happy Little Kingdom here in the far north.

The play of the rising sun light in the clouds is often a most pleasant experience. Indeed, it is amazing the joy, awe and wonder a sunrise can bring.

Why is this?

I suppose many or even most aesthetic experiences are acquired tastes tinged by cultural bias. But I suspect that the pleasure of seeing the beautiful glory revealed in the sky is natural, universal, in fact arch typical.

My question is: why? Why are we, so to speak, "hardwired" to enjoy the sunrise?

I propose that it has to do with the spirituality innate in our common humanity. What I mean by spirituality is the feeling or grasping of meaning in this existence which at times can seem somewhat chaotic.

There is one effect, not rare yet not frequent either that strikes one as almost metaphysical in its effect. I am thinking of the situation where shafts of sunlight pierce the clouds in shafts of light and shadow, creating a sort of fan-like effect.

Until recently, these were the only straight lines one would ever see in the sky.

Today it is almost a daily experience, weather permitting, to see the condensation trails of high flying airplanes scratching their chalk marks across the blue.

I hardly know of any thing more ugly than the meaninglessness of their incongruity than these contrail graffiti defacing the sky.

Bubble Ships -- Banging Evolution

I'm doubting that I can tie this "Bubble Ship" series together like I thought.

What I have been writing about is the way that the manifest Universe apparently out-folded from what understand as the Big Bang to galaxies, stars and occasional rocky planets like our Mother Earth.

The point is, the inevitability of this out-folding. Inevitable in the sense of a seed corn putting down roots and first leaves up to the sun.

The next step is how life appeared on this planet. Was She impregnated by some sort of seed from interstellar space, or was it a sort of "parthogenisis", that is, a sort of "virgin birth"?

As they say in Danish, it "isn't good to know", which, in Danish, means you can't tell -- but the literal translation applies also. There are some things which aren't "good to know", in the sense they whack your understanding up side the head.

But, it really doesn't matter. The point is that the out-folding of the Universe brought forth a situation where there was a planet ready for life and whether it was chemical structures falling down from the skies, or an innate proclivity for the formation of complex hydrocarbon chemicals to form in the watery soup of the young planet, it doesn't make all that much difference. The fact is, that is the Way-Things-Are.

Again, the main thing is that once self-replicating chemicals have appeared, for whatever reason, the show is on the road and the force of evolution will, eventually, bring forth beings consciously aware -- it's just as sure as an apple tree making apples.

All this could be (mis)used to make a plea for Intelligent Design, that this "proves" a "designer" made it happen this way. But it would be over my objections.

My main objection is that it explains nothing to say this Universe was formed by an over-intelligent Being outside the Universe.

First of all, it explains nothing, nothing at all, nothing whatsoever.

Secondly, it is an idea put forth by people with a not so hidden agenda, that is (he he) the Intelligent Designer is, wow, surprise, surprise the God of Genesis in the Bible.

The reason is that the proposed Intelligent Designer is "outside" the Creation It Creates -- this is just a wheels-within-wheels sort of thing and explains nothing.

On the other hand, there is no reason that the Universe could not be a Thought (so heavy it fell into space) as I intuited many years ago.

There is no good reason to maintain that What Happened and what was followed by what we know as Big Bang must have been construed by a Someone.

The thought and fire of creation can be much more sensibly thought of as self-eflugent. It makes as much sense and is more simple.

You can make up ideas for how the Earth is the center of the universe, or even that the Earth is flat. The problem is that such theories are very complicated on the one hand and do not lend themselves to experimental verification. Similar are the so-called theories of Intelligent Design -- they explain nothing and, worse, they predict nothing which can be verified by either experiment or observation.

I have deliberately avoided talking about evolution until now for a number of reasons. First or all, because the popular concept of evolution is rather pale and two dimensional.

Perhaps I will write later about it, but let me say this: life is a force, once it appears, a force as real as the four forces of gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak interaction I mentioned earlier in this series about "Bubble Ships".

What I hope you may comprehend is that life is not simply determined by chance mutations -- life is like a player getting dealt cards.

The cards you get, genetically, as a living being are what you get dealt -- but, as a living being, you do the best you can with what you got.

That is the force of evolution -- life don't sit still, it tries and tries and tries.

Like Pete Seeger sang so many years ago Malvina Reynolds' words : "God bless the grass, they pour the concrete over it and it grows up through the cracks".

Bubble Ships -- Banging Water

When I was in high school in Poosah City many, many years ago, I tutored a fellow in chemistry one summer.

He was a good old boy and a friend, but his mind could simply not wrap around the concept of valens, that is the number of electrons an atom needs to "borrow" or "loan" in order to have a complete "shell.

But then, I hit upon the idea of replacing the idea of valens with sexual organs. My friend easily comprehend that an atom could have one, two or more "dicks" or a number of "cunts". From there, he only had to memorise how many of what sort each element had.

The thing with Carbon, is that, to continue with the image, it is sort of a hermaphrodite -- it's AC/DC and can go both ways. That is why Carbon can form long chains, rings, even spheres with itself. If it didn't do that, there would be no proteins, no DNA and no life.

But it was water I had planned to entertain you with today with my surplus of semi-ignorance.

Water is a most unusual substance.

First of all, it's boiling point at what we know as atmospheric pressure is extremely high. Secondly, its normal solid form, ice, is lighter than the liquid. Third, it has an extremely high coefficient of heat -- that is, it takes a lot of energy to heat it up or cool it down. Forth, it can exist in three states, gas, liquid and solid at temperatures we consider to be normal. Fifth, water is pretty much a universal solvent -- one of the first things you want to know about a chemical compound is how soluble it is in water.

The point is, that all of these characteristics of water are crucial to life forms, at least as we know them. True, there are speculations that life could be based on silicon -- but, outside of science fiction scenarios and nightmares, that seem unlikely.

But why does water have such a unique chemistry? There are a number of factors, but the main one is what is known as "hydrogen bonding".

Oxygen, is rather greedy and. when it loans the electrons from two Hydrogen atoms, it keeps them pretty much to itself. The result is that a water molecule is "bipolar". That is to say, it has negative and positive ends. But unlike a magnet, where the north and south poles are on a straight line, with water there are two posive "poles" at an angle of approximately 105 degrees.

Two make a long and rather complicated story short, this in that main reason that water exhibits all the qualities mentioned above -- and many more.

The point of all this, at least why I mention them here, is to point out that a planet like our Mother Earth should form and orbit around a star like our sun in a galaxy like our Milky Way is implicit in the Singularity the immediate consequence of which was what we know as the Big Bang.

Furthermore, the particular chemistry of Carbon and Water along with the chemistry of all the other elements not only make it possible for life, but make it probable, likely, in fact nearly inevitable on, not only our dear Blue Mother, but many, many other planets in the manifest Universe.

Tomorrow, I hope to bring "Bubble Ships" full circle and fulminate about the anti-intellectual bullshit known as "Intelligent Design" and "Creationism".

Bubble Ships -- Banging Chemistry

[I said y'day I would talk about chemistry, but I can see I hadn't given enough atttention to the fourth force. Also, it is important to understand something of how atoms are built up in order, not only to understand their chemistry, but how their physics and chemistry are seemingly inevitable in the way the Universe unfolds from the singularity which became what we know as the Big Bang]

It takes an awful lot of energy to get atom kernels to meld, or fuse together. But, when they do fuse, they release a lot of energy (which can get other kernels to fuse.)

Those of you in the back row paying attention, may well ask, well why doesn't it all fuse together into a giant atom? Well, for one thing the larger, heavy nuclear cores are unstable and the weak interaction tends to "unglue" the bonds holding them together. Also, the amount of energy needed to get atoms to fuse in the first place, increases the larger they are.

The break-even point, happens to be with one of the isotopes of iron. It takes more energy to create elements heavier than iron than they release in their fusion*.

Thus, in a sense, iron is the most physical stuff we know of on earth.

(A coincidence, of course, is that iron is deadly to the fairy folk in most folk legend. Also, iron the symbol of worldly power in most traditions. Thor's Hammer was made of iron. Thor, by the way is the son of Jord -- that is, Earth. His father was Odin, All-Father of the nine worlds.)

It boggles the imagination to know, with certainty, that a sufficiently large amount of apparently chaotic energy MUST coalesce into plasma, then quarks, mesons, bosons and what-not. This inevitable fall-out of the plasma, MUST stick together to become atomic nuclei and these, in turn, MUST become the more complicated atomic kernels -- neutrons and protons held together and ruled by the forces of strong and weak interactions mentioned before.

Lithium, Barium Fluorine, Oxygen, Carbon -- all the elements and their isotopes -- they MUST be formed as a result of the Big Bang as surely as if a jillion angels had knitted them together in some sort of divine Chinese sweatshop,

However, this inevitability would not be obvious to a casual observer until some many billions of years later, when living, consciously aware beings appear in this Universe, beings which can look at the world around them and realise that the prerequisite for their being was the out-folding of the Universe after the "Big Bang".

Was the Big Bang, in fact a "big bang"? Whatever, the reason we call it a Big Bang because we have to call it something.
The point is that Something Happened and the result was what we call the Big Bang and the inevitable result of that was an out-folding of galaxies, stars, suns and planets, all the elements we know of and, finally, life and beings such as ourselves which are, occasionally consciously aware.

When the first stars took form, they were made up of almost nothing but hydrogen with a pinch of helium. After the minor and major cataclysms of novas and supernovas, hypernovas and quasars, some of the hydrogen was transmuted into heavier elements. Even so, the stuff of the Universe today is roughly estimated to be ninety percent hydrogen and seven percent helium.

But this three percent, this stardust, these ashes of eternity -- they are the lion's share of what makes our Earth and any planets like Her. They are the key to the fact that life could and did appear and evolve -- without them, the Earth could never have become our Blue Mother.

(By the way, if she did not frequently keep herself and her children chastely covered with the gentle shawl of her soft white clouds -- life would long ago have disappeared, frozen at night, scorched to death by day.)

When the elements cool down enough to what we, as living creatures think of as "good" temperatures, they begin to interact with one another in a number of very interesting ways -- ways which are obvious and inevitable once you know how and why they interact in these ways -- they form chemical bonds.

What are chemical "bonds"? Just to even begin to really answer that question would require book loads of footnotes!

First of all, though, we have to backtrack a bit and ask: what is an "atom"?

The first atomic theory was proposed by a Greek philosopher about two and half thousand years ago. He postulated that if you cut a piece of, say, iron in half -- both pieces have all the qualities and nature of iron. He intuited that at some point in dividing the iron into smaller and smaller pieces, you would have something that was iron that could not be further divided.

The truth of his intuition was that, from a certain view at least, the Universe is discrete. However, he was wrong on several counts, mostly because the Universe, seen from a different viewpoint is continuous.

This means that a single atom of the element "Fe" is not what we know as "iron". There has to be a quantity of these atoms before we can recognise the qualities of iron -- it's malleability, ability to be magnetised, melting point and so on.

The problem is: we can't quantify how many atoms make a bit of iron -- we can't say that twenty million Fe atoms is "iron" and twenty million minus one atom is "not iron".

The second point where the old Greek was off the mark was his assumption that an atom cannot be divided into something smaller. The fact is, that it can -- and these particles can also be broken into things even more exotic.

What Einstein noted in the intuition he concretised in mathematics (and which has since been verified in a number of practical ways) is that matter and energy are different states of the same thing -- analogous to the way ice, water and water vapour are different states of the same substance -- H2O.

Although I had intended to talk about chemistry, in particular that of Water and Carbon, I realise now that that to backtrack a bit. The way atoms bond and interact chemically has a lot to do with the core of the atom, its nucleus.

Earlier, I said that protons (the core of a Hydrogen atom) can, under sufficient encouragement "meld" and that what makes this possible is the fourth force, the strong interaction or nuclear glue. I didn't mention that there have to be neutrons for it to work. Neutrons are the same as protons, except that they have no electric charge, they are electrically neutral -- therefore the name.

Usually, there are at least as many neutrons as protons. The only atom which does not "need" a neutron is the single proton -- Hydrogen. However, it can be glued to one or even two neutrons. Such are called isotopes. All elements have isotopes and their chemistry is the same -- almost, but not quite!

The dominant isotope of Helium consists of two protons and two neutrons. There is a naturally occurring, but rare isotope with only one neutron -- all other isotopes are exotic, extremely unstable and, in our world, artificially made.

An atom, as you surely know consists of more than a nucleus of protons and neutrons -- there are also electrons. The electron is a rather odd critter, little more than a negative charge with (almost) no mass. The picture Bohr gave of electrons which rotate around the nucleus like planets around a sun is a rather poor analogy -- which he well knew. Actually, the electron is more like a cloud of probability. Furthermore, the electrons must be at certain, discrete distances from the nucleus. Since the position of an electron is a probability cloud, the place where an electron can be is called a "shell".

Each "shell" can only have a certain number of electrons in it. The first shell can only have two, the second eight. It quite quickly gets very complicated. For example, only these first shells can be thought of as spherical. The point to understand here is that there is atoms "want" to have a complete shell. This is accomplished by either "borrowing" or "lending" electron(s) to an atom of a different element.

Generally speaking, elements which have only one electron in the outermost shell or lack but one for completion are the most chemically active. The most common example we see in daily life is Sodium and Chlorine -- which, as soon as they are together as elements form common table salt, NaCl.

Elements where the outer shell is complete have no "need" and therefore are almost completely chemically inert -- Helium is the first of this sort.

This far from explains chemistry, but I hope it makes clear not only why the chemistry of the elements changes as the size of the atomic nucleus gets larger, but also why their chemistry is cyclical, i.e., Helium, Neon, Argon Krypton and Radon all resemble one another in that they are chemically inert.

In regards to life, the most important are, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Carbon.

Hydrogen and Oxygen are important because they form water.

Carbon is important because, as the sixth element, it has an outer shell which is either half full or half empty, depending on how you look at it. What this means is that Carbon can bond chemically in all kinds of ways with any number of other elements, in particular, with Hydrogen and Oxygen, but also Nitrogen, Sulphur and Potassium, just to name a few of the most important.

In fact, chemistry is divided into to categories, inorganic and organic. Roughly speaking, organic chemistry is any compound containing Carbon. Inorganic is all the rest.

Inorganic chemistry deals with less than two hundred thousand compounds.

Organic chemistry deals with several millions -- and the reason is that outer shell which is neither/or -- I said Carbon can combine with a lot of elements, but, most important of all, it can combine with itself!
And that is the secret of life -- in Carbon chemistry we hit the jackpot.

If the chemistry of Carbon was not like it is there could be no life, period. But the chemistry of Carbon is like it is and the reason for that is that the elements form in the out-folding of the manifest Universe with all the certain inevitability that an avalanche falls down a mountainside and not up, that a seed sends its roots down into the soil and its first leaves up towards the light.
Carbon can be Carbon, but without water, H2O, it would matter little. There is something very strange and wonderful about the chemistry of water.

I hope to write a bit about Water tomorrow.
_________________
* I'm not completely sure about this with Iron, but I'm pretty sure it is correct

Bubble Ships -- Banging Galaxies

An impression I received one afternoon when I was about fourteen years old while watching bubbles rain drops made on water has followed me all my life:

Simmer rain on streets black asphalt, bubble ships on sheets of water

I described this impression in the first of this series, "Bubble Ships". In the second, "Bubble Ships -- Conscious Awareness", I tried to combine that with another impression I received when, at the same age, I often looked up and saw the Milky Way on a clear night stretched across a black velvet sky in Poosah City.

That I could acquire such impressions is because I live on a world where life appeared some four billion years ago, life which has evolved and which, in the form of the human being, occasionally manifests conscious awareness.

There are a lot of questions which can be asked regarding how it all came about, but, first, let us take a look at this planet at the very beginning, when our Earth was quite new, some four and half billion years ago.

Usually, people say that the Earth was then barren. But, this is misleading for, as we know, She has proven herself time and again to be quite fertile.

The Moon is barren, but not our Earth.

It is not for nothing that many, myself certainly included, call the Earth our Mother.

But, how did it happen to happen that the Earth got there in the first place? The answer is that Something Happened a long, long time ago -- at least twice as long as the age of the Earth today.

What Happened? We can't really say, but we can say things about it, for example:

A thought so heavy that it fell into space...

We can also say that, almost instantaneously after What Happened, there was a point of intense energy and potentiality which defined the entire manifest Universe we know today. This point, or singularity, is what we call the Big Bang.

Immediately, that point blossomed and, with a strange blend of chance and inevitability, out-folded into what we today know as the manifest Universe. That is to say, according to its nature, it expanded and cooled.

As it cooled, the energy became plasma, then curdled and curled up into tiny bits of particles with strange names and, eventually, into hydrogen ions, atoms and molecules mixed up with a pinch of helium.

"O well, that was a nice show!" remarked some of the younger angels, who figured it was time to pack up and go home (where ever that was!) before it got dark...

However, whatever Happened did so with a bit of a twist with the result that the hydrogen dust sort of swirled and clumped together.

(More than one of our creation legends refer to a curdling of primal "milk" or "blood" and that intuition is not a bad, albeit non-mathematical, description of what happened.)

The reason for the "curdling" is that there were at least four forces at work, forming the stuff of this universe in ways we barely comprehend so that it eventually out-folded into the manifest Universe in which we find ourselves.

A fifth force is suspected by some of those who study these things -- this may be another wild-goose chase of science -- or there may a number of other forces we haven't even inkled yet.

Whatever, we know now there are at least four and what they can accomplish in concert is pretty amazing.

The bigger clumps tend to bend space a bit so that smaller clumps and dust from the clouds "fall" into bigger clumps which get, well, bigger.

Kind of interesting at first, but after a billion years or so, it does get boring -- time to go home (again) -- but then, who would have thought that, as those clumps get bigger and bigger, they scrump into themselves they get warm and start to glow, albeit very dully.

It all just doesn't get just colder and further apart. Some of it gets closer and hotter. The younger angels are amazed and they settle down with another bag of pop corn.

The clumping together happens because of one of the four forces -- gravity. A second force, electromagnetism is responsible for the dull radiation.

Eventually though, it looks like this too will peter out, but then, something else happens that you never would have thought -- until you see it happen, then you know it was inevitable.

Gravity is a very weak force compared to electromagnetic force, but its reach is unlimited. Apparently it is a quality of matter -- the more matter and the closer together matter is, the more gravitation.

Although weak, gravity is the like money accruing interest in the bank. If you accumulate enough, it becomes irresistible.

Deep, deep, deep inside the biggest clumps, gravity gets so strong and everything gets so squished, that some of the hydrogen atoms meld together.

This melding is called "fusion" and it gives a bit of a bang, releasing a lot of energy. We (mis)use this little trick to make the terror weapons we call "hydrogen" bombs.

Some one in the back row just asked ask why these hydrogen atoms don't meld on their own when they get close.

The "reason" is that hydrogen ions -- protons -- repel each other. They all have a positive electric charge and, since the electromagnetic force is much stronger than gravity, it keeps them apart.

It's like trying to put the north poles of two magnets together -- they just don't "want" to do it. You can press them together as long as you want, but as soon as you let go, they spring apart.

However with hydrogen cores it's a different story, if you press them real close and it's really, really hot -- something strange happens you would never have suspected if you hadn't seen it happen: a third force comes into play. This force is immensely stronger than gravity or even electromagnetism. Therefore, we call it the "strong interaction". That name, although descriptive, is a bit clumsy. I would prefer it was called "nuclear glue".

Nuclear glue, or "nuglue", although very strong, does not have a very long range. As a matter of fact, it can barely reach further than the distance of an atomic nucleus before its effect fades. A lot of energy is needed to get the protons and neutrons close enough together so that the nuclear glue can grab ahold and overcome the repelling effect of electric-magnetic force.

However, if you smack them together hard enough -- they sort of "snap" together with a "click", that is, a release of energy. In this case, a lot of energy -- in fact, much more energy than needed to bring them together in the first place. The extra energy is more than enough to get more hydrogen to "burn" in this fashion.

The "ashes" of thermonuclear fire in a star are helium and a few of the heavier elements.

Very interesting, our angels say -- it gives us Helium, which is nice if you want to sell balloons at a county fair or talk like Donald Duck, except that aren't any balloons or country fairs, not for a looong time anyways...

"That will all come in due time", reply the older angels.

The important thing is that the ignition of thermonuclear fires in the bigger clumps of hydrogen dust is that it is inevitable, given the way that the energy of the Big Bang sort of curdles and curls into the first particles and clouds of gas..

These particles must clump together, because of the effect of the first two forces, gravity and electromagnetic force.

Fusion of the first nuclei must occur, because of the third force -- that of strong interaction -- "nuglue".

It is also inevitable that some of these thermonuclear fires will burn completely out of control and explode in one of several different ways.

We don't know all that much about these explosions, except that their magnitude ranges from the incredibly enormous to completely off the scale, dwarfed only by the Big Bang itself. These explosions are inevitable, simply because it is a quality of the nature of matter and energy.

Besides the fireworks, these explosions are important to us because they generate all the heavier elements! The forces generated in these cataclysms are so great that nuclei are slung together, and all the other elements are fused in these events. Some of the elements, in particular the heaviest, are unstable and tend to fall apart in a decay we know as radioactivity. This is the work of the fourth force -- the weak interaction or "nuclear glue disolver".

[If I can work faster than I did in preparing this post, I will try to communicate some of the things that have always amazed me about chemistry -- especially that of water and cabon]

Bubble Ships -- Conscious Awareness

In y'day's post, bubbles appearing during

"Simmer rain on streets black asphalt,bubble ships on sheets of water..."

will today be compared both to our lives and the stars in the galaxy

and the thought, such as it is, will be even further developed:

Is conscious awareness a product of chemistry, a consensus of synapses connecting the dendrons and axons of the hundred billions of nerve cells we keep inside our skulls?

Or: is the body-brain a sort of organic lens which concentrates (as the organic eye does the physical light) that-which-is-in-all-things until fire catches -- and the light of awareness is lit?

Actually, both views can be "correct".

At times, our conscious awareness is most properly thought of as simply a consequence of physical phenomena. At other times, it is better to consider consciousness to be a consequence of concentrating the quality or nature of what-is.

In the trees of the forests and the rocks of the mountains; in the sun and moon and the stars; in the very fabric of the manifest universe: there is imbued a tendency or potential to evolve in a fumbling, random, yet seemingly goal-oriented* way towards ever increasing complexity of form and organisation -- towards life, sentience, self awareness, conscious awareness and then what?

That is the question.

Can the awareness life enables always evolve towards yet more complexity?

Although it would seem, as Teilhard maintained, that evolution strives towards a "Point Omega, it ain't necessarily so. If you look at the periodic chart of elements, you will see that, at a certain point of complexity, elements not only become unstable, they become increasingly so...

Similarly, the level of complexity we, as humans, have evolved to may be unstable and we may, inevitably self-destruct.

However, just as some physicists suspect that there may an island of stability among yet heavier trans-uranium elements, perhaps there is an possibility for us to evolve to where an awareness of our common humanity is awakened.

On the one hand, that would seem to imply greater stability. On the other, it could also be an interpretation of the dreams of mankind -- i.e., religion.

Whether the human body, its brain and other stuff produce the conscious awareness we occasionally experience, or whether it concentrates and contains a consciousness present-everywhere, the fact remains that a body is necessary in order for conscious awareness to manifest here and now.

Whatever we may experience when we shuffle off our mortal coils, it won't be here or what we experience now. Therefore, questions like "what happens when we die" are futile. The "answers" charlatans might give you are, when you look at them closely, meaningless.

On the other hand, it is quite pertinent to understand something of what, apparently, had to "happen to happen" in order to draw forth these bodies and their associated awareness, from primal slime and into existence upon this planet of ours -- our Mother Earth.

If one understands something of the little we now know of how this Universe developed, seemingly with all the inevitability of a tiny, burning seed, into a great Tree; from a pin prick of utterly intense energy and potentiality into the manifest universe -- a vision, of itself, unfolds, a vision so magnificent that to call it a "Creation" is hardly sufficient.

Before I ramble any further, there is something I wish you could do.

I wish you could go out and look at the night time sky in the Fall -- a clear night, a night without clouds, a moonless night, far away from city lights, a night like those I saw as a child more than half a century ago while growing up in Poosah City.

You would see stars not quite, but much like the stars those shepherds, tending their flocks in the Xmas legend, would have seen two thousand years ago, myriad points of light, glinting diamond sharp against a canvas midnight black.

You would see the Milky Way.

Unfortunately, because of the way we have dirtied our nest, the air is not clear and the diffused luminance of thousands upon thousands of city lights make it rare, if not impossible, to see and appreciate the magnificence of the Milky Way near even small cities.

When I was a child, the Milky Way was indeed a milky Way in the sky -- a band of light, from horizon to horizon. If you looked at it with a small pair of binoculars, the whiteness became thousands upon thousands of pin pricks of light -- stars like grains of sand...the diamond dust of Heaven's Road...

It is a wondrous and humbling experience to see this, especially from the viewpoint of a bright-eyed, fourteen year old with a burning interest in astronomy.

Truthfully, it is more than a humbling experience, it is revelation; a revelation as valid as that any prophet has ever known, or pretended to have.

Seen from a much more distant viewpoint, with more knowledge than that with which we now grasp (or perhaps can grasp) of the Way-Things-Are; could the Milky Way be a "street black asphalt" and the stars "bubble ships"?

Did you know that it is little more than a hundred years since we understood that the Milky Way is in fact a galaxy -- "our" galaxy?

You know, of course, that our "Sun" is just one speck of star, shining among billions of others -- but, did you know that there are at least as many stars in our galaxy that there are cells in your human brain?

For sure you know that the Sun is quite average in size and brightness -- but did you know that the Milky Way is also quite normal in size and shape and that there are at least as many galaxies in the known Universe as there are stars in the Milky Way?

Perhaps galaxies are also "bubble ships"?

In fact, our Universe, in turn, could be but one of many such, bubbles floating upon a River of Time beyond all concept of Eternity?

Enough of star gazing.

The evolution of life on this planet cannot be rightly understood if we do not ask, what is our understanding of how did this planet, this sun, this galaxy got to be where it is now, how it out-folded from a speck of incredible intensity and potential.

[I hope to continue tomorrow on these themes, but I can't garantee it as I am getting a bit over my head with these ramblings and find it difficult to express my thought as clearly as I would like]
___________
* by "seemingly goal-oriented" I mean in the sense like that of a time exposure of a sweet pea as it grows, seemingly reaching up for some to grasp with its tendrils and climbs towards the light.

Bubble Ships

The famous astronomer, Edwin Hubble, after a lecture on astronomy particular, was approached by an elderly lady who, somewhat worried, came up to the professor and asked him how long it was he had said before the Sun would die, (either in a ball of fire or as a dark dwarf)?

"O, about ten billion years or so."

"Ten billion? O, I'm so relieved -- I thought you said ten million!"

On the face of it, it seems rather ridiculous -- a million or a billion! What difference does make to someone who won't be alive even a hundred years after asking her question? And yet, that is the way we think. We all know that we will die. But that everything around us must also go into the long night -- that scares us!

Whatever we may say that we believe, we don't really know that the ashes of eternity retain any memories...

(Hubble, by the way, onece said, "The Universe is not only stranger than we think -- it is probably stranger than we can think!")

I grew up and came of age in Poosah City, which the local residents will tell you enjoys a subtropical climate. "Sunshine State" sounds great in tourist brochures. However, besides 'roaches and 'skeeters, it also means the weather can change from sunshine to rain rather quickly.

To call it "rain" doesn't quite give the picture. At times, and rather suddenly, with little wind, it can start raining pitchforks, buckets, barrels and even wooden shoes...

When it rains like that, the water cannot run off the asphalt pavement fast enough and the road is covered with thin sheets of moving water as raindrops, the size of small berries, pop up small bubbles on the surface of the water.

These bubbles sail merrily along upon the streaming water until they, all of a sudden -- pop! -- and they disappear...

I was watching the phenomenon one afternoon when I was about fifteen years old when it struck me that the water on the street was like a river of time and the bubbles like our lives and consciousness...

Many years later, this experience returned to me, congealed into a snatch of words:

"Simmer rain on streets black asphalt,bubble ships on sheets of water..."

Does not our consciousness appear like that?

All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thin bubble skin of water surface tension appears, containing, for a brief moment a small breath of wind -- the very same eternal wind that otherwise blows where it will...

Then: "Pop!" ...the bubble is gone...where did it go?

Any answer is pregnant with a following question: the essence of the bubble, is it in the water or in the air which the membrane (briefly) encloses? Or both? Or neither?

Similarly with our conscious awareness, what is it that contains it? Or, can we say that consciousness is "contained" in any "thing"?

[I hope to continue on this theme tomorrow]