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Theory:
When I was in elementary school, and again in college, they told us basically the following:
If all the time of the earth from it's inception until today,
was 24-hours,
man would have shown up at 1 minute to midnight.
That is to say, we showed up at the very, very end.
It seems like perhaps the universe puts "intelligent" (in quotes to imply whatever the hell THAT means) life on a planet for a specific reason. I might even suggest that it's for the express purpose of running that planet into the ground. Or blowing it to smithereens--both of which we have already done or are perfectly capable of doing thanks to technology we developed wholly on purpose. Our sole purpose here may be to bring about the planet's demise. In which case--we're doing a bang-up job!
In the premiere episode of The Sopranos, Tony has this great monologue. It's about how it's good to be at the beginning of something. And that these days he felt as if he was coming in at the end. Prophetic, seeing as how he is whacked in the series finale. Ya know? I kinda feel like that may be the case with humanity. Or maybe it's just me. I hope not, yikes!
Here on Earth, there is much ado about how we define that which we do not know. Why are we here? What happens when we die? Who made the planet--and us? How long ago? What else is out there? Humans go to war over that, countless people dying needlessly. But what if whatever it is is larger than the United States, the planet Earth, our Solar System, the milky way even...and beyond? What then? Are we all going to some intergalactic plane of torment because we didn't know we should revere a super space God? Probably not, but who the hell knows?
It certainly stands to reason that if there is a single higher power, that it controls more than this one planet. So if you want to be One with The Universe you might want to set about the task of finding out who that it, and how we may appease them.
In other news, my head has been hurting me and giving me weird kinds of throbbing and tingling, and feeling heavy. Wednes no like. Decided to start cutting those new pills I've been taking in half. They seem to be taking a lot out of me. Think it might also be time to get my hearing checked and maybe get a new head X-ray. It's been a while for me.
was 24-hours,
man would have shown up at 1 minute to midnight.
That is to say, we showed up at the very, very end.
It seems like perhaps the universe puts "intelligent" (in quotes to imply whatever the hell THAT means) life on a planet for a specific reason. I might even suggest that it's for the express purpose of running that planet into the ground. Or blowing it to smithereens--both of which we have already done or are perfectly capable of doing thanks to technology we developed wholly on purpose. Our sole purpose here may be to bring about the planet's demise. In which case--we're doing a bang-up job!
In the premiere episode of The Sopranos, Tony has this great monologue. It's about how it's good to be at the beginning of something. And that these days he felt as if he was coming in at the end. Prophetic, seeing as how he is whacked in the series finale. Ya know? I kinda feel like that may be the case with humanity. Or maybe it's just me. I hope not, yikes!
Here on Earth, there is much ado about how we define that which we do not know. Why are we here? What happens when we die? Who made the planet--and us? How long ago? What else is out there? Humans go to war over that, countless people dying needlessly. But what if whatever it is is larger than the United States, the planet Earth, our Solar System, the milky way even...and beyond? What then? Are we all going to some intergalactic plane of torment because we didn't know we should revere a super space God? Probably not, but who the hell knows?
It certainly stands to reason that if there is a single higher power, that it controls more than this one planet. So if you want to be One with The Universe you might want to set about the task of finding out who that it, and how we may appease them.
In other news, my head has been hurting me and giving me weird kinds of throbbing and tingling, and feeling heavy. Wednes no like. Decided to start cutting those new pills I've been taking in half. They seem to be taking a lot out of me. Think it might also be time to get my hearing checked and maybe get a new head X-ray. It's been a while for me.
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If there were dinosaurs--one species among the many--who were a heck of a lot smarter than we know--could there have been some sort of civilization a hundred million years ago that we don't even have evidence of? I mean, suppose they made things of wood that doesn't fossilize so well? Could there have been intelligent beings before us?
Maybe it's not that humans are late to arrive, but that we are early in the human race. Have you heard of the anthropic principal? It one incarnation it says that if life is rare in the universe, anyone around to worry about such things must live in one of the super rare places. But suppose that intelligent life is inherently short-lived. Anyone smart enough to make a civilization is smart enough to destroy their world. If intelligence is by nature short-lived, the anthropic principle says that anyone intelligent enough to worry about it is going to live in the first few hundred millennia of that intelligence, and remark on how long the world went without them.
Physics, the order of the universe, seems to follow laws that are best understood by people with borderline autistic/aspbergery mindsets. Perhaps this means that God is really autistic, in that he created a universe along the lines of a geeky numerical obsession. But of course, we all create God in our own image.
Perhaps we have already learned how to appease that cosmic interplanetary god. F'rinstance, It demands that we eat or we will weaken and collapse. God demands that we eat. And that we sleep. And drink. This things It demands of us.
Eternal torment for not appeasing a deity seems to be a human invention. I can't take it seriously. Besides, would we even be ourselves after an eternity of torment. Would our eternal souls suffer senile dementia after a few centuries?
I think it was George Carlin who pointed out that it's presumptuous of us to think we can destroy the planet. We can fuck things up, sure, and wipe out places we love, or species we appreciate, but if a vandalous human race set off every atomic bomb, and opened the flow on every oil well on the planet, we might kill ourselves, and we might creat an impressive mass extinction, but life will remain, and evolve all over again, and the planet will keep spinning and orbiting with no perceptible change. We aren't as powerful in the face of nature as we'd like to think.
And, of course, I'm as full of shit as the next guy, and my beliefs are wrong. In fact, a fair fraction of what I've proposed isn't really my belief anyway. You just got me thinking about stuff and junk.
Wheeee!!!
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I talk to a lot of atheists who are, in reality, angry at their god. They aren't actually denying their existence. These people are not unlike petulant children holding their breath until they die and then won't god be sorry? Okay, that's a tangent, but you know what I mean. I think you're onto something in saying that intelligent life is short lived. It may be that the search for our creator is the beginning of the end.
Could it be that geeky math types invented math and numbers as nothing more than a symbolic way to quantify the universe? Pythagorus always seemed batshit crazy to me.
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Absolutely, geeky math types invented math and numbers as nothing more than a symbolic way to quantify the universe. A big load of renaisance astronomers pretty much were looking for the secret code to read God's mind. There was a lot of mysticism involved. I think it wasn't until after Newton that all that crazy math turned into a nuts-and-bolts practical way of manipulating and sorting out the universe.
Hell, even Kepler was full of wacko stuff about music of the spheres and nested polyhedra being God's secret beautiful plan for the universe. He didn't get that what we now call Kepler's Three Laws were the only things in his theories that made sense. And Gallileo rejected the heart of them because God would never do something as klunky as move planets in ellipses.
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Anyway, the calendar you mentioned was conceived by Carl Sagan, I think. Yeah, the tenure of modern Homo Sapiens is brief in comparison to other species around here, and we seem to have a hard time remembering this collectively.
I was never much for assigning a purpose to existence myself - it may sound odd, but I am quite comfortable in believing that existence as a whole is a happenstance, and that we as individuals assign it to our lives and surroundings in order to create some sort of structure for ourselves, which is fine really. I often think I am here to revive interest in good beer in my area....
Oh, both Pythagoras and Archimedes were eccentrics in their time. Indeed, when the Romans sacked Syracuse (a Greek settlement on modern Sicily), they killed Archimedes, but not before he had a chance to remonstrate the soldiers entering his home. Rather than defend himself, he pleaded for his work to be preserved - his last words are known: "Stand away, man, from my diagram...."
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I honestly don't remember if I had some kind of pull toward deity before I was introduced to it. Like a lot of kids, that happened pretty young for me. I was given a bible before I turned 5 and already knew that "god" was watching me all the time. Now I know that it was no different than most of the other crap they make up to trick kids into being quiet and not making a mess.
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