It is All Relative

Anyone, even some among us with very little ability to observe or afflicted with the direst form of apathy or have the least amount of curiosity, knows that everything around us can only be perceived relative to everything else.  This will not be a lecture on Albert Einstein’s theory because very few people in the world understand it - I am not one of them – but we can spin something from it to make it more practical or give it worldly relevance, where the stark reality of anyone’s station in life is viewed relative to where everyone else stood.

Just very briefly, let’s pick up just one little bit from how the great scientist actually thought.  He was not brilliantly eccentric if it were not for thinking what at that time, perhaps still true even today, the most far out suppositions and conjectures.  He made us imagine a ball traveling at very high speed through empty space: dark and devoid of anything else; i.e. no stars, hence no light, no air, no dust, just plain void of nothingness, except for the constantly (fixed velocity) speeding ball. Now imagine it is a large transparent ball, like glass, and you’re inside traveling with it.  How can you tell you are actually moving? You cannot. In fact, you will not know how fast you are moving nor can you know what direction you are moving to or from. And get this. You will be oblivious to the surrounding space even if you are traveling at the speed of light – 300,000 km/hr. Come to think of it, you will not even know that you are moving to anywhere at all. [Only way you can is if your speed changes, i.e., you slow down or speed up even more or if you can see other objects around you with which to base an observation]. The same way you can’t tell seated inside a 747 doing 400 mph, except when it picks up speed for takeoff or slows down to land].

Now, back to the real world. As little as we know or understand Einstein’s theory, this we can be sure: Everything is relative. How does a young baby recognize his mother and father? They look and sound different relative to other people.  This is of course started by first recognizing people to be different from the other things around that move – like the pet dog or cat. There is nothing flippant or glib about that. The baby’s brain was an empty slate from birth and it has to learn all the things that stimulate it.  It begins quickly to recognize objects that don’t move from those that do.  Notice how quickly they are bored once there are no movements, sounds or changing colors around them. They’d recognize shapes and the size of the shapes because, well, something is different, larger or smaller, softer or harder, relative to something else.

From then on the baby has grown to be about seven years old.  By now his perception of a lot of things has grown substantially larger over what it was when he was three or four.  He’s bigger now but he must recognize quickly there are bigger boys out there.  He establishes his position relative to the younger, little ones and to those taller and twice his weight.  By his teenage years, he now recognizes not only his own social status but where his family is in the hierarchy by which his parents, their peers, or not-so-peers, stood.  Relativity begins to manifest some of its darker sides.  He cannot have a car even at his junior year in high school when some of his classmates do.  When finally a used car came along by the middle of his senior year, some of the same classmates were getting brand new ones ahead of a graduation gift. It is obvious that relative to his parents some of his classmates’ families have relatively more to spare, which made the difference between a used car and a brand new one.

If only, just before graduating he had widened his perspective to a larger focus.  If only he had done a thought experiment that took him to a neighborhood far, far away. There he would have seen a similarly populated high school, say, in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where even the principal of the school drives a car a decade older than his.  There, students from the middle class would be fortunate to own a bicycle, whose father, the bread winner, is still 30 months away from paying off the scooter he drives to work which by now belches smoke as to render it unsuitable to drive through the city streets in a couple of years; or less if the environmental police catches up to him with a citation.

It is all relative.

My son and daughter-in-law traveled to Russia years ago but not to the tourist attractions in Moscow, not even Nizhny or Rostov-on-Don. They went on a church mission to some of the poorest areas in a remote Russian region.  My daughter-in-law who was then a high school teacher had seen her U.S. students come to school in name-branded or sports-emblemized back packs filled with new text books and more than ample school supplies.  In that Russian town they saw young students come to school with their books and school supplies in plastic bags, notably no different from what we see in grocery stores in many parts of the well developed world.  The kids were happy to have those grocery bags to keep their books dry and protected from the elements, with simple hand straps, clutched by tiny fingers to hold on to what momentarily are prized possessions in their young lives.  There were no school buses.  Every student walked to and from school.  We can only imagine what it was like when the weather turned into the famous Russian winter.

It is all relative.

When western tourists go on their yearly sojourn to the Far East or South America, they may think nothing of a $2 or $5 tip but to the waiter or bell hop or driver, it could mean crossing the threshold from a hand-to-mouth existence to an albeit temporary relief from the following day’s worry or uncertainty in case he or she misses work for one reason or another.  The tourists, regardless of their social standing from whence they came, are assured by relativity in a foreign land a place far more special than they can ever imagine, if only they can know how these people who serve and cater to their needs live - in homes these strange but, relatively or seemingly, wealthy visitors will never see.

Back home the same tourists return to the reality of their daily existence in a world so different from the grand but short intermission.  It will take a while for them to re-adjust and realize that the daily stage show they must begin to resume is the actual reality of their lives and the vacation was merely the entr’acte, according to the French among us. Now, in not so frequent a case, which most of us should be grateful for, post vacation seems to bring on more stress than had there been no vacation at all even though such joyous trips are supposed to relieve them of it.  It does not seem to matter that there is a job to go back to, to a home taken for granted in a neighborhood that looks the same.  Well, if they must, they ought to re-imagine what that home in such a neighborhood would look to those folks that catered to their needs and serve them well in that foreign land not too long ago. The seemingly tired, old neighborhood, the house that could use new furnishings even when they’re perfectly fine, would be heaven to those 767 million people of the world’s population in extreme poverty who subsist on a meager $1.90 a day (2016 world survey) or to those 2.1 billion who get by on $3.10 per day.

It is all relative.

Albert Einstein may have inadvertently taught us something else. We can learn from our own personal Special Theory of Relativity.  Treat whatever we have or where we are today, as something special because relative to much of the world - many of whom do not have an electronic device to read this, let alone electricity by which to power it - we live relatively well.

What Part is That?

Beth Madden, of Seattle, Washington submitted the following conversation to “Life in These United States”:

I came home to find my husband sitting on the couch watching TV.

“I thought you were going to mow the lawn,” I said.

“I’m waiting on a part,” he replied.

“What part is that?”

“The part of me that wants to do it”.

That conversation is reprised in a variety of different ways not just across the U.S. but around the world, although the chore of mowing the lawn is primarily or mostly American. In many parts of the world mowing the lawn is not likely something to be argued about. Only in America is lawn care more obsessively a part of suburban living while much of the world is probably oblivious to the idea of actually watering, let alone care so much for how the front and back yard grass look.

 “In a 2005 NASA-sponsored study, it was estimated that the area covered by lawns in the United States to be about 128,000 square kilometres (49,000 sq. miles), making it the nation's largest irrigated crop by area. [1] Lawn care is thus a popular business in the United States; proper maintenance, construction and management of lawns of various kinds being the focus of much of the modern horticulture industry. Estimates of the amount spent on professional lawn care services vary, but a Harris Survey put the total at $28.9 billion in 2002 (approximately $1,200 per household using such services)”.

According to the EPA, "of the 26 billion gallons of water consumed daily in the United States, approximately 7.8 billion gallons, or 30 percent, is devoted to outdoor uses. The majority of this is used for irrigation."

I digressed there for a minute as an aside because Beth Madden indeed has brought up the subject that most Americans are familiar with although there is something far more profound about her question, “What part is that?”, which could trigger all kinds of things in life and human nature.

For example, what part is someone waiting for to embark on a business venture, a career change, or a commitment to do something that is outside of one’s comfort zone. Some have conjectured that perhaps Princess Diana may have waited for far too long for that part of Prince Charles that could have loved her deeply. Could things have turned out more differently, such as, that she could still be alive today had that part come to the prince in time? A wishful hypothetical for the millions of fans of the beloved princess but in reality there are actual people out there today under similar circumstances waiting for the part of someone they love to arrive in time to save a relationship.

Waiting for that part, in my opinion, could very well be also the father of invention. [Should I have said, “Mother of invention”?].  Let’s get back to mowing the lawn for a minute.  The first lawn mower, a huge improvement over a scythe, was something that needed to be pushed for the cutters to cut. I’m sure back then there were men and women, primarily husbands, of course, waiting for the part where a motor can do the rotating.  A gas-engine powered mower was invented but that wasn’t enough because more folks waited for the part when… well, ultimately somebody invented the self-propelled version. But do you know that someone out there, today, is still waiting for the part where the mower, on a programmed schedule, will start itself, motor out of the garage or storage shed, cut the lawn, edge, and trim the whole yard – all by itself.

"Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation", a very technical sounding but accurate definition of LASER, was early on a mere curiosity but was an invention waiting for a part.  And what an abundance of parts showed up! Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity could easily have been something relegated to the annals of obscure technical publications or discussed only in rarely held theoretical physics conventions if not for the fact that engineers have all been waiting for the part or parts that came with it. Today’s GPS, smart phones, live global TV broadcasts, more accurate tracking of celestial objects, future space exploration, to name a few, depend on that theory to hold true – always.

What possessed the Wright brothers to go from building/repairing bicycles to take to the air with the first airplane?  Soichiro Honda was a high school dropout mechanic who was turned down by Toyota when he applied for what he considered then his dream job.  Fortunately, for the world there were many parts of him that wanted to do more. After building makeshift mopeds from post WWII spare parts in war-ravaged Japan, his company’s cars and minivans are some of the most reliable vehicles today. The company now builds robots, [yes] lawn mowers, portable electric generators and even jet engines.

What part of Melinda Gates made her pick up a skin-and-bones African woman suffering from AIDS, then carried her to the roof top of the clinic so the dying patient can see her last sunset?  What part of the firefighter made him go back one more time into a burning building to save one more life? What of a soldier diving over a grenade to save his comrades?  These are people who did not wait for the parts of them to come along by acting instinctively towards what is good and right in their eyes and in their minds; and in their hearts.

The question for many of us is how do we know what part of us is still waiting to come out. The youth is likely the reservoir of many parts.  We can say that it is those who are good at coaxing these parts to come out who lead successful lives.  Such successes are not always measured by money and material possessions but by the depth with which these folks went down to retrieve the parts.  

The part easily dug out is not always the most meaningful. The part that matters the most is when one had to dig deepest from his or her heart, especially in the midst of adversity, hardship and sacrifice.  Lastly, at the end of our life’s journey the best time to reply, “NOTHING”, is when asked, “What part of us have we forgotten to bring out”.

As Luck Would Have It

Fortune had been showered upon you to be living today. Nothing facetious about that whatsoever because today, as we speak, or rather, as you are reading this musing, consider yourself one of approximately 7 billion who each comes from a very long line of continuously unbroken chain of connected lives that span a very, very long time. It is continuously unbroken because had there been a break, just once, in that chain, at some point, or any point along that span of tens and thousands of years, you will not be here. 

Here's why.  From a set of two people - your parents - your mother gave birth to you not too long ago.  Before that, two sets of parents (four different people) brought up the two persons who became your father and mother. You go back another generation and now we're talking four sets of parents - eight people in all - from your past who had something to do with you being here. If you go back just a little bit more, you will count 16, then 32, then 64 who were in that chain in just another additional three generations. Imagine a very long funnel and you’re at the bottom tip of it today. Tracing upwards you will have a wall of people lining the sides of the funnel stretching almost endlessly to an unimaginably flared top. Markers of your DNA will extend in an unbroken band stretching to however farther back your imagination will take you.  There is something truly staggering about this, but let's digress for a bit in the next paragraph.

The Chess Board Story

There are quite a number of different versions of this tale but we’ll pick one from India since that is where chess likely originated. It’s about a king, a chess master, who challenged one visitor to a game.  The challenger when prompted what he wanted as a reward after he bested the king, merely asked that a single grain of rice be put on the first square of the chess board. Two grains on the next, then doubling that on the third square, which are four grains…then doubling it again to eight, and so on and on until the 64^th square. The king thought nothing of it and agreed, not realizing that he was faced with the classic effect of exponentials.  Just by the 40^th square there would have been 1 billion grains, but still manageable and well within what the king had in his vast granaries. The king’s accountants soon realized that by the 64^th square the number of grains of rice amounted to 18 followed by 30 zeros (18³⁰ grains).  That amount of rice would have weighed 210 billion tons, enough to cover all of India with a layer one meter thick. Assuming just ten grains of rice on a stalk per square inch, a rice field twice the area of the entire surface of the earth, oceans and lakes included would have been required for planting.

Two things we learn from that story: (a)from the second paragraph above, you will see that there had to have been some serious overlap in our ancestry because there could not have been that many people to have lived if each individual among 7 billion people today traces his or her lineage just to one discretely single funnel; (b) often people, even experts in their field, would use the word exponential, i.e. exponential growth, profits will grow exponentially, etc., not realizing what they’re talking about, so tread lightly when using that word, except to use it metaphorically but often one cannot resist and even add “literally” to it.

To further explain what I just said from the last sentence, imagine going back just 60 generations before you were born.  The doubling effect of parents of parents of parents would require an exponential number of people if we merely account a single line of ancestry.  Therefore, it is only conceivable that a great number of people in every race and mixed races could trace their ancestry to a relatively much smaller number of original individuals. Another way is to imagine that you, as an individual, were at the tip of an ancestral pyramid, which you are, and you project backwards in time the number of people from whence you came through the doubling phenomenon of parenting.  By the 64^th generation the base of the pyramid would exceed the diameter of the entire solar system if all the people involved with you were from a single linage if they stood shoulder to shoulder on a straight line.

Therefore, we must conclude that we all came from a very narrow ancestral base.  All Europeans, for example, have common DNA markers in each and every one of them, distinctly European, because there had to have been just a handful of original parents.  It is almost as if there was a proverbial Adam and Eve but mind you, not in the literal sense.  We can say the same for those from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, of course.  People in every race are likely related to one another and there is more likelihood than not that all races are related as well.  Allow for migration patterns, allow enough time (as in several thousand years), and allow for the fact that changing geology dictated climate patterns that dictated the concentration of food and shelter, biological adaptations, cultural and sociological evolution, etc. the odds of people mixing, separating, reuniting, exploiting one another through wars and even local conflicts, and do not forget that we are confined to one earth –though large and widespread it is still a finite area – the odds of people “bumping into one another” completes the recipe for the proverbial “melting pot”.  We cannot know all the details but the math tells us that there could not have been that many people in our ancestry to have allowed for truly discrete “originals”. I could be wrong but not by much if we keep in mind that the numbers are not there for you to have come from a single line without ancestral “entanglements” in the past.

But what has “as luck would have it” got to do with all of what had been said so far?

Everything!  In order to cover every reader we will either make this about the odds of you making it thus far as just mere fortuitous results of probabilities or as an acknowledgement that the Creator, as many of us believe, has a hand in how and why we made it this far; however, God did not exactly make it that easy for every ancestor.  Just think this through.  At any time along the chain, a break could have occurred because of diseases, famine, accidents, death through war, enslavement, natural catastrophe, etc. Of course, either none of those happened or you owe it to your ancestor’s skill, genetics or luck because you are here now.

The biology of creating you, and each and every ancestor before you, was always fraught with all kinds of obstacles. From the moment of conception the struggle for survival, even at the microscopic level of fertilization, is no picnic for the fertilized egg. Let’s back up for a bit because before that, anywhere from 40 to 120 million sperm cells initiated the journey with only a few hundred making it anywhere near the egg which by comparison is not only a hundred fold bigger than the sperm it is actually a cellular fortress.  As luck would have it, one sperm cell out of the remaining few hundred will make it through and the fortress shuts down and fertilization begins. The fertilized egg must then make an epic journey from the fallopian tube to the uterus (womb) when at that point it is still considered a foreign body and can be rejected at any moment. As luck would have it, the fertilized egg reaches its destination and will cling to the lining of the uterus like a parasite, which it is, and must remain there for nine months totally dependent on nutrition from every ancestral mother. Occasionally the fertilized egg will not get it right and an ectopic pregnancy may occur thus making the whole journey for naught. Many generations ago under primitive pre-natal care, or perhaps even none at all, the odds were not too favorable to the infant or mother.  But, as luck would have it, your ancestors made it and here you are.

Furthermore, as luck would have it, the blueprint of you was intact and followed to the letter throughout your entire development as an embryo to final term.  Here is the thing.  The smallest and latest computer chip available in the market is phenomenal relative to its predecessors. It is small and thin all right but we can still clearly see it, hold it and examine it. It holds a lot of information but not quite as much – not even close - as the information carried in the fertilized egg.  If the egg that is just a mere 100 microns in diameter (a millionth of a meter) were scaled to the size of a shirt button, the latest microchip, proportionately scaled, would be about as large as the Houston Astrodome. But, as luck would have it, your mother’s natal CPU (central processing unit) read all the information correctly so that you have the right hair and eye color, your limbs were complete, all your organs developed in the programmed sequence and upon your birth, not only did you successfully inhale your first mouthful of air outside the womb, you bellowed with a loud cry that also made your mother cry for joy.

As luck would have it, you and 7 billion others are each at the tip of unbroken chains of life.  But keep in mind that of all the species that ever lived from since the time life begun only less than 1% are in existence today.  99% became extinct for many reasons. The fact that our species are still around is something to behold, and we add to that the reality that our ancestry had been so entangled in so many ways for so long over eons of time that we could all be related – one way or the other. Unfortunately, there is a “but” that follows. Because as bad luck would have it, human frailty and the nature of the human character seems to prevail throughout, from history to history. If anything, we had proven that human life is persistent; we persisted on developing, understanding and always aiming to elevate the human spirit; yet, the most important question still remains unanswered: Why is our history filled with human conflict, theaters of war in the same battlefields over and over again and again - our future is pre-dominated by wars and rumors of war?

Hopefully, as luck would have it, we will somehow find a way before our luck runs out.