10 Billion ...20 Billion

At the dawn of every new year we wish peace and goodwill toward men. There are approximately 7 billion people on earth now.  What happens when it gets to 10 billion? And 20 billion?

A friend wrote to me about what had been a perplexing point for him to ponder. Where would the population be today had there been no wars, natural disasters and epidemics throughout our history. That is an intriguing question because millions upon millions perished during the Black Plague, the Spanish flu, to name just a couple of pandemics; and from  the two World Wars, and those killed by oppressive regimes before and afterwards. Had those deaths not occurred and even if just a fraction of those  people had  lived full lives to have families and children, the logarithmic increases in population is something to behold. Where would we be today? For sure we would have passed 7 billion a long time ago. Hypothetically we could already have exceeded 10 billion by now. That is, of course, all hypothetical. But suffice it to say that hypothetically we would be dealing with  exceedingly serious population numbers by now. But that didn't happen.

Not that 7 billion people is a small number. But it is what we have today. If all those wars and natural calamities were part of the sorting out processes, historians had to deal with all kinds of questions. One of the answers to those questions, perhaps the one that has the most impact when all is said and done, is what we face today. 7 billion is the answer. 

If we look backwards in time we find the steps that took us to today's 7 billion. It is not 10 billion because millions had perished before they had a chance at the fullness of life. Instead, the pages of history were written much too differently and the reality is what we have today. Today was shaped by a history of wars, famine, diseases, the creation and reversal of fortunes that kept shifting between kingdoms, borders, nations and alliances of nations. In effect, it was all those and then some that gave us today's world of 7 billion people. 7 billion is indeed the answer. This brings us to another set of questions moving forward.

We have the natural - more specifically the biological - reasons and then we  have the social and economic and, of course, political questions to answer moving into the future.

From the purely  biological perspective, let's look at this example. When the population of voles (rodent family) in a particular habitat is severely reduced for one reason or another, the owls (their main predator) in the area either raise only one chick, or none at all during the breeding period, whereas they can raise as much as three or four when their prey is plentiful. This is repeated in all kinds of prey/predator relationships everywhere. In cases where predators had gone on to unsustainable proportions relative to prey, the overlapping of territories cause them to kill one another. Simplistic, even cruel as that might sound, that has been the story of survival. 

We are able to detach from that today and we even squirm at the prospect of equating ourselves to that story because, well, we are civilized. We elevated ourselves to the pinnacle of all living things now, but lest we forget it was just a few thousand years ago that all that regulated the fate of our ancestors were what nature dictated. Early fossil and archaeological  records only described what all seemed to be natural behaviors just barely above all the other creatures. The constant search for food and suitable habitat propelled migrations and those who survived were defined by their ability to adapt and, more importantly, by their success at organizing themselves into territories, kingdoms, and nations and alliances of nations. Where the 7 billion live today is a function of who settled where or when those who had the technology to do so determined how the rest of the lands and bodies of water were found and settled and defended. 

If 7 billion is the answer, here is what we ask ourselves. Amidst the sophistication of our so called society, the intelligence we had amassed over centuries of learning, the development of morality and a compassionate society, why have we not moved  farther away, even by just a bit, from the edge of a precipitous conflict that can wipe out the entire 7 billion. There is enough nuclear arsenal, biological and chemical weapons to cause the entire population to perish several times over. When we think about it, civilized society has never been in such peril. The headlines aside, for every discussion towards peace,  preparation for war has a budget allocated a thousand fold more than peaceful programs. And that is because world leaders, especially those who have the most arsenal, find preparing for war their justification for more effective weapons so that peace can be maintained. The idea of mutually assured destruction or MAD, for short, is the very definition of global madness. Proponents of this philosophy assure the world that indeed it is because of that that it had been almost three quarters of a century now since  the last World War. True, perhaps but ...

The lessons of history are written by the victors of conflict that shaped the story line. Unfortunately for the world today there are way too many would-be authors, who would rather write a different narrative, a spectacular one at that.  The danger, of course, is that the pages of our future history may never be written at all because there will be no one to write them, let alone readers to read them. Yes, you read it right. If we are not careful we will be writing ourselves into extinction.

Why such a  dark and gloomy forecast. It would be because maybe humanity has yet to acknowledge that perhaps it is not capable to govern itself, not ever. Tried as it did, idealism and two world organizations aside - first, the League of Nations and now the seemingly inutile U.N - humanity is still struggling for answers on how best to manage itself.

7 billion people are waiting for answers to the question : Why?

This New Year will be no different from all the other new years now permanently etched into the pages of history but maybe there is hope. Hope that all 7 billion people will indeed ask and pray for goodwill towards all. If man does not have the answers, is it not time to ask Someone else?

Happy New Year to Each and Everyone of You.

Taxes - The Beast of All Burden

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.” 

- John Marshall

That might be a little too extreme. However, there is a moment in the history of any nation - however young or old the government may be - when taxes become tools for tyranny that exacts the worst punishment according to Jeff Hayes when he said,

“Capital punishment: The income tax.” – Jeff Hayes

Pun may also have been intended because capital for businesses could also suffer from the punishment of excessive taxation.

Again, a little too excessive. If we are to have a government we need to fund it. If we expect services and protection then we ought to be willing to pay for it. There lies the one and only justification for the existence of taxes - but lawful ones they should and ought to be.

Now, this takes us to the question of when does taxation become a burden. When does it become the beast when its annual visitation can make beasts of people - making them lie, cheat or concoct stories of fiction to avoid paying what they believe is more than their fair share of contribution to their government? Though undeniably there is cheating just for the sake of it, with an uncontrollable desire just to be greedy, the general citizenry abide by the virtue of fairness.

There is a time, and it could be for many nations, when all the taxes that can be formulated, exacted on people and collected for the proper functioning of governments have already been written in the laws. Any new taxes since then are either frivolous or no longer justifiable. When do these new tax laws that ask for more money from the people become a destructive beast? When is the burden much too heavy for the average taxpayer to sustain?

"Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."     - Calvin Coolidge

That was spoken by a U.S. president almost a century ago but since then more taxes continued to be written into the laws, yet today the government is still clearly unable to live within its means. And so do almost all governments worldwide.

The California legislature recently had a proposal alliteratively expressed, though not too cleverly: a tax on texting. These lawmakers are running out of ideas on ways to feed the beast. Airport tax, hotel tax, road tax, fuel tax, carbon etc. have all been taken. So, how about a tax on text? And the gall to actually do it retroactively for five years! The tax is to help the underprivileged but since the tax will apply to everyone then the people least likely to afford it suffer the most.

This tax is symptomatic of ideas gone berserk. Progressive ideologies. and liberal agenda have this one weapon aimed at everything and anything. Anything that moves, tax it. If it doesn't move, tax it anyway. Remember the death tax?

Sen. Barry Goldwater said, "The income tax created more criminals than any single act of government."

So someone said this, "I'm seeking an income tax refund high enough to just barely keep me out of prison."

Well. Enough said but there is more to think about.

Legalizing marijuana use is a way for state governments to legitimately collect taxes on an otherwise underground economy. However, we do not know the extent of the effects of rampant marijuana use on society in general and the overall health and safety its young citizens citizens in particular that some experts believe could follow, which could ultimately cause governments to spend money later on such issues as mental illness, increased accidents on the road, poor performance in schools and productivity loss at work, and all other effects not quite well understood or anticipated for now from a freer use of the drug. Should new taxes be required to cover those in the future?

State and other government sponsored lotteries that seem to be a method of income distribution or a voluntary form of taxation are on the surface an innocuous diversion that affect people least likely to afford that kind of entertainment. These lotteries are supposed to help educational programs for the poor and other services to the needy. Unfortunately, it is probably true that the very same people lotteries target to help are the same ones spending an inordinate amount of their income on lottery tickets.  It is just a thought. And again, it comes down to collecting money from people that is a veiled attempt at taxation.

Taxes on fossil fuels to discourage use of the product to reduce carbon emissions are legislative methods to change behavior. And speaking of behavior, Elon Musk (of Tesla and SpaceX fame) says below:

He was on to something when he declared "elementary stuff"  from the quote above; either that or, he was  on something (remember the famous podcast while he inhaled something profusely?)

Carbon is the second most abundant element in nature, the entire universe even, that had served a purpose and continues to do so in more ways than it is disruptive. Why is money not spent on making more use of it? It's just a question.

Carbon hardens iron into steel. It is what makes possible for raw rubber to become tires; hence all tires are the hue of carbon black. Without carbon we will not have cars, buses and airplanes can't land without tires. Carbon fiber is the lightest, yet the strongest pound per pound modern material for all kinds of applications from helmets to bikes to car and airplane bodies. Carbon is the lifeblood of plants. It is part of all our energy needs - from carbohydrates in food to being the component element that forms the structure that holds hydrogen atoms to make hydrocarbon fuels. Is there not enough money to tame carbon into a useful material, rather than fight it? It is a fundamental element.  It will be here forever. Long after we are all gone. Why not find more uses for it? Instead we spend all kinds of money as if we can actually rule it out of existence. Is everyone blinded from thinking outside the carbon shroud?

Soon we will run out of stuff to tax. Oh, no!

It is something to ponder, indeed!

$5.00 Per Gallon

That is just the rolling price per gallon difference between the gas pumps on Fannin Street in Houston, Texas and Rue Manin in Paris, France as of a particular time last week.

The other difference, of course, is that Fannin Street, though very busy with traffic due to the holiday season, is remarkably quiet compared to what it had been like in Paris lately from demonstrations brought on by the proposed new taxes on gasoline. Pres. Macron had since made an effort to back track from that and made a speech to appease the unrest. The so called "yellow vest protests" marked by tear gas bombs, burning  cars and vandalism of commercial  establishments seem to be just one of the symptoms that ail France and much of Europe. But we all have problems.  The U.S. is not exempt, except that gas prices has not been in people's minds as it used to. 

So, let's stay within the issue of gas prices and the things associated with it. Politics and political divisions are much too intractable and they will always be here for the foreseeable future, if not forever. We'll stay out of it although gas prices almost always get linked to the world of oil and oil production that leads to the environment; the environment to climate change; and before we know it, the issues are right exactly at the doorstep of  the halls of Congress. So we'll try to stay clear of the political components, as futile as that can be.

If I understand it correctly, the new tax was for funding eco-friendly projects and the carbon tax is a way to reduce carbon emissions by curbing demand which is really a backdoor way to help comply with the country's obligation towards cleaner air and responsibility to the environment. Those are lofty ideals that seem to backfire at a huge cost to tourism in particular and to the French economy in general

I was watching the French Ambassador respond to the issue of the protests in an interview this evening. He quoted one of the protesters' remarks that was much too eloquently expressed with the simplicity of thought that could only come from the philosophy of a simple man. The man said, "We too are concerned with the end of the world but what we are most concerned  with right now is the end of the  month".  

President Macron in his speech alluded to the fact that, though not in so many words,  he had overlooked the concerns and issues of the people with regards to the proposed tax hike on gasoline. His detractors  accused him of being out of touch with the realities of the French economy. As a concession he is increasing minimum wage and a year end bonus for the people.

We must wonder where the disconnect comes from. Actually, the man two paragraphs above said it best without him realizing that perhaps that is exactly where the gap resides. Indeed it could be a matter of residential locations of people living on one affluent side of the cultural and social tracks opposite to those who come from the middle to lower middle class side. There are the politicians and their supporters from the elitist crowd in their fund raising parties for environmental awareness, listening to speeches and presentations on the ailing planet  and the pressing concerns for climate change. The disconnect could be that those least affected by rising gas prices are the ones dictating the agenda that affect those with very little cushion in their incomes to absorb the costs of clean air and reduced carbon emissions.

The man is right. The end of the world to him is lopsidedly distant when set to a timeline that could be a mere few days to the end of the month where his budget could quickly turn vermilion red versus the green promises to hold off a global catastrophe a hundred, a thousand years from when he retires.

Speaking of that kind of timeline, we are now being told a different story, after a few convincing arguments that in our distant histories the world had been visited by global cooling and warming in alternating cycles that was free from human intervention. We are now told that present human activities are hastening the return of the warming cycle from the last ice age 12,000 years ago to just a few hundred years instead of a few thousand. The point the man on the street was telling us makes more sense because his worries are real and immediate versus projections that are far less reliable or arguably controversial.

The "greeners" - there, we just invented a new word - are defending the actions or inaction of their celebrity proponents and supporters as  individual exceptions because the bigger culprit are lose regulations over and abuses by the big corporations, namely oil and energy producers and industrial/commercial fuel consumers. You see, Al Gore's 10,000 square foot home that produces ten or more times the average home's carbon emissions or the biggest carbon-footprint per capita private jets used by the likes of DiCarpio and attendees to climate conferences around the world are exempt because they are doing a greater service. It does not matter that the lower middle and bottom-scraping lower classes are the ones severely affected by tax hikes on fuel, because in the end it will mean lower consumption of hydrocarbons, ergo lower carbon emissions.

One TV guest, a self-described environmental activist, even went on so far as to say that, "yes electric planes are possible and are in our future". This was after declaring those taking opposite views to hers as ignorant climate deniers.That seems to be the extent of their arguments - demonizing opposing views or espouse dreamy all electric wishful thoughts. Notice that much of their arguments are focused on belittling the intellect of  those who present alternative views but when they make claims about electric planes the media is silent. Now, let's look at electric planes. So, assuming there are big enough electric motors and really, really super light batteries, how far and how fast will they go? And don't forget this idea will take us back to the age of propeller air crafts. Jet engine works only with direct fuel/air combustion at high compression ratios for jet propulsion. Where is the intellect that can discern the difference between camera-toting little drones and Amazon's pie in the sky dream of drone-delivered packages and 400-passenger-carrying airliners?

Or, was the idea of converting to all electric vehicles given much thought that all those vehicles will get charged overnight  by electric plant generators that today mostly burn fossil fuels? Remember, the same environmentalist groups don't want nuclear plants either. All the electric charging will be done at night so solar is out of the question and wind is more erratic than siroccos and trade winds of summer. If only 25-50% of cars are electric today, there is not enough electricity to go around at night, so rolling power outage shall be the norm. And will governments continue to subsidize electric car manufacturers or rebates to every electric car sales?

Let us not forget that the green projects Spain went into ended in near economic disaster for that country.  The French apparently have not learned from their southern neighbor.

The bottom line is that the financial burden is heaviest on ordinary people while accolades and feel good results  sprinkled over smoked salmon and fine wine to people who drive the agenda on climate change -  completely detached from the realities of paycheck-to-paycheck workers.

There is enough to ponder there. 

Strange Realities of the Other Real World

Yes, indeed there are strange realities of a different and distinct world we do not see and even with our senses we would be oblivious to them.

You were sound asleep one night when nightmare paid you a visit. You were in prison with another prisoner in the same cell.  Your cell mate was ordered out by the evil-looking warden. The other prisoner was taken inside a smaller cell of solid metal walls all around and sealed closed. The warden said, addressing you, "There is a vial of cyanide gas inside that cell. The vial will shatter if a heavy weight above it is released. The release will be triggered by a switch that will turn on with a 50-50 probability programmed into a small computer. The computer will either turn the switch on at some point or keep it off but either event is not for certain to occur one way or another." Then, after a few moments, with a loud guttural laugh, he declared, "So, you see, right now your friend is both dead  and alive. But we won't know for sure until we open the door, would we?". His laughter trailing, you woke up in a cold sweat.

Somehow, you managed to drift back to sleep.  But dreams won't leave you alone. This time you're in another room. Tennis balls were being propelled against a wall. There are two vertical slits parallel to each other a foot apart and wide enough for the balls to go on through. Most tennis balls bounced back off the solid wall but many others went through the slits. When you went behind to look there was a white wall against which the tennis balls that went through the slits hit. The balls left marks on the white wall and sure enough there were two vertical bands of green ( they were green tennis balls).

You were led back to the other side and this time only one tennis ball at a time was being propelled in very rapid succession through just one of the slits, which you watched intently.   After a while, you turned away and lost interest with the now seemingly boring spectacle.  After several minutes the racket (pun intended) stopped.  You went to the other side to see the marks. To your astonishment there were two vertical marks as if some of the balls went through the other slit.  Suddenly one of the tennis balls lying on the floor started talking (remember, you are still in a dream). "Hah, you wondered how that happened? Well, when you were watching, we, like an obedient herd of sheep went through just that one slit. When you were not looking we, each one of us individually, went through the two slits simultaneously. Yes, we can do that! You see we behaved one way when you were watching and we misbehaved when you were not." Then, with the tennis ball still grinning, you woke up in another cold sweat.

Again, against all odds, you drifted back to sleep.

This time the dream was incredibly serene. You were in some kind of laboratory or studio filled with all sorts of monitors and sensors. Someone was there and he spoke to you. "See this baseball with a trademark to one side. It has a twin", and pointing to one of the monitors, he added, "Look at that other baseball. It is about a million miles away from here. It could also be just a hundred miles away, it doesn't matter. Watch as I turn this baseball here and quickly look at the monitor." As the trademark moved from left to right on the baseball in the room, the baseball on the monitor turned exactly the same way. The man said, "These two baseballs will move simultaneously together no matter how far they are from each other without any apparent physical or electronic connection to make them do that. The other baseball could very well be in another star system or even another galaxy and one will behave the same way as the other simultaneously. Distance are of no consequence and barriers that isolate or insulate do not hinder the behavior of the two baseballs".

Then you woke up again.

Those were nightmares all right. In the macro world, that is. In the sub-atomic world of particles, electrons and where other much smaller microscopic denizens reside, those are not uncommon. They are everyday occurrences. Where they occur is the domain of quantum mechanics, the quantum world is as real as our everyday world that we can see and touch.

With those examples, you have just been introduced to the world that even Albert Einstein refused to embrace. Up to the day he died he was skeptical of quantum physics, or at least the behavior of particles as prescribed by it.

But it is real. Smart phones, TV, radio, even the propagation of photons from the center of the sun to its surface up to the moment it reaches our face to warm us on a cold morning, quantum physics rule the phenomenon. I cannot pretend to understand even ten per cent of quantum mechanics but no one person alive today can claim to fully understand it either. It is a strange world but it is real.

The dreams above are just a handful of examples of quantum mechanics - a branch of physics - described albeit a little differently but they are true. In the first example, probability rules the movement and location of particles. Well, how different is that when you ponder what you will do tomorrow, a year from now, or the next moment? Everything in front of what we consider the present moment resides in the realm of nothing but several probable outcomes, sometimes too numerous to consider each. Until it happens. And when it does, every conceivable probability collapsed into just the one reality. That is not too hard to understand, is it? Every morning when you wake up, no matter how much planning you formulated the night before - what time to get out of bed, what to have for breakfast, what to wear - are all "probables" until you actually did what you intended to do. Simple enough; however, do not forget that your brain functions are a series of interactions between the countless neurons and electrical signals as synapses  between nerve cells that operate in the quantum world. But the next two examples are really  weird.

The double slit experiment is now a common place laboratory phenomenon done even by physics majors in college. When they place detectors to monitor the path of an electron going through one of the slits the electron will be observed doing that - go through one slit. Remove the detector and in a few moments the image on the second wall will show that the electrons - pointed to just the one slit will seem to have gone through both slits at the same time. The electron's behavior seems to indicate that it knows if it is being observed. There lies the phenomenon that the electron and other sub atomic entities can behave either as a particle or a wave. Here's how best to imagine it. Imagine a single wave on a still pond approaching the same first wall with two slits. The single wave will come out to the other side as now two waves - one per slit. They will mark the second wall with images of two waves. How does a particle behave that way also? And how is it able to choose to behave as a particle or a wave? It is a mystery.

The two baseballs are examples of particle entanglements that is the weirdest of all. How is the behavior of one particle affecting the other when there is clearly no physical way they are communicating with each other? That is not just weird, it is another great mystery. And this is one that we are not able to observe in the macro world. You would think, but  stranger things do happen in our observable world too.

How often we hear of someone thinking about a friend or relative and almost in a few moments the phone rings. It is from the very same friend or sister or brother one was thinking about.  What about two friends who had not seen each other for years, as they each moved to other cities only to see each other at some bazaar while vacationing in the same far flung middle eastern country, looking at carpets at the same exact place and time.  These are all ruled as coincidences. But coincidences follow the rule of probabilities. In some experiments dogs were able to sense when their owners are coming home long before they can hear the car. We sense sometimes when someone is looking or staring at us. What can explain what most consider a gut feeling that turned out either as a good decision or one that was a portent of something bad?

Back in the days I used to joke that it is a quantum thing. Sometimes this quantum thing even defies the rule of probability. Why is it that Murphy's Law still torments us these days even when every precaution is taken to insure a catastrophe doesn't happen?

The field of quantum physics appeals to very few because few cares about what happens in the world of the very small. But it is not true that quantum mechanics (QM for short) has no effects on the macro world. Stars, lasers and even the way the galaxies behave are subject to quantum effects even though QM is more probabilistic than anything with total certitude. 

Here is where it all settles down. Let's assume we aim to build a computer that can predict every probable event that can happen in the entire universe so that we can know with 100% certainty everything that will occur. It will not happen because QM maintains its probabilistic nature and an inherent error in prediction. However small an error is, QM maintains and  even insures that such a probability exists. QM prevents us from knowing everything. Omniscience  - the complete ability to know everything and the omnipotence to wield power to control or cause events to happen or not happen - is that quality we can only ascribe to an infinitely powerful and all knowing God. Nothing short of that, even if only by a little, will do. There lies the greatest gift we have. First, is that we are equipped with a mind to ponder these things and, second,  we are led to understand that there is such a thing as quantum mechanics to set limits to everything we can know or predict. Short of that we are left to defer to the Omniscient and Omnipotent God. Something must have caused the phenomenon of quantum mechanics. Once we acknowledge that, what more proof do we need?

Oumuamua

Oumuamua

An artist's rendering of Oumuamua

Translated loosely from Hawaiian, Oumuamua means "scout" or "messenger". As a news maker it was barely noticed by the public. In the  literal rarefied world of astronomy it was kind of a big deal though not meant to be more than a flash in the cosmological pan. But the story just won't die as quickly as it came and went. Indeed, in that sense the "messenger" swooped in and off it went, leaving everyone who cared with their mouth still agape, and today scratching their heads and still wondering, "what was that?" 

Astronomer Karen J. Meech's presentation on Oumuamua on Ted Talk had over 3 million views, and counting. The number of views is so far about half the viewing record of a Ted broadcast but it could go up as more and more data or speculation on the subject keep coming. You see, Karen Meech and other astronomers and astrobiologists did not rule out the possibility that Oumuamua had artificial origins, as minuscule as the odds were.

So, what was all the hoopla? Oumuamua is the first ever interstellar visitor to our solar system. Incredible as it seems, it is true because comets and asteroids are, in a manner of speaking, all part of our neck of the woods. Comets, though rare because of their extremely elongated elliptical orbits, are still regular visitors, and asteroids are ubiquitous stragglers from the early moments of the creation of our solar system.

Oumuamua came from another star system. 

That is a big deal because even if it came from our closest neighboring star, it would have taken it a couple of hundreds  of thousands of years from there to get here (assuming it was traveling at the presumed limited speed of objects the size that it was, and as estimated based on its actual transit). Even light at 186,000 miles per second would take over four years to make the journey from Proxima Centauri - one of the triple-star system of Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor.

But that is not the biggest thing. Oumuamua brought to light once more - reinforcing the recurring theme of E.T. - the proverbial wishful thinking of not just science fiction writers but by over half of the population in the U.S. (and presumed for the whole world) who believe in UFO's and extraterrestrial life permeating the universe. But was Oumuamua no different from faces and familiar objects gleaned or perceived by people from cloud formations? Are people still being influenced by childhood predisposition to seeing faces or animal features in natural objects?

First, this: 52 per cent or so of people polled in the U.S. believe in the existence of beings other than those on earth and that there is a possibility that some had visited our world in the past, are visiting us today and may in fact even come in the future. Of the entire population, slightly over 80 per cent responded as believing in God and only about 3 per cent are self described atheists. We can assume the rest are agnostics. They just don't know. Obviously, there is an overlap in the statistics which may leave us to assume that some faithful believers, agnostics and atheists believe in UFO's or E.T. There are many who believe that "Project Blue Book" was a U.S. government (U.S. Air Force in particular) cover up on the existence of UFO's or even of actual physical evidence of extraterrestrial technology and, above all, the existence of physiological  remains of E. T.

Well, it shall remain speculative at this point in time and conspiracy theories continue unabated. Oumuamua rekindled that.  But what is really known?

That all we have is an artist rendering (above) speaks to the fact that astronomers really did not have a good look at it. It was too far. It snuck in and out and the actual image was a flickering light across the night sky. It was determined to be an extra terrestrial object because of its trajectory coming in and out and along almost a perpendicular path to the plane of the solar system. It did make a sling shot around the sun but did not behave like a comet. Those who make it their business to know celestial trajectories believe that Oumuamua made a one time pass.

Now, how did astronomers guess at the likely shape of Oumuamua? Based on the flickering intensity of the light it reflected towards earth-based telescopes, scientists figured that the object was either rotating or tumbling aimlessly but that it had a thin edge and the ratio of its length to its width was about 10 to 1. It is a guess though an educated one. But there is a bit of science to it.

As of today, with increasing accuracy, astronomers have detected close to a thousand exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars. How they know that is with the use of very sensitive light detectors that are able to measure the dimming of starlight caused by a planet transiting in front of its star. It is akin to detecting a moth flying across a street lamp from some distance  away and the detector is able to measure the temporary dimming of the light when it reaches the telescope. The process is complicated and the collection of data tedious but it has now come to a point where scientists are able to calculate  how fast a planet is orbiting the star and how close but also its mass based on another detector that determines the wobble of the star. Suffice it to say, the science works with the same facility as extrapolating data collected on Mercury's transit across the sun.

So, Oumuamua was either a natural celestial visitor or a manufactured alien object or, dare I say, a spacecraft. Well, that stretch of the imagination might be going too far but because this is a musing with a primary task to tickle your imagination, let us then at least look into E.T. from a tangential perspective.

First, let me say this. I believe in the magnificence of creation, and the God who created all of what we can see around us and everything we can imagine. It is a limiting belief to believe that this earth and this earth alone harbors life, life as we know it or even life we have not even began to imagine. It is much too egocentric on our part to believe that the universe of two trillion galaxies is just for us alone. To say that, and to only believe that, is actually limiting the power of the Creator. To also believe that the creation of life is one instantaneous event and exclude the deliberate development of life over a prolonged period encompassing all life forms in diverging and diverse manifestations is also limiting the power of the Creator. You see, to believe in the Creator and to have absolute faith is to believe in God's infinite power to do anything and everything, far beyond what we can only imagine.  Having said that, until we see incontrovertible evidence of alien life we cannot rush to believe in it either. That is because, and this might seem contradictory,  it is God's choice alone to decide whether to create life on earth and on earth alone or in every location across the universe. But we don't know that. We are indeed limited by the uncertainty principle. So, we can either believe our little earth is the only place with life or life exists in prolific diversity everywhere else. Until we know for sure, uncertainty is the only certainty.

So, where does that leave us? We are very fortunate to be living at a time that is now. We are seeing and experiencing so many things today that a century ago, more so ten to a hundred centuries ago, would have been miraculously magical. The average high school senior today knows more than Isaac Newton ever could have known. But do not lose sight of the fact that the more we know seems to expand the breath and magnitude of what we still do not know. Below is a quote about Halley's comet.

"In 1066, the comet was seen in England and thought to be an omen: later that year Harold II of England died at the Battle of Hastings; it was a bad omen for Harold, but a good omen for the man who defeated him, William the Conqueror". 

We know, of course, of many more instances of good or bad omens from the night sky, as interpreted contemporaneously by those witnessing the events then that we know today were mere coincidences with no real causal effects beyond the natural. Today is no different. Oumuamua is treated by some as a harbinger of future potential alien visitation. It was on a spying mission. Or, it may already have left behind in its trail something that could conceivably affect life here.

This is where we need to take a pause. This is where we put the brakes on a runaway imagination. This is also where we reinforce our ability to be awed by the vastness of the universe and how infinitely small our role is in the greater scheme of things. But this is also where we take stock of the reality that even for the huge expanse of our solar system ours is a mere speck of dust lost in the swirl of the Milky Way. If we treat all inhabitants of our little world as fellow passengers on a life raft that is speeding across the cosmos to destinations unknown, we may think differently. Indeed, we ought to because the journey is fraught with uncertainty. What we know for certain is of little consequence to what is infinitely unknown.

The Mind. A Beautiful Servant. A Terrible master

An old man, close to his 100th birthday, was asked what he thought are the greatest mysteries in the world that are likely to remain unknowable forever. "There are just two", he said. Then raising one frail hand he pointed to the sky and added, "What's out there", and slowly he moved his hand and pointing to his head, "and what's in here". Then, "Of the two, the most unknowable is the one we all have here", pressing his finger firmly to his head once more.

To debate which one is more unknowable than the other would, of course, be an exercise in futility. It would be like two kids outdoing each other to come up with the largest number they can think of. One kid, exasperated and running out of patience, finally said, "infinity". The other kid countered with, "infinity plus one", thus restarting the bidding argument all over again. Of course, unknowable is undefinable in such a manner that infinity plus any number or infinity minus any number is still infinity. Analogously, one bottomless pit cannot be deeper than another bottomless pit. You can now stop rolling your eyes, grab and hold on to the spinning head and read on.

Choosing between what's out there and what's in here, arguing for the old man, can we say that the final frontier then is not space as Capt. Kirk of Star Trek would have us believe? We can't take the word of the most ardent cosmologists either. That might seem like a most uninhibited thing to say when one must consider the vastness of the universe - as in a previous musing, "700 Million Trillion".   

Briefly and we can move on to argue for the old man. Lake Tanganyika is the entire universe of an amoeba. A single bacterium at one edge will think - if bacteria have thoughts at all - that the opposite edge and everything in between is its final frontier.  The bacterium will behold that it is impossible for it to get to the other edge. Likewise, our world is this earth that is merely the size of a dust particle from the context of the entire Milky Way Galaxy around which our solar system revolves. Our sun is lost in the glare - if viewed from another galaxy like the Andromeda, and vice-versa a single star there would be indistinguishable to us from here. We will likewise behold that considering that there could be as many as two trillion Milky Way or Andromeda galaxies out there, we are in a  position no different from that of the bacterium.

Yes, we will try to argue for the old man even if only for this and only this reason. If we are not here to behold it, to ponder it, to be awed by it, what is the universe? The observable universe is what it is because we are here to observe it. That is according to the anthropocentric principle which, put another way, says that if it were not for us to be aware of it, the universe does not have any meaning at all. And there lies the conundrum. Let's hold that thought.

"The human mind will not be confined to any limits". 

----- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The mind has in its employ a brain that is capable of making a number of possible connections that exceeds the number of atoms in the entire universe. 

"The human brain has a huge number of synapses. Each of the 10 to the 11th power (one hundred billion) neurons has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. It has been estimated that the brain of a three-year-old child has about 10 to the 15th power synapses (1 quadrillion).

The number of possible connections and permutations are maddeningly staggering. Behold the brain, behold the mind.

An IBM computer named Deep Blue beat a reigning world chess champion in 1997, besting chess Grand Master Gary Kasparov. What is not widely known is that the computer was not some laptop sitting in front of its opponent. Its "brain" was an array of several small main frame computers next door in a temperature-controlled room and a support staff of several humans. Additionally, Deep Blue had no idea what it felt like to win. A year earlier, in 1996, Kasparov actually beat it. But did it care? No. Its handlers did, so they went back to the drawing board and pump up more computing power into it. Still Deep Blue cared less when it won the following year. It was the people behind it that celebrated afterwards. Deep Blue merely went into deep sleep once it was unplugged. I used to play chess a lot (minor club level) while in college so I take small delight from knowing that Deep Blue was incapable of the ecstasy from victory over a human.

That is not the only difference between the human mind and a mindless computer, despite the fact that we sometimes treat it like it has a mind. We cuss at it, we shower it with praise when it found us a cheap air fare, a great deal on hotels, a bargain gizmo or, yes, another computer.  Actually, it was not even slightly heart broken when we used it to find a newer version of it. And cheaper. With more power. Imagine that. I am using a computer to criticize its own kind but it doesn't care.

Now let's talk about what's in here (I am pointing to my head). 

Books, research papers, articles, symposiums, conventions - over a long history of attempts by psychiatrists, anthropologists, neurosurgeons, etc. - have come short of understanding the human mind. What we lack in physical abilities compared to much stronger, faster, more agile species we more than make up for with a powerful brain. However, brain power was not all there was to make us a superior creature. Pure intelligence alone would have taken us only so far. It gave us the ability to fashion tools and weapons and understanding climate and seasons that allowed us to tame the environment that led to settling down in place - a pivotal switch from hunting and gathering to farming that led to agriculture. Agriculture gave us permanent societies which was the key to the development of civilization. There was something more beyond brain power. 

Civilization is what makes us uniquely "human". Ants and termite colonies are superbly unparalleled by any human societies when it came to effective organization, division of labor, chain of command, and dogged determination to survive. These micro-creatures outlived the dinosaurs and innumerable species over millions of years but they are incapable of developing a civilization. Here we are, barely a hundred thousand year old species, although civilization is believed to have  begun just a mere 8,000 years ago. How did we separate ourselves from the rest of the living things?

Last September Scientific American dedicated a special issue: "The Science of Being Human". Part 1 was "Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness - The Hardest Problem". Part 2 was "How We Learned to put Our Fate in one Another's Hands - The Origins of Morality". 

If there is only one thing to say about everything that was written there, it is this: The jury is still out. As it had been for centuries since the time we began to think and ponder the answers to all that are related to the questions about the human mind. There were a lot of answers on the  physiology of the brain but a lot more were actually conjectures, guesses, and theories sprinkled over a platter much too diluted by more questions.

Is consciousness an illusion created by the brain? What sets the mind apart from the physical brain? 

This is what we know. Or, at least what we think we know. We have a powerful mind generally accepted as the seat of human emotions, the cradle of morality, the creator and admirer of the arts, the source of empathy, altruism and the flint stone of language and inventions, and many more that sets us apart from all the other creatures of the earth.

Here is something to tickle your mind which, just to remind the reader, is the aim of much of the musings I write here - "to ponder with me some of the un-ponderable and the whimsical and lightly thought provoking issues" that you may not have thought about.

Ponder for a moment the Book of Genesis version and the cosmological/anthropological story of the universe. The age of the universe is generally accepted to be about 13+ billion years. Fossil evidence showed anthropologists that bipedal locomotion - the ability to walk upright - for the early human-like creatures came around 1.9 million years ago. But longer legs, total upright posture and gait suitable for life 100% on land (abandoning the trees completely) and the development of communication beyond grunts and bodily gestures did not come about until 100,000 years ago when communities started to form. Modern languages, family and closer social bonds emerged just 8,000 years ago. Now, we read and we know it was not until the 26th verse, Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis when God "created man and woman", which roughly reflects the ascendance of the modern human species in natural history versions. 


Here is the biggest argument. Even among those who agree that the Biblical timeline and fossil records are in accord, the debate had always been about why did God wait so long to create man and woman. We don't want to go there. In the greater scheme of things we are still the amoeba trying to contemplate the whole lake.

“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 


Reading the above quote carefully we note that the Creator had set limits. The scripture unequivocally set our position in the hierarchy - ruling over all of earth's creatures but not one step higher than that. Not even to rule over other humans. Let's leave it at that, or leave it to the politicians, despots and miscreants, etc.

"The mind. A beautiful servant. A dangerous master."

----- Anonymous

The quote covers everything. When we have control over our mind, it is capable of enabling us do a lot of things. Just think, it will take us backwards and forward in time for beautiful memories to reminisce and cherish; and to dream of a future full of promise and hope. It took us to compose beautiful melodies, write poems and books and speak spiritually and socially inspiring speeches and create  ground breaking inventions, etc.. Those and many other innumerable accomplishment of the minds were brought about when we had control of it as to harness it for good. Then the bad flip side of it is when we let it control us. And, most tragically is when one mind is allowed to control other minds. Think Nazi Germany and every totalitarian and despotic rulers before and after it. How is it that the mind is able to lead us to be sympathetic, altruistic, compassionate to others but it is also capable of making us envious, hateful and covetous?

Those are just a handful. The mind shall forever be  a mystery and perhaps one day we will indeed get some answers. It will be some answers but not for everything. Even the question about whether such a time will come is unanswerable because, contrary to the quote earlier (above) from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, our minds have been limited  - perhaps - for our own good.

One that we are or should be thankful for is our ability to express gratitude. That is one definition of humanity we can all acknowledge.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!