Survival of the Laziest

From the Science Daily:

Date: August 22, 2018
Source: University of Kansas
Summary: A new large-data study of bivalves and gastropods in the Atlantic Ocean suggests laziness might be a fruitful strategy for survival of individuals, species and even communities of species.

"The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a research team based at the University of Kansas".

From that same news page, was a quote below:

"If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement, fear not".

"Maybe in the long term the best evolutionary strategy for animals is to be lassitudinous and sluggish -- the lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive," Lieberman said. "Instead of 'survival of the fittest,' maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is 'survival of the laziest' or at least 'survival of the sluggish."

I can't help copying those quotes because, for one thing, we now know there is such a word as, "lassitudinous" (lacking in energy or a case of mental inertness).

Taxpayers via government grants actually paid good money for this study!

Let's give these scientists the benefit of the doubt, shall we? I'm sure it requires dedication and lots of waking hours to study clams and oysters.  However, upon reading the study, I formed my own conclusions. While this is not  part of the study - purely a case of pure unadulterated speculation on my part - I conclude that we are the enablers of laziness among these gastropods, which is the reason for their eternal survival  in the modern era. Granted, they did make it for eons and eons of time to get here, but we now have sealed the deal for their survival. Let me explain.

Take the oysters. A pearl is produced because some debris, like sand or very tiny piece of rock gets lodged into the oyster's mantle (that's the part that produces nacre that makes the oyster's shell). The foreign debris acts as an irritant and the mantle keeps producing nacre that envelopes the irritant, but it keeps doing that for its entire life. All of this nacre was wasted when it could have been used to build up its shell. The oyster was too lazy to put an effort to remove the irritant in the first place. It took the easy way out. Or, did it? The oyster has a plan. All the entire species had to do was make sure that every now and then one of them produces a pearl for the benefit of the pearl divers. That is the con game they have successfully perpetrated.  Oysters spawn to reproduce and they do it in huge numbers to insure that a handful of larvae survive predation and other natural erasers of life. Humans begun cultivating and culturing pearl farms. Immediately, oysters don't have to worry about extinction because more of their larvae not only survive, they are being cared for. Their survival is assured by the clamor for pearls and for the insatiable appetite for oysters on a half shell. One can argue that being served with slices of lemon by the dozens at some swanky restaurant is not exactly a survival strategy.  For the species, it is. By the way, oysters get to reach full maturity before being harvested, beyond which their demise will naturally occur anyhow. 

We can also say the same thing with cattle. As you watch them appear like statues at a distance over lush green pastures, think of their cousins' annual 2,000-mile-round-trip migration back and forth across the Serengeti, where thousands of them are sacrificed to crocodiles, lions and hyenas, so that the entire species can survive.  Domesticated cattle are free to eat without fear of predators, they get free health care, and their prenatal supervision by veterinarians are top notch. Again, it is about the species surviving, because we need them more than they need us. But the biggest con game is the one successfully put on by cats and dogs. (in the first world, at least). More so with cats. At least, dogs do show unabashed fondness for their masters (more rationally, their feeders). Cats, if you do notice, don't even pretend. That is just simply so beneath their nature to wag their tails and get so excited over every little thing.

I admit I went too far there.  I love dogs and I admire cats. It's not their fault but ours. But trust me, we did not domesticate them. They domesticated themselves so we can care for them - all for the survival of their species.

Don't take everything I said seriously because I don't have a doctorate in biology or animal husbandry.

But I observe. The laboratory is our backyard. Everyday, I observe true survival events happening.  I submit a photo essay which were all taken from our backyard - not exactly the Amazon rain forest but creatures do their thing every day whether we are there or not. The captions tell the story.

This magnificent raptor feels at home in the neighborhood, the roof over our garage or the rim of the trashcan.  It is up to something.

I have, of course, become one of millions of enablers in backyards and parks across the country. These sparrows enjoy like very few do - they eat white grains of rice (raw or cooked).These birds had trained me well. They would actually  come to the window sill and look in, wondering why their feeder is empty. They know how to make you feel guilty.

 They have also develop a taste for stale bread. I should be guilty of that as well, but no reports to PETA, please.

Where else can they find food where nearby is an oasis-relief from the Texas hot summer.  This bird knows just how to dip its entire head and live to chirp its story. Two hapless ones did not do so well in the past. One drowned, another I was able to rescue in time. It is supposed to be survival of the fittest but I am guilty as charged with tinkering with nature, again.

But these sparrows cannot be too careful. They are weary, they are watchful because ...

This hawk is after the careless sparrow caught unaware. The sparrows have a great exit though. They go into the interior of the nearby bush, leaving the hawk frustrated and disappointed.

But this predator is persistent .

I saw it go after squirrels too but I did not witness one successful hunt, but I know it must make a good living because it had been around for much of the year now. So, even with a low success rate, it is surviving with local prey, for sure.

These guys here used to be, I'm told, migratory fowls. It is obvious now that they they've decided to stake permanent roots . Mom and dad birds are raising their two ducklings (shouldn't there be more?) somewhere in between our house and the next door neighbor's. They were weary but I got close enough to take the pictures.

Not far from where the birds are feasting (note the potted pineapple plant in the earlier photo), one creature first contemplated, then ...

Caught in the act !

I elevated those pots later, but it discovered there were more on the ground. A small plot of pineapple plants that took me several cuttings from fresh pineapple were laid to waste.

But what can I say ... I too got suckered into liking this lovable creature. Of course, that is not without manipulation by this guy, by allowing me to get closer for this photo.  With that face, how can we get mad?

These creatures are surviving for not being lazy. They work hard but they are, in a way, outsmarting us by targeting the softest of our softest parts - our love and fascination for wildlife and they know that in our backyards they are safe and well fed.

HYDROCARBON and why TANSTAAFL

In my first of two semesters of chemistry, that was part of an engineering curriculum decades ago, the word hydrocarbon, like all compound molecules, evoked a sense of wonder at how everyday items worked, how they were put together, and where they all came from.  At the chemistry level, hydrocarbon was not the Darth Vader of materials - far from the super-villain that it is portrayed today, remotely the effigy that environmentalists would like to string up as a protest banner against much of what is wrong in the world. To be fair, hydrocarbon is not the exact word used. It is oil, coal, gasoline, plastics, etc - all within the hydrocarbon family.

Chemistry was not an easy course for those pursuing majors other than chemistry or chemical engineering. Even premed students struggled. I struggled but how I wish I was then able to look at chemistry the way I view it now. The hours and hours laboring over electron valences and the complexities of the formation of chemical bonds, etc. could have been a little more engaging or even fun.

Here's how carbon and hydrogen look to me now. If the universe were a dance hall, carbon and hydrogen are like bachelors and bachelorettes who at first gaze and longing eye contact could not peel away from the sudden and unstoppable embrace that follows. They connect right away as if they were meant for each other, soul mates to the nth degree even though they were not social equals. Hydrogen is needy with a bare minimum of assets to speak of: one proton and one electron, a very meager existence, indeed. Carbon is easily upper middle class with assets of 6 protons, 6 neutrons and 6 electrons. There was only one problem.

Carbon could not keep a monogamous relationship. The bare minimum it would settle for is to be with at least four hydrogen atoms, if it were to enter into one basic union. That tight embrace - one carbon and a concubine of  four hydrogen atoms - turns into  a chemical class called methane. As a social class they are known and organized as members of a larger group called hydrocarbons.

Such a relationship, however, is not a stable one. In the company of other methane, the union is fine. But, once they meet up and socialize with another element - oxygen - it would only take a tiny spark for the relationship to be explosive.

The combustion and release of energy broke up the union of the elements with predictable results. Some are good, others not so good. Energy is produced which is good; pairs of hydrogen atoms eloping with one oxygen harmlessly become water vapor; but then one carbon hooking up with one oxygen is not so good because enough of them can wander about to become carbon monoxide on a mission to do mischief; or if one carbon goes on its polygamous bent and connect with two oxygen atoms, they take on an identity we know so well as carbon dioxide. The case of a broken union, the dissolution of a relationship would end up with results that often become a problem. Greenhouse gases, pollutants and smog are all because a chemical marriage is broken up. And thus begun the uneasy and often unrelenting hatred for these chemical classes  of compounds we come to regard as abhorrently bad stuff for the environment. By the way, carbon too can form gangs with other carbons, snag a lot of hydrogen atoms, along the way.  They become the heavier molecules of diesel, gasoline, kerosene, grease, and more. The heavier the molecules the more they resemble chain gangs of hydrocarbons, and when they're broken up, the mess they create is equally complex.

But then this takes us to a quote with an acronym, "TANSTAAFL" or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". 

The expression was supposedly about salons in the Old West offering free lunch to customers who ordered at least one drink. The meals were so salty that somehow induced customers to order more drinks than they originally intended had there been no free lunch. A more academic application to the cliche is touched on below:

"The phrase and the acronym are central to Robert Heinlein's 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which helped popularize it. The free-market economist Milton Friedman also popularized the phrase by using it as the title of a 1975 book, and it is used in economics literature to describe opportunity cost. Campbell McConnell writes that the idea is "at the core of economics".

Hydrogen and carbon - the two most abundant elements in the entire universe - are the raw materials, the main ingredients, of the physical world. In fact, life as we know it would be impossible without those two elements. Life could not have begun, could not have flourished, could not have been so diverse, if not for these two.

This is not to defend oil and plastics but to offer a different perspective so that perhaps we could come up with a way to deal with them in some rational way that will actually work.  Let's be honest. We've benefited from the family of hydrocarbons for over two centuries now and we're waking up to the realization that, like a lot of things we use all around us and what society had provided for us, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch". It is truer more often than not.

Let's take a quick staccato trip of backward steps. Hydrogen and carbon had been around for billions of years. They're why we have trees and rain forests and kelp and algae, etc.

Both elements survived in millions of years of layers upon layers of decaying vegetation only to re-form and reemerged as compounds of hydrocarbons - bound together still. It was because of them that we saved the whales from extinction when we no longer needed to boil their blubber to make oil for our lamps and lubricants for our machinery and tools.  We saved trees and forests when we no longer needed them to heat our homes or run our rail cars. We shrunk the world around us when planes and cars and ocean liners run on hydrocarbon fuels. We made light and durable materials out of them to manufacture all kinds products for our use and convenience. Hydrocarbon survived every transformation they were put through because, well, the universe is practically made of them. They are 99% of the physical universe. Our sun and every star (all trillions of them) are all made of pure hydrogen and carbon takes over at the end of every star's life when hydrogen runs out, then compacted by gravity into heavier elements that included carbon, iron, etc. The rest of the chemical elements we see and use today were at one time in the belly of stars, as hydrogen. Every molecule of gold, silver, titanium, pizza and lasagna, t-bone steak, us, and every living thing, all at one time existed as a hydrogen atom. We are carbon based creature, carbohydrates sustain us, proteins that build our muscles are mostly carbon and hydrogen, etc.

So, we just have to manage hydrocarbon at every level of its existence, at its every transformation and configuration, because, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch".

If there is just one thing we can learn from this: Long after we're all gone, when the solar system  no longer exists, when much of the universe had expanded itself wide and sparse into a density of just a handful of stuff per cubic mile, the family of hydrocarbons will still be around.

The Possibilities of the Impossible

Icarus  (IK-uh-rus)

"Son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. Daedalus had been imprisoned by King Minos of Crete within the walls of his own invention, the Labyrinth. But the great craftsman's genius would not suffer captivity. He made two pairs of wings by adhering feathers to a wooden frame with wax. Giving one pair to his son, he cautioned him that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became ecstatic with the ability to fly and forgot his father's warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea".  

It is an intriguing story, given the era it was handed down from generation to generation. It first surfaced between 30-60 B.C.  Evidently, no written records were kept, let alone the identity of authorship, which is the reason for the wide estimate of the time of origin but had since evoked all kinds of interpretations.. The orally told and re-told story at the time when human capabilities were primarily measured in running the fastest or paddling the fastest boats to get across waters, human flight was farthest from any realm of possibilities, yet, there it was - the dream to fly.

This myth could very well have been one of the many obscure ones, if not totally ignored in today's short-attention-span generation,  except that this month (2018) the world just witnessed the launching of NASA's Parker Solar Probe - a spacecraft that is intentionally heading towards the sun. It will also be the fastest man-made craft ever, so that by the time it gets there it will have attained the speed that would cover the the distance from Los Angeles, CA to New York in 20 seconds (a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour). Now, although sunlight reaches us 8 minutes after it leaves the sun, the probe won't reach the sun until 2024. But, unlike the Icarus wings the probe will withstand the sun's extreme heat long enough to study it, while circling within less than 4 million miles.

Icarus had all kinds of allegorical lessons, even a cautionary tale about human hubris, unfettered ambitions, or man's proclivity to overdo certain things. It also symbolizes human desires to aim for the impossible.

Every technology we see today were once impossible, or so most people thought at the time it was conceived. And everything was at first someone's dream, wishful thinking, even mere folly of thought. Some were borne out of challenges posed by need or dare. Today it is almost as if anything anyone can think of is merely a case of "it's a matter of time". But, is it?

Flight always fascinated humanity and the dream of flying may have begun as early as several centuries before the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Technology building upon technology was and still is such a powerful engine of progressive development that in sixty-six years after the first powered flight that took a mere 120 feet, humanity had landed on the moon. Those who may yet have to grasp the meaning of exponential path, grab on to that example.

From my previous musing, "First We Dream" (11/7/2016), I noted that dreams are "what makes us human. First we dream. Then we go after it.  Everything we have today – the discovery of the new world, birth of nations, modern farming, mass production, etc. all took seed and germinated from a dream by one person or a group of people who share the same dream".

However, many of the dreamers were not necessarily scientists and inventors. Men and women science fiction writers wrote the bulk of predictions - or the inspirations - that powerfully influenced the paths that inventors and engineers took to get us where we are today.

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946), or more popularly known as H.G. Wells was one prolific prognosticator of things to come. His life straddled two centuries, the 19th and 20th, during which and thereafter up through this century, many of what he predicted became true. The passage below from one of his novels eerily foresaw emails or phone messaging, long before it was even a glimmer.

“A message is sent to the station of the district in which the recipient is known to be, and there it waits until he chooses to tap his accumulated messages. And any that one wishes to repeat can be repeated. Then he talks back to the senders and dispatches any other messages he wishes. The transmission is wireless.”

Then he went on to  suggest genetic engineering in "The Island of Dr. Moreau".

In "The Time Machine" that was published in 1895 he wrote about the atomic bomb and the nuclear war that wiped out almost the entire earth's population. 1895 was far too early to ponder the idea behind splitting the atom to release such cataclysmic energy from a small mass. But nothing can be so terrifying among his visions than what was in the passage below, long before we feared about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists.

“Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionizing the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city,” he wrote.

Should we be worried? Yes, but perhaps not just from the last paragraph, because H.G. Wells had other darker visions - darker than the errant use of technology. You see, H.G. Wells was an avowed socialist and he had visions of a Utopian society where he idealized a political system embraced by socialists then and now. 

In his novel, "A Modern Utopia", he took his vision of a world government that had one currency, customs and laws, abolishment of personal properties because everything was owned and provided for by the government, etc. He put a lot of meat to his idealized visions - a pun is intended here because in his Utopia meat is banned! Such wishful thoughts are not lost to those who today embrace the legislation against all kinds of evil caused by plastic straws, gas powered vehicles, consumption of sugared drinks, animal fur, etc. H.G. Wells was disappointed up to the day he died that not much of his Utopian dreams came to be. He predicted and campaigned for the creation of the UN and if he lived to see the European Union, the concept would have pleased him dearly.

The possibilities of what then might have been considered impossible longings by someone whose many predictions came to pass is indeed worrisome if for one thing and only one thing - the rise of socialism as a platform from a portion of mainstream politicians and social circles. That is and should be cause for worry. The voices are getting louder, the revived ideology that used to be relegated to the fringes of liberal academia is taking on a larger stage. The momentum continues even after a failed presidential run of an improbable but persistent candidate who is still pressing hard to be heard; a rising young star in Congress; and the socialist pundits with ever growing bullhorns are signs of a growing ideology or a resurrected one that used to have become extinct decades ago but getting a new image and acceptance.

That is one possibility we cannot ignore or take for granted. Everyone is emboldened.  After all, one such impossibility occurred in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, that is catalyzing those who oppose and are still badly hurt by such an unprecedented performance by someone counted  out early in the campaign by almost all pundits, experts and political geniuses who were caught off guard in the early morning hours of Nov. 9, 2016.

Socialism, for it to have an impact in the U.S. needs to be accepted as a viable alternative to the Republic and when it does, H.G. Wells will have sealed his reputation as an unerring predictor of world events. Or, at least his dream of one will have been made true.

I enjoyed H. G. Wells in high school and his fascinating novels took my breath away as a teenager but he was flat wrong on socialism. Socialism, like democracy, was an experiment touted by many then and now as a viable social and political system. Unlike democracy, many socialist experiments in a variety of forms, had failed time and time again. Yet, leaders from the past, today, and many more in the future had tried and will keep trying. It will still not work.

Finally, a quote from Ronald Reagan:

“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.”

It's a Small World After All

From the extremely large and now we go to the infinitely small. 

The very small is just as unfathomable as a limitless universe. You would think that looking at something up close, right under our noses, would be much easier to study and draw conclusions from. Far from it. In fact, the limits of how small is small would be almost philosophically equidistant from knowing for sure the limits of the very large if the center point is that of what we know today. But don't pay attention to that. Suffice it to say that we are far from knowing everything about what's going in the world smaller than atoms as the ones larger than our solar system.

At some point, no instrument will let us see all the way to the limits of the universe nor would the most powerful microscope enable us to see the very, very small. But, what we may lack in measuring tools is more than made up for with our limitless imagination.

What is amazing though is that more often than not, what begun as imaginary conjectures, even guesses, were proven true later with physical measurements. Not all, but even in failing to prove some of the theories, it sometimes led us to ones that gave us more knowledge that otherwise we would not have found.

400 B.C. in Greece, the ancient philosopher Democritus, was first to define the smallest of the small he could think of. He declared that 'atomos' - the uncuttable - was the smallest component of matter. You see, people then wondered what made up a grain of sand. Surely, one grain was made up of even much finer things. So 'Atomos', the atom had to be the smallest particle and nothing else can be smaller.  That was true for centuries that followed. There was not much debate because there was nothing to see, except from the point of view of that Greek philosopher.

For centuries since after Democritus, and Greece was past its glory days, and Rome's grandeur ended in the rubble of two extinct empires, the atom was still "uncuttable" and indivisible. Then the microscope was invented. We had our first glimpse of what the protozoa and amoeba look like. Those and the bacteria became the smallest living things. Still no atom sighting. It was a few more centuries later when the first electron tunneling microscope was invented when an atom or a group of atoms were viewed for the first time. It was not as everybody, including scientists, imagined.

In case you haven't noticed, electron was mentioned two sentences ago. Suddenly, the atom is no longer that small and it can be 'cut' into smaller parts.  'Cut' is not really how to describe it. Let's just say that now the atom has smaller components still. But we can't see them. But we can now imagine that the atom has a center called a nucleus and inside it  are protons and neutrons. Just outside the nucleus are electrons spinning around. We're simplifying everything here but let's leave it at that.  First, how small are we talking about. Well, let's shrink ourselves down in size while magnifying the atom like blowing up a balloon. We're now sitting next to a basketball that is the nucleus of the atom. Inside the nucleus is, say, a proton the size of a tennis ball. An electron would be a grain of sand but it's farther out almost 10 miles away. That's about as well as we can imagine how small is small. And how far distant the electron is from its nucleus. And the thing is, there are yet smaller things that make up the electron.

As described, an atom with one proton and one electron, is what we now know as a single element of hydrogen. It is the most elementary and the most abundant, by as much as a quintillion fold, of all elements in the universe. And, from that single element, we have just identified the building block of the physical world. But the hydrogen atom can still be 'broken down' into far smaller units. If the atom was an orange, we can now break it further down to its seeds, pulp and the outer rind. Furthermore, the electron is in fact made of even finer little parts. What? You may ask.

How did scientists know what these parts were? What they do can only be explained in an analogy.  Imagine two high powered race cars on the Indy Race track, running at full speeds exceeding 250 mph in opposite direction and colliding head on. After the smash up the parts from the debris, are identified individually. If there was combustion, the energy expended can be measured, including what can be attributed to the loss of the parts as the source of the energy (as when firewood is reduced to ember, the material loss contributed to the production of fire and smoke). That's what happens at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. It collides heavy protons traveling opposite each other at near the speed of light and the collision is recorded with special cameras and radiation detectors.

Here's the thing though. The debris, known as sub-atomic particles, at the LHC don't linger for very long. Actually, they exist only for the briefest of an instant. Whatever or however you can imagine as the briefest moment of time, these sub-atomic particles live as if they never existed. Nothing can be briefer than that. Don't give yourself a headache. What the scientists see in those detectors are akin to ghostly apparitions. And that's what they are. They appear quickly and they make a quick transition into something else. 

If you think that is strange, let's try this analogy. Boil a pot of water until every drop had evaporated. First they turn into steam and then as water vapor that we could no longer see. They're all over your kitchen. If we let the temperature cool down, and assuming your kitchen is hermetically sealed, soon you will see water droplets or condensation all over. The heat put out by the stove energized the water, turning it into steam and water vapor became invisible. The moment the water vapor loses energy, it turned itself into water again. And with that, you've just understood the law of conservation of energy - the energy from the stove to the water, and to steam, dissipated to the entire area of the kitchen. Keep this in mind because a few paragraphs down, you will see what this means.

Everything we can see and touch and feel (a cool breeze or a waft of warm moist air) and taste and smell - in other words, the entire universe - was all at one time in one infinitely small bundle of pure energy and infinitely hot. Do not be too alarmed by this radical view. It was not too alarming when we first encountered the same description from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

The sudden explosion that modern cosmology describes as The Big Bang is similarly noted in Genesis with the same instantaneity.  It is almost the same description for both except for the divine command from a Creator who willed it, "Let there be light". Even those who take the Genesis verses as allegories, they do believe that the universe was created from out of nothing.  How different is the Big Bang Theory - the sudden explosion from a single point - from "let there be light'? If one were to rewrite the Genesis verses, one might as well change the order and make verse 3, the very first verse. Let there be light is as instantaneous as the theoretical beginning of the universe, as explained by modern cosmology. The only difference is that in Genesis, the Creator willed the explosion of light to happen; whereas, in cosmology, the whole thing just happened - scientists not worrying at all as to why. We can never know or read the mind of God, as Stephen Hawking wishfully longed, but let's be satisfied that we were given the mind to get to a feeble understanding of God's creation.

Arguably, scientists and theologians actually do have available to them a common ground from which their views are not so much different as they are parallel to each other, that is, where the origin of the universe is concerned. The Big Bang theory occurred as instantly as "Let there be Light". Having said that, what Genesis lacked in details, cosmology had filled in the minute step-by-step incremental moments. As a side note, the theory of the sudden explosion from which the universe came from was vehemently opposed by scientists when it first came out.  The very idea of a sudden origin was looked upon as supporting the creation as described in Genesis. Fred Hoyle, a prominent British astronomer in the 60's, so maligned the whole idea that he jokingly called the theory the big bang. The phrase stuck and so it is what scientists call it even today, although with much more scholarly respect and acknowledgement that their predecessors were wrong.

As simply as we can put it, matter, as we know it today, is nothing more than condensed energy. We are not too far off. It was part of what condensed from that explosive bright light in an instant of creation. But in one hundred thousandth of a second after the explosion, protons, neutrons and other sub-atomic particles formed. Don't bother about nomenclature here because they're not that important.  However, since I mentioned earlier that electrons are made up of still smaller stuff, then let's introduce the made-up word that scientists use to call them - quarks! And because there are several types, scientists this time used common words to described each one, i.e., strange, charm, up, down, top and bottom quarks. No reason for those names, except as a sort of ID and that each name has nothing to do with how they behave. There are other terms but suffice it to say that there are smaller stuff that make up the smallest stuff we can think of.

Present day cosmologists believe that one hundred seconds after the big bang, hydrogen and helium and other lighter elements formed. For three hundred thousand years after that, the condensed matter filled the entire space* that was there and the growing cosmos became dark. That's what scientists believe. Let's go back to Genesis 1 verse 2, Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. ( *It is critical to mention here that space was simultaneously being created as the universe was expanding).

Soon after 300,000 years as space kept expanding, as  the elements kept spreading as well, the universe became transparent, which could mean, "Let there be light", as well. It was a billion years later when stars and galaxies formed.

In a nutshell, the universe we know today came from the smallest of the small that we can ever imagine, and everything we touched today is made up of rally small stuff. 

We all should be in awe of the vastness of the universe and if we ever have any doubt that the creation occurred, think of the small ghostly particles that make up everything, because they could very well be what the Book of Genesis referred to as, "The Spirit of God".

700 Million Trillion

No, that's not the trade deficit. Not even the budget deficit. Big numbers like these have a way of making other numbers look small. Or, feels small. It used to be that more than ten - what's in people's fingers - was a big number.  Then folks learned to count their toes as well.  So twenty was the new large number.  Anything over that was uncountable.

As soon as our ancestors learned to realize that there really are numbers too big to ponder or to grapple with their minds, new words started to get created. Today, actual words to describe plenty, a lot, huge, etc. are substantially way too many to enumerate here. It even has come to the point when words that are too long has a label - "Sesquipedalian". And so the very idea of extreme wordiness, words on steroids, is Sesquipedalian loquaciousness. I'll stop there because I have your attention now.

Let's start small again. Many countless moons ago (remember, folks used to only know the phases of the moon in addition to sunrise and sunset as a gauge for the passing of time), people thought the fields they could see, the horizon from the seashore were limits to where they could go. Once they realized that other people lived from far away, what were beyond the mountains changed their views on what was big. The earth was much bigger still.

Then Galileo showed the world that a handful of what looked like stars in the heavens were planets, or wanderers of the heavens. The solar system was big. Then our sun, around which the wanderers revolved around, was just one of the "thousands of stars" up there, and not a very big one either. The sun was average. Actually, smaller than average. Early on, people even thought the earth was the center of the universe ('universe' - very loosely defined, as it were). Then followed a revelation that a million earths could fit within the sun.  Stars became too numerous to count as telescopes got bigger. The sun assumed a tiny spot on a nondescript location - now too small because on a dark night a milky band of hazy light was filled with 'millions' of stars, in some of them will fit a million suns - per star. That band of swirling light and gas is the Milky Way Galaxy - gaining the title of the big kahuna. It was our universe for over centuries of awe and profound contemplation. It was a world in a steady state of orderly existence. We gazed at the night sky for the quiet comfort it gave us when everything else seemed chaotic in our own little patch. Even Albert Einstein thought that was all the world there was.

One cloudless night on Mt. Palomar an eccentric astronomer, named Edwin Hubble, peering through the eye piece of one of the biggest telescopes then, saw that those hazy patches of light were not twinkling stars at all. They were individual galaxies, believed then to have millions of stars in them. The Large Magellanic cloud that ancient seafarers used as a marker in the night sky was a galaxy, again with millions of 'stars' (later found to have an estimated 30 billion stars in it). When Hubble had Einstein looked into the eyepiece, the brilliant physicist, for the first time, realized he had been wrong - one of a few times that he was, as he came to realize. Hubble would reveal that those other galaxies were moving away from each other at tremendous speeds in all directions, like a flock of starlings spooked by a ground snake.

The Hubble Space Telescope today tells us that those millions of stars per galaxy are too small a number.  The Milky Way alone may have as many as two hundred billion stars (with a B). Its nearest neighboring galaxy, The Andromeda, has a few hundred billion more stars, or could have a trillion stars. That is mind blowing. But wait ...

Now, we're told there could be as many as Two Trillion galaxies in the observable universe.  Two trillion Milky Ways and Andromeda's!

As a result, there could be as many as 700 million trillion terrestrial planets! That's not counting gaseous planets, like Jupiter or Neptune. Terrestrial, as in rocky planets. The odds that just a handful of them could harbor some kind of life, similar to or different from ours, is extremely a very high probability.

As humanity begins to look more seriously about its place in the scheme of things, it had to grapple with a new measure of humility. To mean nothing in a world of over six billion people is one thing, but for each of us to become invisibly less than nothingness, is another. To be humble in that sense means to be profoundly amoebic of pride or grandeur.

What has Seguey have to say? Remember it - the extra terrestrial being in our midst? It lived as an amoeba at one time, it had been around for 500 years as a self-aware being and its origin is from somewhere in a far distant point in the cosmos. Here's what it says,

When humans think of an observable universe, they must also think that there is something beyond what is observable. There has to be. I cannot know for sure but what I know is that there cannot be a boundary. Every time I think of a boundary, no matter how far it is from where I am, I still have to wonder about what is there then, past the edge of the boundary. And beyond it. We cannot say nothing. The moment we do that, we have to ask this: Why doesn't anything from where there is something, right at the edge, not spill over into where there is nothing? And we need to think about what is keeping everything together that is in the confines of the "observable" universe, keeping it in place as a distinct entity from where there is nothing.

Seguey is not much help. We know that asking these questions puts us in a position of total helplessness. When we think large of ourselves, or when someone belittles us, the futility of such a behavior is naturally stupid. But wait! Here's more from Seguey.

If we, as citizens of the universe, if you will, are bestowed with a mind and heart to believe that somewhere up there or right in our midst, right where we are, in the stifling chaos of disorder and helplessness, is a being so powerful and limitless in capacity, as to pay attention to each and everyone of us ... and sometimes even answers our question or pleadings for help, then there lies the simplest answer to a complex mystery of all. For each of us to have the capacity to think that, to believe and to have faith in such a Being, it is the greatest source of awe and wonder. And why do we have a choice to think that? Well, to have that choice, we're given the greatest gift of all - the freedom to guide and determine the path to our destiny.