Recycling The Universe

32 years ago, in 1987, was the infamous story of the New York garbage barge - the MOBRO 4000. The town of Islip, New York had run out of landfill area. One enterprising idea was hatched. Load the garbage on a barge and ship it to a North Carolina landfill. 3000 tons of trash were loaded as a "trial run". However, the media and the people of North Carolina got wind of it. Fearing that the trash had hospital waste in it (proven not to be true later), the state refused. The barge was diverted to as far south as Louisiana, then to Mexico, whose navy threatened the barge with artillery. Belize refused it as well. The barge, now internationally the most watched garbage carrier, clearly a phenomenal precursor to reality shows long before such a concept was even a TV idea, continued to find a home for its cargo. Ultimately, it went back to where it came from where the entire trash was incinerated. That barge incident prompted all kinds of laws and regulation on trash disposal. Green Peace, ever mindful of whatever publicity stunt they can get, draped  across the barge a white banner that said, "Next time ... Try Recycling".

I got to thinking one morning as I was pulling the draw strings on the plastic bag of recycled items for the weekly pick up/collection by the local waste management company. Regular trash is collected twice a week. However, on Fridays, two different trucks come: one to collect trash and the other for recycled items. It shows that more trash than recycled items are put out. Or, maybe it is simply for the convenience and well being of households that would rather have standard trash that begin to decompose (and stink) picked up twice more frequently than odor-free and non-decomposing recycled items. We do ours only once weekly - on Fridays - because the composting bin takes a good chunk of the trash - banana peels, fruit and vegetable scraps, etc.

Well and good. Folks feel good to play a role in recycling and composting. Twice weekly, trash disappears at the curb - out of sight, out of mind as soon as the garbage trucks leave. The urban American household goes through this routine every week. Small trash cans from room to room, bathrooms and kitchen, are emptied into a bigger trash can in the back of the house or garage. Once or twice weekly the big trash can/s make a short journey to the curb. By late afternoon, early evening, sometimes the following morning, the trash can/s are trekked back to where they were and the weekly cycle begins again.

This is repeated across the country and in all of the developed "first world" around the globe. The third world countries do their best to deal with it. But the problem is not so trivial, however. Far from it. 

Today, New York (the entire state) gets rid of 7 MOBRO barge worth of compacted garbage everyday. They are trucked hundreds of miles into landfills in Pennsylvania, Virginia, etc. It is a huge business, an enterprise that used to be part of the mob's money making scheme. It is all legit now.  

Then, just recently as a month ago, we have the Canada - Philippines garbage dispute. In 2013-2014 Vancouver shipped 103 shipping-containers worth of supposedly recyclable plastics. It turned out it had household waste in them. It is waiting to be settled.

Landfill. It is today deemed the only "ideal" solution. One New Jersey landfill is now a golf course. Incineration is another while a not so well known idea that is catching on is recovering methane gas from decomposing trash from landfills. It actually works.

The question is this. Do we ever really get rid of anything? Does anything really disappear into nothingness? No. The universe does not allow it. 

The bottom line. Nothing disappears. Tons and tons of plastic that people thought they got rid of by throwing them away are in the oceans, on the beaches, in stomachs of fish, whales and birds. They are on the streets, subway cars, railroad tracks, even on less traveled roads, even in national parks. Outer space is not immune either. Circling around the globe today are space junk traveling at several miles per second, thousands of feet above the atmosphere - leftover material from countless space launches from since more than half a century ago and still going on today.

If you picked it up (no pun intended) from the previous musing I have fervent hopes the readers are by now convinced that nothing really ever gets lost in the universe.  The universe does not throw away anything into nothingness - it is the ultimate recycling agent.
  

Our sun is at least a second generation star. The universe is 13+ billion years old.  Half that time ago our solar system did not exist. Not in its present form of a sun at the center, 8 or 9 planets (we feel bad for Pluto) around it, millions of asteroids, several comets, the Oort Cloud, The Kuiper Belt, etc. All of what we see and know as the Solar System today came from recycled material, from left over space dust to hydrogen gas and other debris.  I will not go nerdy with the readers but suffice it to say that there is a strong theoretical basis for why  our sun came out of recycled material. I am tempted to give a detailed explanation of it but I will muzzle the urge.

Now, to this thought. Long before the word "re-purpose" became a recycling buzz word, the universe had been re-purposing cosmic leftovers and discarded material into new structures, from which came this tiny patch we call our world.

From that little world was created a thinking population that today continues to wonder, to question, to postulate, to be in awe and oblivious at the same time, to introspect but often take things for granted. As part of the total world population, those who recycle are a tiny segment. Much had been said, we've been lectured, we're inundated with calls for action from well meaning activists, politicians and policy makers. We heard it but, alternatively, to balance our perspective, let's look at how explicit or implicit recycling is defined from an unlikely but infrequently visited alternative source these days - The Bible - and its take on recycling:

First, from the creation of man:

"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.           Genesis 2:7, KJV (King James Version)

Then, carefully read the verse below:

"If he set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust."      Job 34:14-15, KJV

And then ... 

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."     
Genesis 3:19, KJV

Widely known and taken as Gospel truth, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is actually nowhere to be found  in the Bible; a poetic  expression perhaps, "Ashes to ashes", but it has no theological basis, where the Scripture is concerned. The Genesis 3:19 quote is the closest we will get.

Now ...

Ground burial is widely accepted today, regardless of religion or culture. Cremation, though still by a small percentage, is accepted as well.

In not so ancient culture in Tibet, Mongolia and parts of China, people, mostly Buddhists practiced what was called, "sky burial".  

"Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation".

The last word is an interesting one, although Google red lined it when I typed it on this essay, but it is likely the opposite of reincarnation.  As we know, the Buddhist religion adheres to it.

The practice is now frowned upon by society in general but it was not too long ago that sky burial was in fact a tourist attraction in some remote places.  There are video and photo images of it online.

There is no definitive explanation for the origin of sky burial. In some cases, it is explained that in the mountainous though tree-less regions of Tibet, where timber is a luxury and the ground too hard to dig up, particularly in winter, the practice was more out of pragmatism.  On the other hand, it is also noted that offering the body of the departed to be consumed by other living creatures is the ultimate act of generosity by the departed that only enhances the process of reincarnation, for those who believe in it.

When all is said and done, but not to be philosophically flippant about it, ground burial achieves the same result where decomposition is the task of other living creatures - microbes, earthworms, and others - which consume the buried body until it is returned to the soil. Dust to dust. 

I know this is not a pleasant topic to be thinking about but it is  meaningful when taken in the context of a far more profound truth. The truth about the impermanence of everything physical. It makes us pause to take stock of the insouciant accumulation of material things or the worship of material possessions to the exclusion,  perhaps, of a far deeper introspection  or search for the meaning of or reason for why we are here.

Read the quote from Genesis 2:7 (above) one more time. Think about it. Each of us will take it differently, ignore it, be indifferent to it, even disagree with it, or have no opinion. Remember though that the fact that we have an opinion, or choose not to have one, makes us individually unique. But there is a common bond. Every living creature has connection, one to the other - from single cell organisms to simple plants like algae and fungi, to termites and small rodents and giant elephants and whales that ultimately lead to us - because one way or the other we are all part of both the natural and spiritual ecology that is the universe.

The universe does not waste anything. Whenever and wherever it can, it will recycle. Whether we are here or not.

The Afterlife

"The afterlife (also referred to as life after death) is the belief that the essential part of an individual's identity or the stream of consciousness continues after the death of the physical body".

The question of what happens after death is one subject matter that, like politics and religion, are either avoided at all cost or most fervently discussed among friends depending, and only depending, upon how well their beliefs are aligned; or how, on very rare occasions, their open mindedness lead to extremely tolerant acceptance of each other's opposing views. 

Undeniably, the question of the after life had been asked since humanity acquired the ability to ask, to ponder and to speculate. In fact, long before there were historical records, fossil remains had so much to reveal about how our early ancestors dealt with the subject. There is no question that the mysteries surrounding the afterlife or our ancestors' inability to know or understand what happens after death led to superstition and speculation. Early civilizations - from Old Testament accounts of kings and kingdoms to the days of the Pharaohs, to the Persian empires, the Greeks, the Romans, and all that followed in both Eastern and Western Europe and Asia - produced many different ways of dealing with the subject of mortality, from spiritualism to theology to philosophy.

We find today that much of the questions still remain unanswered. 

From my earlier musing, "Everything happens for a Reason", I wrote about how different major theologies address the subject, so I will not rehash them here.  But there is something intriguing about the quote above on the "afterlife".

A friend, a former co-worker from the old country before we and our families both came to settle here, passed away recently. He was stricken by Parkinson's disease many years ago. The devastatingly downward trajectory of the malady, though slow, affects the person and the family in ways that is tragically heartbreaking. The weariness from the physical deterioration when motor skills gradually diminish is compounded by the frustration when one's speech is affected. The pain from the physical disability is made worse when the affected person gets frustrated from not being able to express oneself, when even the conveyance of an idea is a struggle, the ability to even tell a joke is near impossible. Towards the end the downward physical and mental spiral was a slow and torturous fading away of both mind and body.

One may ask then, what "stream of consciousness continues after the death of the physical body".  This friend used to play (and played well) the highly physical game of basketball, was thoughtful and was a good chess player, and made a good living to support a family and two children. The retirement community he and his wife picked suited them well. Life had all the makings of a comfortable retirement. The sunset of their lives was way far into the horizon, hardly visible and out of mind, as they set to enjoy a long retirement.

Then the diagnosis came. He fought hard with the support of a caring wife and family and he managed well under the circumstances. Then came the wheelchair but that did not deter his will to fight on. From a year ago though  the struggle was gone. The feeding tube was all that sustained an almost unconscious life. The family was long prepared before the sad day. Everyone was at peace during the short vigil, waiting for "God to take him away". 

This adds to the complexity of how to answer the age-old question. Of course, this is not a burden to those who believe that everything is extinguished at the moment of death. Life ended, one's story is finished, there are no sequels, no continuation. To those folks, what I say or think here will have little or no effect whatsoever. There is no need to discuss that either.

We too can avoid discussing theology.  How else then do we address the afterlife? 

Well, if we must,  there is no getting around these: first, life must mean something before we talk about the afterlife; second, why must there be an afterlife; and third, how long is the afterlife? Does it go on forever and ever?

And then we have to ask. Who or what makes all of these possible? And we say, this takes us back to theology or religion or philosophy, or other belief systems, doesn't it?    

The Pew Research Center took a poll last year and found that 90% of Americans believe in "a higher power". However, a much lower percentage (though still a majority, but barely) expressed  belief in God as depicted in the Bible. We can set this aside so as not to get into a debate. Now, we know that of the ninety per cent who believe in the "higher power" there could be a portion of them who would find God or the Universe (as a whole) as interchangeable; that is, God is all of everything we see and observe and that everything that is the universe is God. Still likely to be controversial but we have to start from somewhere that is  as close to neutrality as possible in dealing with the ninety per cent. We will not address the remaining 10 per cent who are either agnostics or atheists.

We start by saying that the Universe/God has sets of rules that are fundamental and beyond dispute. The universe, as an isolated system, whether by creation or by the theory as postulated in the Big Bang origin, maintains that matter and energy are conserved, one can be converted to the other and vice versa, but that nothing is ever lost. That is fundamental to the laws of physics: physical and chemical changes may occur anywhere in the universe but nothing ever gets lost. 

And this brings us to the concept of "stream of consciousness". First we come down a step lower. We begin with "information". We may take it for granted but that is where everything begins. DNA from which life begins is a bundle of information. A cell communicates with other cells through packets of information that it is constantly processing: everything from identifying nutrients that it needs and invaders like bacteria or viruses. Every living thing lives by information.

The painted lady butterfly lays a blue egg no bigger than a pin head. That pin head will hatch into a tiny larva that instinctively dines on the leaf where it was laid, becomes a colorful caterpillar in no time, changes into a chrysalis, pupate and turns into a beautiful butterfly - an exact copy of its mother.  Everything begun as a bundle of information packed into strands of DNA in a tiny blue egg that will complete a life cycle of a year. Then that cycle gets repeated over and over. 

Information, created by the butterfly, by an amoeba, the blue whale and by us all came about by processing matter and energy,  consuming food, converting much of it into flesh and blood and a brain that uses energy in order to process and produce even more information. We know animals remember but we do more than that. We develop self awareness even from an early age, we have a superior intelligence, and a well defined sense of being - a conscience, a set of emotions, an aptitude for morality - and something else we are hard pressed to explain. We feel a connection to people, animals and inanimate objects beyond mere physical stimulus, as if there is much beyond the world of the senses. We feel a stream of consciousness that are often faint, but at times overwhelming. For how do we explain love, acts of goodness, introspection, the capacity to appreciate music, the arts, etc.  Where do all these go upon death? 

The Universe/God does not waste anything. Nothing is ever lost. Not even information! Physics and a very complex mathematics which we will not get into here, speaks to the conservation of information. Suffice it to say that it is at that level of complexity that for the moment is beyond our capacity to understand. But it is also true that just from the principle of the conservation of matter and energy we may gather confidence that perhaps the preservation of information is what the afterlife is all about. We will admit ignorance to what it is exactly that awaits us beyond this physical life but to believe that there is better than 50-50 chance that information is carried over in the form of a stream of consciousness is and should be a safe bet.

We may not know until we know it but what is certain is that the universe does not waste anything. If God is an all knowing God then God must be the Universe. 

STATS

Numbers. Nothing can be more clear, precise and pristine as a number. A single number is language at its purest form. 1 is clearly an entity of a specific value that is precisely different from 2, as 2 is different from 3, and so on and on. 

As often said, numbers don't lie. But a community of numbers can be herded together, divided, then grouped together again, re-tallied, lined up, and voila! We have statistics. Given a new identity and re-clothed, it is now part of a tool that has a very technical sounding label - analytics. It has become an inviolable piece of information.  It is now a tool to fashion an idea that turns into an agenda, soon a doctrine, and alas society is forever changed.  How can something so singularly pure as a single number become part of a group of numbers that soon becomes a bedrock feature of policy decisions? 

But first ...

Millions upon millions every summer make a pilgrimage to the beaches around the world. The salty air, the lapping water of a gentle sea or the roar of never ending waves, photos and selfies by the millions will go unnoticed by the world at large except for the friends and relatives who will get them via Facebook or twitter. 

Then the unthinkable happened. A shark attack!  The story becomes a media event even in places like North Dakota, small communities in outer Mongolia or Bhutan - places so far away from the oceans, yet the measure of fear as relayed on TV or the internet became real even when much of the people there may never come close to the water's edge of an ocean, let alone be waist deep in sea water. 

TV and the news media in general, purveyors of statistical data whenever they want to, will for this one particular event ignore using statistics to help assuage the fear or concern of every person this one time when perhaps their viewers or listeners can be comforted by the concept of statistical odds. Shark attacks are so rare that a person somewhere in the world is likely going to suffer physical injury or death from a traffic accident or falling off a ladder at home than being bitten by a shark. Of course, people in general can be complicit in the misdirection because these are the same people who believe that their chances of winning lottery's Mega Millions are better than being hit by lightning. But the media will play the shark attack incident without ever mentioning that such an event is rarer than a human to be bitten by a dog. 

Statistics originally came from Latin, then Italian for "statista", more about status directly connected to government affairs - hence how we come to know about The State of the Union. Statistics first surfaced in Germany in  1770, "science dealing with data about the condition of a state or community".

Now, of course, it is pretty much in every facet of human affairs - from sports statistics that determine a player's draft status to online betting, to political gerrymandering, to social data on marriages, divorces and fashion trends, etc.

Statistics had become a science, worshiped by analysts and opinion makers, by politicians and merchandisers. It is also an art, worshiped by analysts and opinion makers, by politicians and merchandisers. It is also fashioned as a pseudo science, a tool to deceive, devised as a last minute closer in a desperate strategy to win an argument, because numbers as the means to an end have power, and in the hands of pundits or eloquence of a debater, statistics have a way of sounding infallible. What is it about statistics that can make us vulnerable?  It is because numbers can be intimidating and a statistical quote gives power to the one who has it and renders defenseless the hapless one left to stare into the glare of numbers and charts, cornered into a position worse than a deer caught in the headlights. And statistics - one of its insidious nature - can be made up by anyone, who often may get away with it with very little consequences, unchallenged and worse - accepted.

The human brain is vulnerable to a barrage of information that come en mass, overwhelmed and often resigned to acceptance. Or, is it because emotions play a role? Take the most common generator of statistical data, the coin toss. We all know that the odds of heads or tails are always 50-50 in every toss. Now, after observing 23 consecutive heads - a formidable statistical data to confront the human mind - what is our expectation on the 24th toss? How does it influence our decision if it was a betting game? Some, if not all of us, will bet on tails, even betting more heavily than previously - forsaking the true odds of the toss to be still 50-50. Why? Because we harbor and are influenced by our memory.  The coin is not encumbered by memory at all, oblivious to the prior 23 heads consecutive tosses. We become victims of statistics that deceive rather than help because our minds are influenced by memory rather than going by the probability rule for each toss.

Then there is this one that perplexes common sense. People remember and are still saddened that over 50,000 American lives were lost during the entire 10-year Vietnam War, and justifiably so. What escapes notice, however, is that during that same period, half a million people - male, female, young, old, sometimes an entire family - perished in traffic accidents in U.S. highways and roads. More were maimed and permanently injured. There may have been as much as 25 % to have been caused by drunk drivers. Yet, as a statistical number, people shudder at the Vietnam war deaths while inured to civilian deaths in the homeland. Today, car fatalities are less due to better vehicle safety technology but it is still a high number. Now, gun violence and death as a result do not come close to the number of traffic fatalities but the emotional response and the toll on the national psyche are far greater than the hundred-fold magnitude of difference between the two phenomenon. Politicians and activists use that human mind's vulnerability to advance an agenda but little is done to or attention applied to the extremely higher rate of fatalities and injuries due to the influence of drugs and alcohol while driving, which makes these everyday form of conveyance a far deadlier weapon than guns. 

The 2020 election, like all elections and everything that demands choices and decisions, will be one large playing field for statisticians and opinion makers.

Statistics - where and when it used to be a very valuable tool in mass production quality control, economic and political policies, health and safety standards, strategy for the environment and population management, vis a vis health and epidemiological responses, etc. - can be corrupted by anyone, by a group, or by factions whose only objective is to force an agenda down the collective throat of the population at the mercy of a dizzying collection of numbers. Polls that used to be reliable indicators are now taken with  very little grain of salt. 

Sometimes, it is not even about numbers but a kind of generalization or stereotyping that takes perceived statistical data into a motive to influence or a means to ignore. For example, after the suicide bombing in Sri Lanka, two major political personalities twitted about the bombing that killed and injured "Easter worshipers"... avoiding the more accurate identities of the victims who were all Christians. The same media that showed those twits without any more elaboration or commentaries, broadcast an upcoming Republican conservative event as something that would attract mostly "white Christian men" ... So, a former President and a former Secretary of State twitted their sympathies about a horrific event claimed  by ISIS with a sanitized account to carefully avoid mentioning that the victims were Christian worshipers at the end of Holy Week while not mentioning that Muslim extremists claimed responsibility.

Statistics. Another of those discoveries by intelligent minds co opted to wreak havoc  in the same manner that TNT was initially used to move mountains and dig tunnels have become a tool of death and destruction.

There is no vaccine against the misuse of statistics. There is only common sense but that too is under attack by political correctness and the onslaught of minority voices that speak in volumes not worthy of their causes but often go unchallenged because people have become complacent. 

Complacency, if it is not one already, should be deemed the eighth deadly sin.