We’re all going to be Civilians

A hodgepodge of semi-errant thoughts is what happens when the mind, having a mind of its own, cannot quite slow down to idle.

In the End We’re all going to be Civilians

In a rare moment of humility that’s what a general might say to himself or maybe even loudly to those who served with him, as he contemplates the end of his last assignment. It too could be what a CEO or a once highly driven executive would say at the inevitable twilight of his or her career.  Civilian – a word only associated with “one not in the military” – might as well mean an ordinary folk, a man or woman on the street, a dude, a Joe Blow, a hypothetical average worker, a retiree.

Indeed, that is what life is all about for everyone.  No matter how high up we get our career to soar, how much wealth we’ve accumulated, how much power we’ve attained, we will all get to be civilians in the end.  The power gained is all temporary.  The CEO will soon be an ex-CEO.  The same fate awaits the filing clerk and the forklift operator at the end of their final shift. Ordinarily, we will be led to believe that the CEO will be a far greater civilian than the ones whose earnings were 1/600 of his but we will be wrong. The power to hire and fire secretaries, assistants, high powered VPs and managers that were a red hot symbol of authority and privilege shall become a darkened ember that is now reduced to firing the cook, the gardener and the pool guy.  That is a far greater step down from what authority the CEO used to have compared to someone who could not fire anyone. That is because the latter had not lost any power at all, when there was none to begin with. The CEO had lost far too much but still he will live far more comfortably, his vacations and his homes and his stock portfolio, and all things that indicate wealth will be intact.  Yes indeed, but those are not that shall be measured.  In fact, it will never even count. One day we will all, without exception, step through that threshold, into the other divide, and we will all be assessed as mere civilians, where name, rank and serial number will neither matter nor be required.

There is a yardstick somewhere that will not measure the accumulation of wealth, social honors, plaques and awards. The universe is much too big to be bothered with such trifles because those material things will all turn out to be trivial at best or worse, invisible in the vastness of the cosmos. The whole rigmarole that is the saga of life can simply be divided into three reels of film for those fortunate to get to their golden years: Growing up, earn a livelihood and care for family, then retire into the sunset. The film will be reviewed by the Ultimate Critic. How we chose who will critique us from when we first became aware of our responsibility to the world around us and conducting our life accordingly is what determined “how we lived”.  From The Reviewer’s point of view we will all be treated as civilians.

Is the Goal to Simplicity Complicating Our Lives?

There is no turning back. The train of technology had been and still is speeding faster and faster, hurtling down the winding tracks that endlessly lead to “what will they think of next?” to simplify our lives and make things easier over and over, one new thing after another at an ever increasing pace. The skeptics won’t believe it anymore when told that this or that will simplify things. The question really is whether all things that are supposed to make things better really do, and do they get any easier to use. 

It took a very long time from writing with quill pen and ink to the first manual typewriter, then to the first electric one.  It was decades and decades of copying parchment after parchment to publish or publicize anything till the Gutenberg press. But by comparison, technology wheezed by from the first mimeograph machine to Xerox and then on to Laser printers. The jump to 3D printers is akin to a Rolls Royce Phantom VIII leap-frogging over the horse and buggy.  It took many thousands of years from when communication developed from grunts and hisses and facial expressions to sign and hand gestures to the first repeatable vocalizations that preceded language. Long distances brought the smoke signals and tom-toms and the first telegraph.  By comparison the speed of development from the first telephone call to broadcast radio to satellite phones and TV to GPS to smart phones to Alexa and Echo was a blur. 

It is understandable that knowledge building upon knowledge is responsible for the rapid development of technology so that artificial intelligence (AI) must be engaged to help out. AI’s advantage is that computer chips and every conceivable algorithms that go with them can be added almost ad infinitum to machines and devices, whereas, there is not much we can do to add more mass to our brain or increase the folds and creases on it. Elon Musk mused about the dangers of AI but that train of thought too had already left the station.

Did all these technology that come like rolling waves, one after another, simplify life? No question, some aspects of our lives have gotten better but “simplify” is not exactly the word most folks have in mind. In psychology, “Reactivity is a phenomenon that occurs when individuals alter their performance or behavior due to the awareness that they are being observed.” In the following example we are presented with something totally the opposite of it – a purely modern phenomenon that is the absence of awareness of the world outside of the 3 by 5 inch screen: A young woman about to enter the gym looking down at her phone, tapping at the keys, suddenly stopped right in front of the glass door. Still looking down at the phone, she remained standing there, head hunched over the device, oblivious to people wanting to exit the gym. Fortunately, this one did not end like some of those youtube videos, because someone about to push out the door patiently waited until the woman looked up.  How many such similar cases of unexplained states of oblivion had often been the cause of major traffic accidents, some resulting in fatalities? 

We’ve seen photos of children, people from all walks of life looking down at devices on their laps held by opposable thumbs while sporting events are going on; public speakers are on stage; church services underway, etc.  People don’t talk to each other at waiting areas anymore. Where it used to provide brilliant hues to interpersonal relationships, the art of conversation will seem like a worn out faded canvass; texting is the new writing; spelling and sentence construction a few years ago will in fifty years take on the same distinction of linguistic antiquity as Shakespeare’ language is today, where adverbs and modifiers have become extinct, and grammar shall be less popular than Latin or Sanskrit. One of the things that did become simple is that “so” and “like” are now the go-to words to start a sentence, whole messages not exceeding 140 characters are the driving force behind the inevitable devolution of phrases and full sentences into acronyms.

But for all the capability that these modern conveniences offer, navigating through the functions and features seem to far exceed the average person’s ability to cope.  It is a reasonable bet that the average person utilizes less than half of the capabilities available in every modern device (from smart phones to printers to digital cameras); and by the time that person crosses the threshold of 50%, he or she is buying a newer device with the latest and the greatest features.  Then the learning curve starts all over again.  The bottom line is that if all these modern devices, including the so called plug and play, are that easy to operate, why is there still tech support for every device?  It seems that for every little feature added to any device, the complexity rises with every additional dollar these machines cost over the previous model (which still works just fine).  These complexities have become technological and emotional burdens that face every consumer - cussing and moaning at every frustrating moment towards these uncaring, unsympathetic machines and devices. 

  

Water

We all do take certain things for granted.  And there are quite a number of them but a friend of mine suggested this: Water.  He lives in Florida, the sunshine State, with its famous and highest producing aquifer system, so water should be farthest from every Floridians’ mind but Jim is concerned, should he be?  

Half the world probably does not worry too much about it for as long as water comes out of the faucet. When people from half of the globe go to the grocery store they’d still get their favorite pack or any variety of energy-vitamin-electrolyte laden versions of it. It cannot be said of the other half. I am loosely rounding off the half and half here, guesstimating actually, but we are aware that there are places on earth that are just too parched, where people are too thirsty, where getting clean drinking water is a constant preoccupation, a daily struggle, where tap water is as foreign as indoor plumbing.

Every creature depends on water. We can survive for three weeks without food but only a few days without water. One estimate is 100 hours on good weather but much shorter under a broiling sun.  Without air, 3 minutes and a few seconds are all the average human body can withstand; much shorter under stress.  On the basis of that we know the two things that our lives literally depend on.

 

Water – a simple molecule made up of just two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen – is the universe’s gift to any living creature at the only place we know to harbor life, probability that life exists somewhere else in the universe notwithstanding.  Of course, it may not be such a unique gift since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the entire cosmos, and the simplest, with one proton and one electron; the only element without a neutron in it. Oxygen, the third most abundant in the universe makes up about 20% of our atmosphere but it is one of the most reactive –it will combine with almost every other element to make all kinds of compounds.  The combination that matters to all earth life forms is that of oxygen grabbing two atoms of hydrogen and voila we have water.  It is the most pivotal phenomenon in nature if we were to make one up.  Science fiction aside, it is safe to assume that if there are other life forms in distant planets in alien solar systems, life will have to have evolved just like ours – dependent on water.  Why hydro sulfuric acid for blood, as in the movie “Alien”, when water-based plasma works best?  That’s what makes water the most versatile universal solvent, the wonder material, Creation’s miraculous substance from which all life must originate.

Cosmologists are fond of saying that earth is the goldilocks planet – not too hot, not too cold, where water ordinarily exists as a liquid. What makes it perfectly right is that 75% of its surface is covered with water.  What is even far more astounding is that water, with its hydrogen and oxygen, is the precursor to life, growth and propagation. Throw in carbon to the mix in countless combinations with just a handful of other “minor” elements and we get plants and creatures from protozoa to penguins, anteaters and antelopes, hummingbirds and humans – all carbon based life forms. Amino acids – organic compounds that make up proteins – are essentially compounds of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen linked by atomic bonds in myriad combinations. DNA structures and markers of DNA, popularly labeled G, A, T, C, are each made up of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (which happens to be 70% of earth’s atmosphere).  Carbohydrates and protein and water are what we are.  “Proteins are polymers made by joining together small molecules called amino acids. Amino acids and proteins are made mainly of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen”. 

The environment is predominantly water.  We are 60% water. Where water is scarce in desert areas, creatures survive there because morning dew is present.  Water, which can exist as a solid, liquid and vapor, has this one other more miraculous property, not shared by other substances – it actually expands, increasing its volume, under extremely low temperature, i.e. when it turns into ice. Intuitively, substances shrink in volume when subjected to cold temperatures.  That is a critical property for water/ice. Ice therefore will float on water, thus preventing ponds, rivers and lakes from turning entirely into a solid mass. The layer of floating ice turns into a surface barrier, a blanket if you will, on top, so that water underneath will remain liquid so fish and other living things below will survive winter.

Water is a vivid representation of our life.  We’re made mostly of it, we depend on it, we’ve adapted to the environment with it. Our history of survival throughout eons of climate changes we owe to water. Here we are worrying about climate change.  Our ancestors had survived and adapted to several extreme climate events for thousands of years.  There had been several ice ages alternating with extreme global warming.  Survival of all living things depended on water.  Why are we not, therefore, more vocal about conserving water, keeping it clean, protecting its sources, and insuring its worldwide availability for every living thing that needs it. Shouldn’t we be fighting for the protection and conservation of water? 

But no, because so much energy, so much talk, so much money is expected of nations to “fight” climate change instead. 

The 8th Deadly Sin

I will assume the reader knows about the Seven Deadly Sins.  What the reader may not know, however, is that there is no actual Biblical reference to the specific number (7) associated with the bundle of misdeeds we’ve come to know today.  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament address the various wrongful acts and thoughts and principal vices from different writings by the prophets and disciples but we will not read anywhere that says, “Seven Deadly Sins”. The Ten Commandments, on the other hand, are indubitably unambiguous about the number 10 and specificity of what man is supposed to do and not do as written on those two stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai, as depicted in the Old Testament.

 

Strictly speaking, if we must go by the definition of principal vices, we should add more to the number today. After all, modern civilization has brought additional behavioral burdens and moral challenges to society not known to the prophets and religious leaders two to four thousand years ago. There could be more, depending on how one navigates through the new morality.

Evagrius Ponticus is credited with coming up with an original list of 8 principal vices in the 4^th century that later inspired John Cassian to also write about them.  Pope Gregory in the 6^th century reduced the number to 7 Cardinal Sins now presently delineated in Roman Catholic Theology: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth.  There is a debate though as to how deadly the seven sins really are.  Not literally anyway as some would argue but in an allegorical sense perhaps – referring more to the death of the spirit or of the soul.

If I were to add one - and just one - cardinal sin to the existing list, I come up with hypocrisy. Granted, the Pharisees and publicans had been chastised for that behavior in the New Testament, it did not make the original list.  Those criticized mostly for that behavior were religious leaders, government officials and tax collectors. Is it something acquired late in life?  You see, mild degrees of pride, greed, envy, over consumption, anger and tantrum, and laziness are traits noticeable among teenagers and even young children but hardly is hypocrisy discernible early in youth.  It is purely an adult malady developed later in life, it seems.

The word hypocrisy has its origins from the Greek language (hypokrisis) where it was regarded with a somewhat neutral connotation. It was at first associated with Greek theater where play acting on stage was what actors did.  As actors played different roles, their public performance were just exactly that –character impersonation.  Hypocrites were stage actors who clearly were nothing more than role players.  When the Romans came to power, actors were looked down upon for their “counterfeit persona”.  It did not take long for the word associated with acting – hypocrisy – to slide into disrepute.

By the time the Bible was translated into the King James Version, the word had lost its original connection to role playing and acting but took on its current meaning, to wit, pretentiousness, or “the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform”.  But yet again we see its meaning take another pivot in the 21^st century.

Self-righteousness was what the Pharisees were associated with in the Book of Luke but the key was not so much that of merely displaying piety publicly.  It is of appearing to be pious in places of worship or where they can be publicly noticed then go on to behave entirely differently when they are by themselves or dealing with others.  For example, some folks today can be devoutly religious – regularly attending church and giving generously to it – but take on a very uncharitable behavior when it comes to doing business or in social settings not connected to places of worship.

From the movie “The Godfather”, a metaphorical presentation of extreme hypocrisy was depicted in the episode, “Baptism of Fire”, when Michael Corleone was standing as godfather to his sister’s son at a church baptismal ceremony.  As that was happening, the scenes cut away to the killings of five or so other rival crime bosses that were sanctioned by Michael himself. That was at near the movie’s denouement actually – though let us not forget it was still just a movie - but we must realize that history is filled with more horrific examples of man’s inhumanity to man in the name of religion and other supposedly “just” causes. 

We must mention these extreme cases so that then we can move on to more subtle examples but no less insidious.  They can be just as deadly though not noticeably detectable because the lines do get blurred where politics and the news media are involved. Today, the consuming public is overwhelmed with a daily barrage of information from the broadcast and newspaper media as never before.  Unfortunately the purveyors of information no longer just report the news; instead, they now want to shape public opinion or even blatantly align the coverage of the news to suit certain political agenda, or worse they have become embroiled in pure partisanship. Many and they’re from all different sides, are no longer unbiased disbursers of information; alarmingly, some do not even pretend anymore.  There is obviously a huge difference between reporting and explaining on one hand and taking up positions on the other, as to endorse certain policies from one political party while conscientiously opposing those from the other.

And let us not forget proponents of causes coming from luminaries in the social and entertainment world.  When some are gripped by fear of global warming or climate change due to excessive emission of carbon then they must answer these first: (a) why trot the globe in the worst carbon-emitting mode of transportation – private jets?  At least, commercial jetliners carry more people than a handful; (b) why choose to live in a 10,000 square foot air-conditioned home occupied by two people? Often, if they are out traveling in jets and yachts, the empty house remain climatically controlled, consuming and wasting energy - another hypocritical dagger plunged into the environmental cause; (c) why not carpool to this or that entertainment award ceremony instead of individual limousines lining up for hours, spewing carbon while inching their way in and out of the self-congratulatory venues espousing their concern against climate change? These folks are no less hypocritical than the Pharisees from over 2,000 years ago.  Do these folks even know what they’re talking about – clinging to the bumper sticker of climate change without realizing that climate does change, no matter what? 

We ask why a feminist organization only endorses the views of women from their side of the ideological divide but vigorously demean women who speak from a different point of view.  Why don’t they ask why women are not allowed to drive, vote or be seen in public without a head covering in many parts of the world?  Why do they have the right to speak on behalf of women wanting to terminate the life of the unborn while doing everything to silence those who speak for that child?  

This is why this 8^th deadly sin is truly more deadly than the other seven.  Hypocrisy is not only pretentiousness, it is a pretender – masked as representing a just cause, a moral value, a social conscience by and for those who live and behave otherwise.  When Marin County can continue to be exempt from affordable housing laws in California because such dwellings could lower property values of the multi-million dollar homes already there, then the height of hypocrisy has been scaled. You see, it is in those very homes where many of the elite live who in public speak out for the poor and the down trodden but would prefer that their area remain immaculately pure.  But they will speak for low-cost housing for those who cut their yard, service their swimming pools, clean their homes for as long as these service providers live from at least twenty miles away. Movie actors and directors rail against the Second Amendment but have no qualms making movies where shooting and killing take up more film footage than actual conversation.

If enough of politicians and world leaders believe in the hypocrisy, civilization will see itself spiraling into an abyss of false moral values and social decay.  That is why hypocrisy is indeed much deadlier than the other seven

What If?

We all have “what if” questions.  We wonder about how things would be “if”.  What if one day we turn on the switch and no light comes on, the dishwasher, the garage door, and oh no! The TV does not work. We take these things for granted because they’ve always worked.  But we know better because indeed things could go wrong.  Also, sometimes we do wonder about some outlandish hypothetical “what ifs”.  What if the sun does not rise tomorrow?  What if the tide does not come in, or for that matter, not ebb?  I read this e-book while on vacation last week that addressed some insanely ridiculous “what ifs”. What hooked me to it was that the author actually put in the time to look at scientific scenarios for what would happen “if”.

From the book, “What If? : Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions” written by Randall Munroe, Emily Dunham asked this question, “When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?”  The author went on to pose a lot of assumptions, based on a lot of things: Facebook’s growth rate, age breakdown and compositions of users, etc.  With so many variables, the surprising answer was a date range of between 2060 and 2130.  Again, one must assume Facebook will still be around then. It is possible something new and more exciting mass media phenomenon will replace it, people will get tired of it, or some kind of earth-shaking cultural shift takes place, or for some unforeseen sociological forces – who knows?  I don’t have a Facebook account so I have no opinion on its future.

These “what if” questions do seem to be more intriguing than the standard run-of-the-mill ordinary questions and they do make us wonder.  For example, Mr. Munroe estimated that since its inception as many as 10 to 20 million who created profiles on Facebook had since died; however, more young people than older ones are in that category. That is counterintuitive but one must consider that there are more young people who use Facebook by a huge number over people older than 50.

There are a lot more but less morbid hypothetical questions in the book. Some are even funny. Mimi asked this, “If you call a random number and say “God Bless You”, what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?”  As difficult as that to determine, even unknowable perhaps, the answer is an estimate: probably one in 40,000. Other questions are more catastrophic:  (a) What if all the rain in a thunderstorm fell as one raindrop? (b) What if all lightning strikes around the world (and there are a lot) were concentrated in just one spark over one spot, what would happen? (c) What would happen to the batter if a fast ball was pitched towards him at the speed of light?

Here is one for the physics nerds. Asteroids and man-made space junk burn up on entry and re-entry towards earth, respectively, from atmospheric friction.  Alex Haley asked: “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” First, we must ask whether one wants his steak rare or well done; is it 8 ounces or 12 ounces, defrosted or not before the drop.  From my personal experience, a typical ¾ inch thick steak needs to be cooked 4-5 minutes per side (8-9 minutes total cooking time).  Apparently, even if dropped from 100 kilometers above the earth, there is not that much time before the steak hits the ground because falling bodies like a piece of space debris, even the size of a grain of sand, do travel rapidly and fall fast downwards.  Anyway, if NASA has some extra money, which it does not, it will have to settle this one or maybe Richard Branson or Elon Musk may fund the experiment. Meanwhile, try wrapping steak in an aluminum foil, secure it just above the exhaust manifold of your car, drive for thirty minutes and see what happens to the meat afterwards.

American high school students prospecting to go to college must face taking the SSAT (Secondary School Admission Test). Rob Balder asked this: “What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on ever multiple-choice questions? How many perfect scores would there be?” Actually, one had come up with a scientific process that involved statistical probabilities and intelligent assumptions and the short answer is: NONE.  The question reminds me of another one.  It is the classic query about getting a chimpanzee to type away random keys on a typewriter.  How long would it take, if at all, for it to somehow type a readable novel?

Anyway, the message to high school students is: There is no other way but to study for the SSAT because, quoting from the book, even “If all 4 million 17-year-olds took the test and they all guessed randomly… each used a computer to take the test a million times each day, continued this every day for five billion years … the chance of any of them ever getting a perfect score on just the math section would be about 0.0001 per cent”. From that, a high school student will have a fair idea about his or her chances of passing the SSAT by just guessing – ZERO. On the other hand, a diligently prepared student can do it in one take. So students, like everything in life, there really are no short cuts.  Guessing, in fact, will take forever.

After reading the book, I thought I’d come up with a couple of absurd hypothetical questions of my own. There was not much to do on this rainy weekend so, why not, especially coming back from a 10-day vacation?

1)      What if suddenly one morning we (all of 7 billion people around the world) woke up and each household or every single unmarried able-bodied adult has a net worth of over a million dollars?  Don’t ask how? What would the world be like?  I think it will be worse than yesterday. Imagine Elon Musk – I’m picking on him – took out his top of the line 2017 Tesla Model S to drive to a nearby Starbucks for his favorite latte. He won’t get one because the barista who served him yesterday (and all baristas, in fact) is no longer working there. Would you, if you had a million dollars in the bank? Elon Musk will soon find out there is no one to collect his garbage, deliver his mail, and there is no one working at the Tesla plant or the Space X headquarters. He will not be alone in that predicament.  Try imagining every scenario anywhere and you’ll know it is not going to be pretty. The Maasai cattle herder in Tanzania, previously subsisting on a daily food intake of 1400 calories or less daily, who can now afford to increase his herd of cattle, will find out that there are no cattle available for sale because every Maasai around the region will want to do the same. There is much celebration across the country and alas, every cattle was butchered for the big party.

Around the world home prices will skyrocket when every homeowner, including those living in cardboard boxes from everywhere poverty was the norm yesterday, will want a nice home today.  Mathematicians, sociologists and political scientists will not want to answer this “what if” scenario.  Economists – let us not forget them - will for the first time agree on something: the world economy will collapse into a sudden implosion. There will be no one to sell anything to anyone; besides who will be working anywhere to produce the goods or provide the services of any kind. Who will keep the peace on the streets, and so on and on? You get the picture. Suffice it to say, it is going to be a maddeningly chaotic world!

2)      What if one day your doctor tells you after a very rigorous checking and re-checking that your cells will go on forever young – a kind of incredible mutation has your body replenishing every dead cell? You will live forever; you are an immortal. Wow, you say, but what’s the problem?  You did jump up and down and even did a head stand while still at the doctor’s office. The jubilation stopped when you reached home.  You are gripped by uncontrollable fear and quivering with incessant anxiety in the following days.  But why?  Now that I had time to think about it, it is not what immortality is made out to be. 

Living forever has its drawbacks that, believe it or not, may far outweigh most of anything we ever fantasized about living forever.  You’d be worried sick about retiring. How would you like to be wondering if you had enough in your 401k to last forever?  If you will be receiving a pension, will the company or government entity from which you draw your pension survive even for just a couple of hundred years?  You can say, since you will not grow old, you can work forever.  Would you?

On the other hand, you can try every hobby there is.  25-50 years to master golf, chess, bridge or canasta. In a century, you’ll get tired of woodworking or aqua culture, you can fish and hunt and witness the evolutionary processes change the behavior of the fishes and animals you’ll be going after.  “Climb Every Mountain” is not just a song from the Sound of Music – you will actually do it. Come to think of it, Mt. Everest goes up in height about 4 millimeters a year from tectonic action - you can climb it every time it rises another meter.  Traveling the world through space and time may get you the chance, like no person ever will, to find the proverbial soul mate. It comes with a price, of course.  Your soul mate’s limited life span will have a devastating effect in the end.

Now, we know why anybody will get sick at the prospect of living forever. The first "what if" above goes to show why income and wealth equality is impossible to achieve, it may not even be actually good, Mark Zuckerberg's suggestion of guaranteed income for everyone notwithstanding. Think hard about it. What will it do to society and what will it do towards aspirations, ambitions, working harder, etc?  Mr. Zuckergberg's net worth is $50 billion. He seems to suggest that, perhaps with a tinge of guilt, that rich people should redistribute some of their wealth to help even out incomes, or is he just talking about another government role to achieve such a Utopian dream.

Well, what “what if” scenarios can you come up with. Try it.  It could be fun. And exercise the mind to go along with it. 

(Note: The book I mentioned is free for download online).

Timing Is Everything

“Timing Is Everything”, is almost always associated with good tidings, with all the trappings of serendipity, but seldom to describe a bad outcome.

But then:

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

― Willie Nelson

There, Old Willie may have stumbled upon a typical country-and-western philosophy and an intriguing theme for a debate. Timing did work for the bird but what about the worm that wriggled itself up early to the surface, or near enough to be detected and plucked? It too must have had a good reason to be up early. On the other hand, the eager first mouse to grab the cheese paid the ultimate price so the second one can benefit; although I read that in actuality no mice will ever come near a mouse trap with a fellow dead mouse in it, as enticing as the cheese may be (likewise, a rat trap must be cleaned so thoroughly of the warning scent left by the previous occupant before it will catch another rat; and re-using a mouse trap may not work at all as the tale tell scent from the prior victim remains).  So, timing may not have worked so well from the perspective of the early worm but it is always everything to the beneficiary of the bounty, which is often the story we hear, the mouse version per Old Willie, notwithstanding.

On the other hand, there is this to think about:

“Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.”

― Scott Adams

Of course, there is such a thing as being ahead of the times and so the rapper in the Year 1317 was not going to make a good living but, just to be clear, there were minstrels in that era who did well. “Being at the right place at the right time” made sense then as it does now; and so the corollary to it, “Being at the wrong place at the wrong time”, and other permutations associated with the two phrases.

So, we’ll accept “good timing” and “bad timing” as two sides of the circumstantial coin. Hopefully, they do not occur with the regularity of a 50-50 coin toss and more with an 80-20 split in favor of “good timing”. 

Speaking of coin:

“Time is a coin that you can spend only once. Use it, invest it and make it count”.

--- Anonymous

Speaking of count:

How do we account for something we cannot see, physically hold, taste, smell, etc.? Such is time but it is not even an entity we can point to, up close or from a distance, let alone restrain it in a container for later observation. This takes us to: What is Time really?  A handful of physicists (emphasis on ‘handful’) and perhaps twice as many philosophers say it is just an illusion.

 

Let’s detour that way without pre-judging it as a silly or crazy idea.  Bear with me because, if anything, it exercises the mind to think or ponder these things from time to time. The Babylonians started it with their sexagesimal numbering system, counting in 60s versus our decimal system of 10s. Counting in 10s, 20s, 30s look straightforwardly simple today but there was a method to the Babylonians’ madness when they came up with 60 seconds to a minute and 60 minutes to an hour. 60 is a good number between 1 and 100 that can be factored nicely, i.e., 60 can be expressed as: 60X1; 30X2; 20X3; 15X4; 12X5; 10X6.  In other words, it has the most number of factors, namely: 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30,60. Likewise, 12 and 24 have the most number of factors than numbers lower than them.  For example, 12X1, 6X2, 4X3 has more than 10X1, 5X2. (Try that with 24).  Time, the 4th dimension as we are often told, was subdivided for the convenience of the early, ancient timekeepers. However, today’s digital watches and clocks negate the advantage of the sexagesimal method.  The decimal point has allowed us the ability to dissect anything into almost infinitesimal fragments, including what was conceived as the basic unit of time – the second.

If recorded history is 5,000 years old, thanks to the Sumerians and their Cuneiform writings, the first humanoids were supposed to have first appeared 1.7 million years ago, while our direct human ancestors began their evolutionary journey a mere fraction of that time when they first appeared 2,000 centuries ago. Throughout all that pre-clock era humans had no concept of a ticking time. In fact, modern time keeping began only when the first pendulum clock was invented in 1656. Before then, folks got by just fine. Early on, before clocks and calendars, they simply observed and made mental notes, passed on from generation to generation, culture to culture, the changing of the seasons, phases of the moon and the daily routine of waking up at sunrise and settling down after sunset.  What is more amazing though, if we think about it, is that early thinkers and observers figured out a calendar of a year composed of 365 days, more or less, even without first realizing that the earth revolved around the sun.  Galileo got in trouble with the Church when he posited the idea that the earth was not the center of it all.

The first adjustable mechanical alarm clock was patented in 1847. It is hard to imagine before then how people managed to wake up in the morning to go to work.  More profoundly, before the clock, how did folks organize their days, how were things scheduled and how did schedules get kept. If you toiled for a living, there were no hourly or daily rates for your work. There were no psychiatrists, obviously, as how could they have billed their patients or declared the end of a session. We can say that before the clock time as we know today did not exist. There was no tick tock to segregate the second-by-second march of time. A lot of activities we have and do today did not exist before the clock came about.
 

Today, we have accepted that time is this oppressively ever present part of life – it is there at every moment, like an invisible wall pressing forward whether we are paying attention or not, but it has only this one direction that is not known to go backwards or sideways.  Most of all, this invisible entity, if it is even an entity because we cannot actually physically feel it, rules our modern world. Massive amount of money is moved around the globe by traders obsessed with precision timing, from time zone to time zone as markets open and close, as fractions of a cent in well-timed executions can make or break a fund’s daily performance. Mega law firms live by their billable hours while boutique law offices charge hourly what their clients can afford. Cynical, perhaps, but the world can be obsessed over Usain Bolt’s 9.81-second 100-meter dash in Rio (2016), or be awed by Michael Phelps victory in the 100-meter butterfly 2008 Beijing Olympics over Milorad Cavic, who came in second by a mere fingertip (literally).  Their time was separated by 1/100 of a second. Had the touch pad technology not been invented, the race could conceivably have been ruled differently (or declared a tie) if the judges relied on manual stop watches.

Did we inadvertently invent time to rule over our activities? Let’s get back to the Olympics for a minute. Let’s have a thought experiment about extraterrestrials reviewing films of the 1938 and 2016 Olympics. We cannot assume they have some kind of time keeping system, let alone, similar to ours (it is possible they do not even track time at all) but they will have no problem recognizing that Jesse Owens won the 100 meter event in 1938 as did Usain Bolt in 2016.  They will be oblivious to our concept of time but they can discern the idea of the race and appreciate each respective result. When we come to think about it, time is not necessary for an event to occur.  It is mainly a recording entry after the fact that an event occurred.  

Our concept of time is naturally local – local to earth, that is.  Despite Isaac Newton’s fervent belief that time is absolute all throughout the universe, we now know it’s not.  Time does not “run” at the same rate on a satellite; actually, it is not even the same on a 747 or F-18 Falcon, albeit by mere billionths of a second, relative to the clock sitting on the ground. Time “runs” faster at the executive office 85 floors above compared to the basement, again in billionths of a second; thus, the top-floor-dwelling CEO is aging faster than the janitor. As weird and incredibly silly as that might seem, it is factually and scientifically true. Nanoseconds, big deal, we say, but it is significant enough that clocks on the satellite must be constantly synchronized hourly with earth based clocks, lest they get out of step quickly, making your car GPS navigation system worthless within a few hours if not corrected.  Put two identical clocks (one on Jupiter, the other earth-bound) and they will quickly be out of whack with each other, in relative terms. Jupiter’s clock will run slower relative to the earth clock, while earth’s clock is observed by Jovian residents to run faster. [Note: Jovian citizens exist only in my imagination].

I needed to make that detour into what many might consider the abstract, if not weird, nature of time. It does not clarify or define what time really is but rather to make us think a little bit more about this “thing” that permeates every facet of our lives but which, unlike anything that affects everything around us, including everything we do, we cannot actually physically touch it or hold on to it or re-direct it, or give it away.

We’re told too about how time is allotted equally to each and every person every morning he or she wakes up and any of it unused is gone forever, then we start all over again the next day – with the same amount disbursed for everyone.  It makes for a gem of an insight, a most astute even profound observation, as if time is an equal opportunity provider of fair chances for everyone.  It does sound inspirationally motivating, but is time really all that?  I actually subscribed to that in my earlier musings because it does seem to connote equal opportunity.  But then I began asking: (a) Where does time come from, if we were to treat it as being equally allotted to each and every one of us?; (b) Why can’t one have more?; (c) Why does time go incredibly fast when we’re having fun?; (d) How come molasses outruns the “flow of time” when we’re bored with nothing to do or waiting for someone who is late?

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen all at once”.

The above quote had been attributed to a lot of people, including Albert Einstein and other famous folks, but there has never been any documented proof.

“The oldest confirmed use of any version of this quote… is from Ray Cummings' short story ‘The Time Professor’, published in the Jan. 8, 1921 issue of Argosy All-Story Weekly.

"I do know what time is," Tubby declared. He paused. "Time," he added slowly -- "time is what keeps everything from happening at once”.

That quote is best said with a little shrug of the shoulder with both hands raised mid-torso, palms pointing upwards, which will then prompt any listener to roll his or her eyes.  Well, let’s ponder that for a moment.

Is it possible that what we perceive as the running of time resides only in our brain as it tries to make sense of the orderly step by step sequences that make up an event or events?  Everywhere we look, we can only observe events to occur at a particular order because a bowling ball must first be seen rolling away from the bowler’s hands before striking the pins and not in any other order or a pitcher must first throw a baseball before the hitter swings. Now, before you say to me, “Thank you, Captain obvious” or roll your eyes and invoke the “Well, duh!” moment, think for a minute about why the arrow of time goes only in one direction - forward.

“The Arrow of Time, or Time's Arrow, is a concept developed in 1927 by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington involving the "one-way direction" or "asymmetry" of time. It is an unsolved general physics question”.

Part of the problem is that in 1927 and long before that and since, many laws of physics had been established without necessarily specifying the arrow of time.  Many formulas actually work whether time has a positive or negative value. Let us not make any more detours and reserve that for another time.  There’s enough here to tickle the mind. Or compel it to park on idle.

Now, back to “timing is everything”:

The quickest way for water to boil over a pot or for anything you are frying to burn is to step away for “just a bit”.  On the other hand, the shortest elapsed time sequence before the accident was what’s between the moment you took your eyes off the road and the second you looked down to type an unimportant text while driving.

The years contained in all the total combined generations that had ever lived are a fraction of a blink of an eye in the context of how long the universe had been in existence. From that perspective, we ought to realize the overwhelming incentive to make the most of every moment.  Whether time is an illusion or an accessory of our consciousness, it does not take but a moment to say how much we appreciate somebody dear to us. Make it count each time because another moment will be different from the one we missed.

  

It is All Relative

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

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

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

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

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

It is all relative.

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

It is all relative.

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

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

It is all relative.

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

What Part is That?

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

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

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

“I’m waiting on a part,” he replied.

“What part is that?”

“The part of me that wants to do it”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Luck Would Have It

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

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

The Chess Board Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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