The Inconvenient Sequel to Ecovangelism

Urban Dictionary defines “Ecovangelism”: A socio-political movement disposed to make extreme claims and advocate extreme measures regarding the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment.

First, let’s have a word on Urban Dictionary for those not familiar with it.   

“Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases that was founded in 1998 as a parody of Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com by then-college freshman Aaron Peckham”.

 “Crowdsourced” means anyone may suggest or nominate a word. Popular usage will ultimately determine its fate towards a permanent place in the Standard Dictionary.

There had since been millions of entries by 2009 and new submissions per day are registered.  This is all possible because online information, unlike those in hard copy book-bound dictionaries or Encyclopedia, can be collected and sorted almost without limit in “the cloud”.

Meanwhile, the word “televangelist” first came to global use in 1973.  Only 100 new words came out in that same year. Believe it or not, words and phrases which sound new, like fact-check, factoid, and yes, affluenza were words introduced then. As an aside, most who watched the news last year thought affluenza was a newly minted word. A Dallas legal team used it to defend/justify the behavior of a teenager – scion of a millionaire family - for drunk driving that killed four people.  But I digressed.

Televangelism is uniquely a U.S. original, perhaps brought about in the early years of broadcast media when radio and television were largely unregulated, in a country that was and still is anchored in Judeo-Christian philosophy. Televangelists proliferated globally until many of them fell out of grace (pun intended) after a series of scandals that were moral, social and financial in nature. There is just a handful now. It is the reputable ones that survived and do still enjoy a substantial support – free of any scandals or cases of fraud – and in return they continue to do a lot of public good in the world. {The true standard upon which televangelism should be modeled after is Rev. Billy Graham, who has now been succeeded by Franklin Graham}. A significant alteration at the turn of the new century was a subtle change to more positive messages against what used to be fire and brimstone, gloom and doom to those not heeding the ways of righteousness.

But, in case you have not noticed, the gloom and doom remains an active forecast but not from televangelism. It is no longer for those violating the tenets of piety. Instead, humanity and the world are both doomed due to man’s profligacy and reckless abuse of resources.  We are destroying the environment with our carelessness and irresponsible behavior. Fire and brimstone will be the literal heating up of the planet as human settlements and practices continue to spew carbon into the air.  The melting of the polar ice caps and rising sea level will be the end of humanity.  Suddenly, our sins are against the environment. The televangelists of yore, barely over a generation ago, were replaced by the new, louder voices from the wilderness – the ecovangelists. Both televangelists and ecovangelists prophesy despite the fact that predicting the future is a universal impossibility. The world had ended many times over from century to century if the countless doomsayers had their say. Today, sea levels will inundate many places on earth as polar ice caps melt.  This is despite the fact that there is not enough ice to melt from both poles to raise sea levels as to submerge even half of what Mr. Gore says will be under water.  It is not like melted ice will be concentrated in places ecovangelists choose to highlight. Water will spread out evenly – seeking the appropriate level. BUT, as depicted in many monster and disaster movies, Manhattan, New York becomes the epicenter for raging sea levels or a speeding glacier (an oxymoron in itself). If its earthquakes and fire it is San Francisco or LA.  If it is space alien invaders or Superman’s nemesis, it will have to be Washington, D.C., specifically, the White House.

Let us not forget that the “tip of the iceberg” says a lot about what the doomsayers may neglect to mention. If only 1/10^th of the iceberg is visible from the surface, and 9/10^th underwater, then only 1/10^th of every floating ice berg will contribute to the rise in sea level. 90% of all ice berg everywhere is  already accounted for in the current sea level.  Likewise, only the surface of the ice sheets, just 1/10^th of the entire ice shelf, in both the Arctic and Antarctic will contribute to additional sea level. Mountain ice and snow, if they all melt completely, will contribute to the rising sea level; but not the entire mountains made up of rocks and soil. Mr. Gore may need to re-do his math or review his accounting principles.

It is easy to label those whose views on climate change are different from the prevailing ideas put forward by those who claim that climate change is the world’s biggest existential threat. Climate change deniers are also called by many other names: ignorant, uneducated, ill-informed on the science of climate change, uncaring, heartless, selfish individuals, etc.

Arguing over the science of climate change does not present a simple straightforward platform.

There is not enough data because even if we go beyond the past century, it will not be enough from the context of earth’s history. Often, proponents of climate change go back or begin their perspective only from the time of the industrial revolution. Part of the reason is that that was the starting line for when carbon began to emerge as a polluting agent.

Climate change proponents, to use their labeling system, are historical deniers if they fail to acknowledge the far longer history of the planet – multiple-glaciation alternating with global warming over thousands and thousands of years.  We must consider where we are today in the history of the planet. The last ice age lowered the sea level around the world when much of the fresh water was frozen and concentrated in and around the poles. The islands of Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, Indonesia and many others were connected to the mainland by so called land bridges. That is how early humans and all other organisms reached and colonized those places. When sea level rose as polar ice caps melted the land bridges disappeared under oceans, separating these island-countries as we know them today. Please read the quote below:

“At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth's history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!). Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago”.

Imagine a stair case that is 11,000 years long.  The industrial revolution began in 1820, or maybe as late as 1840.  So, if we reckon the global warming story from that period, it will be as if we just stepped from an imaginary platform on the side and hopped onto that stair case less than 2-1/2 centuries ago, ignoring our story before that. That’s when we began using fossil fuels but already for over 10,000 years earlier the entire earth was emerging and warming up from the last active ice age. We are merely a part of the natural processes that encompass millions and millions of years where organisms adapted to the changing environment. Adaptation defines what we are and how we look today. We reached the top of the food chain when we began to lose much of our body and facial hair so we can take advantage of a warming climate. Organisms that did not adapt became extinct. Or, if we go back farther than that, the mighty dinosaurs died off when they could not adapt to the global cooling after an asteroid impact 67 million years ago. Relatively few dinosaur species actually died outright from that impact that covered merely 110 miles across. Global cooling created by all the impact dust that blocked much of the sunlight was what killed the big dinosaurs. There is undeniable scientific evidence to back it up. Mammals with their fur and live births and extended period of parental care, thus passing on knowledge for far longer time made for superior adaptation.  And we are here today because of global warming.

All of these arguments will be for naught if we do not suggest an alternative.

1.       If carbon build up is the concern then we should be developing the proliferation of the eater of carbon – trees and all plants. Money and resources for a global campaign to plant more trees will be far less than how much had been spent arguing against the use of fossil fuels and endorsement of alternative forms of energy. Trees for building materials and for food production are clearly the low lying fruit (pun intended) that will have far ranging benefits, including flood control, that will truly have relatively more immediate global reach, specially to third world countries. If only a fraction of time and energy spent on climate change campaigns were on planting trees, the planet can be a tad cooler.  Imagine if just a little more of the sun’s energy were absorbed by trees and plants around the world, while gobbling up carbon and exhaling oxygen in return.

2.       We can continue with alternative energy program that works, discard the white elephant projects, but nuclear energy should remain a viable option as well. In fact, it is more critical against limited supply of fossil fuels.  It is more consistent, if not even more reliable, and unhindered where wind power and sunlight can be interrupted by weather. We are aware of the issues dealing with the byproduct of fission reactors and potential accidents (quite low now due to modern safeguards). Make note of this: On top of existing reactors operating worldwide, China has 23 under construction, 33 planned; Russia has 11 and 14, respectively; India 4 and 20; Japan 2 and 12; S. Korea 6 and 6; USA 1 and 9, putting America under a clear energy disadvantage.  Fusion power – the energy source of the universe – should be a priority for alternative power source. The universe had been using it for 13.7 billion years. We should be funding its research more than we are spending on electric cars.  Speaking of electric cars, we should keep in mind that no matter how much we increase the use of electric cars in the U.S., its impact on carbon footprint reduction is negligible because 81 per cent of electricity (from which all electric cars get their charge) comes from oil, coal and natural gas – all fossil fuels.

 

3.       Efficiency in electrical usage by way of more efficiency in electric motors that run the machines, low wattage high output lamps; more energy-saving homes and offices and factories, etc. deserve more research funding and should be ongoing until more than 90% efficiency is achieved.

4.       Here’s a radical idea. Much of fossil fuel today is used by the commuting public – wasted on the road to and from work. While public transportation works in many places, there is a lot more wasted by individuals driving, often singly, their own vehicles. All kinds of scheme had been tried that worked for a while, like carpooling, but we know the best way is still to cut the distance between each commute. City planners and residential visionaries should get together to make the ideal condition: Place every worker’s residence close to where they work. Every morning in every city we observe this: vehicles jamming every artery towards each metropolis but make note there are vehicles too, perhaps not as heavily but still quite significant, leaving the city areas outward the suburbs. From a much higher view we see vehicles going to and fro, much of them commuting from homes to their places of work. An algorithm ought to be developed in work/residential placements, matching people to their work location(without sacrificing lifestyle: amenities and affordability and needs like school and day care, etc.) , with the aim of cutting commute time and distance.  Ideally, people’s residences are matched to their places of work; a matching program in place so as to make that a permanent fluid activity by and between human resources, city planners and home builders and residential managers. Like I said, this is a radical idea but it should be part of the conversation platform where more pipe dream suggestions had been brought up before.


This might be inconvenient to ecovangelists but they ought not be left to monopolize the conversation.

  

For All in Tents and Porpoises

A funny story – it was funny then, to me, anyway – that I keep recalling it every now and then, went like this:

There was a camp ground for boy scouts by the beach close to the sea where dolphins also come by each morning.  The camp director actually fed the dolphins at about the same time the boy scouts have their breakfast.  Each morning the camp director would announce breakfast to the boys and calling out to the dolphins with, “For All in Tents and porpoises…“, to come and get it.  Corny now, perhaps, but it was a clever pun I can’t shake off.  I understand it later became a title of a funny book. 

The origin of the pun is of course, the phrase, “For all intents and purposes”. I will for a minute try to make light of something that has become part of a national conversation that is taken so seriously, despite the fact that it borders on hilarity if not outrageously ridiculous.

What is the intent and purpose of ESPN pulling out a sports commentator from covering a football game because his name is Robert Lee, so as not to offend some segments of the listening audience or fans?  If there is a height to stupidity, this is the Mount Everest of the absurd and empty headedness that is usually associated with political correctness run amok.  If we go by the Malay word origin of “amok or amuk”, we just witnessed an uncontrolled social homicidal rage by these institutions, such as sports organizations like ESPN, that have no business getting involved in political discourses.  Unfortunately, sports these days are also a media vehicle and, as such, they are pulling the same band wagon filled with anything and everything that has to do with political correctness.  Robert Lee, the unfortunate sportscaster of Asian descent, is about as far from Robert E. Lee’s family tree as tamarind is from blueberry.

What is the intent and purpose of removing confederate statues from public parks and sites today?

There are voices now clamoring for removing the Mt. Rushmore Monuments of four presidents because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners.  I can hear Abraham Lincoln speaking to the other three granite faces that are on that mountain.  Abraham Lincoln once had one of the best comebacks to critics who called him “two faced”.  He said, “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?” I am imagining him telling the other three, “Well, if they succeed in blasting us out of this mountain, then I wish they’d make another one somewhere and then perhaps I will have my other face on it”.

When we visited the Gettysburg National Military Park a couple of years ago everyone who was there felt nothing but respect and solemn admiration for those who died there.  It was a war that by Providential Grace led to the unification of a country that was about to be divided. The price for unity was paid for by blood from both sides.

Let’s imagine now if all the Confederate statues were removed from that national park.  Many of the statues were far apart from each other to signify where soldiers and officers may have fallen.  I can hear it now as one Union statue yells to another, “Is it just me imagining this? Where are the other dead whom we fought with?  Did we win this war without anyone to oppose us?  What was the intent and purpose of the war?”  Yes, Gettysburg will be meaningless if the story is not told in full.  It loses much of its significance when half of its history is erased. But, what would be the intent and purpose of doing so? If we are still arguing about the civil war and slavery a century and a half later when much of the healing had gone on, wounds almost all covered with dry scabs, numb to the touch for much of the nation, what intent and purpose is served by statue removals, other than coercing collective amnesia.  The statues had been there a while, silent, vigil, unmoving and un-intrusive to the daily activities of people, generations of them walking by and often oblivious to the presence of these inanimate objects which, like all open air statues, suffer from the ignominy  brought upon them by discourteous pigeons.  Is it not enough that they suffer through that every day? It is not enough for these folks, mostly young, whose moral compass is likely guided by social media than a deep sense of history or respect for what this country had gone through.

What is tragic about all of these is that the obsession and the compulsion to act on statue removal and attempts at revision of history are from a narrow slice of the population that seems to suffer from self-induced insanity. It is as if they woke up one morning and they started hearing voices.  It has to be that because so much of what this country had gone through is well accounted for and many generations were fine with it.  What ill, what injury, what consternation did just occur to bring about this sudden tinge of self-righteousness?  Is it perhaps a failure of higher education, where professors, some of them, more so from the so called liberal colleges, are indoctrinating rather than teaching?

How tragic it is that Columbus is also on the historical chopping block. First of all, if old Christopher didn’t show up someone else would have.  If they prefer the New World was never opened to European explorers, are they prepared to criticize the progress achieved here today?  Their ability to express their rights to protest is guaranteed by a new nation that took all pains to make sure it is in its Constitution. That nation was born from that discovery by somebody who now, sadly, is likely to be associated with mattress sales or extra discounts at department stores. Yet, his name needs to be expunged, his statues, yes, countless inanimate objects scattered all over the country, removed. For what intent and purpose?

At some point, we are heading towards a downward spiral weighted down by political correctness. Political correctness has become a battering ram against an imaginary or imagined harm caused by the creation of events in the course of developing a civilization. We are not looking forward if our attention is towards what is already behind us.  Are we going to let these modern day Don Quixotes fight these windmills of their imagination, believing that a magic eraser will actually clear history in order to create a better Utopian narrative, free of sad, bad memories?

What would be the intent and purpose of that?

Noli Me Tangere

The Latin phrase - it is a complete sentence actually - literally means “Do Not Touch Me”.  It is the title of the first of two novels written by Jose Rizal – Philippine national hero – that helped to spark and sustain the revolution against the 300-year Spanish rule over the 7,000 island archipelago just off the mainland of Southeast Asia.  Tragically, Jose Rizal was tried and found guilty of treason against the Spanish-ruled government.  He was executed by firing squad on December 30, 1896.  If the execution was delayed for just a bit, his story would have taken a different turn. In less than a year and a half, the Spanish American War was declared on April, 1898 and on May 1, just days after, Commodore George Dewey sailed into and entered Manila Bay to engage the Spanish armed forces, or what’s left of it - to a quick capitulation. The Spanish American War was over that summer in July, 1898.  It was a very short war indeed, for which the new American democracy, then relatively still a political infant itself, just barely over a century old, was given the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines – the spoils of an uncontested war. 300 years under Spanish colonial rule versus a mere 50 years as a U.S. territory made for a glaring contrast.  Of lesser importance in the general scheme of things but quite personal to me is that a century after the pivotal event it gave me the ability to write this in English.

Noli Me Tangere

“In the catalogue of human ills there is to be found a cancer so malignant that the least touch inflames it and causes agonizing pains; afflicted with such a cancer, a social cancer, has your dear image appeared to me, when, for my own heart’s ease or to compare you with others, I have sought, in the centers of modern civilization, to call you to mind.  …

To this end, I shall endeavor to show your condition, faithfully and ruthlessly.  I shall lift a corner of the veil which shrouds the disease, sacrificing to the truth everything, even self-love – for, as your son, your defects and weaknesses are also mine.”

 --- Europe, 1886   Jose Rizal

I re-read the novel once more, perhaps for a third or fourth time since high school. It was originally written in Spanish, printed in Berlin, at Rizal’s personal expense, and distributed mainly in Manila in mid- 1860’s.  It had since been translated into other languages, including Tagalog, but as luck would have it from what I already described from three paragraphs above, I was able to read it in English. The story, obviously, has not changed, but my perspective had and I view it differently now.  What is hard to believe is that its relevance is, to me, even more valid if not terribly more pressing, not just for the Philippines but for every country that is in dire strait presently. It is more so for countries that had in their past a prolonged subjugation of their people by a foreign entity, for far too long.

Jose Rizal, if I were to surmise, used “Noli Me Tangere”, as a plea by a nation, by a people, begging not to be touched  because it was suffering from a cancer that was metastasizing, thus much too painful to the touch.  It was a social cancer, a political malady, a moral disease that was gnawing at the very cultural fabric of a people under stress and too sick to even realize it was gravely ill. Juxtapose that analogy around the world today and we see that in places like Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras and Cambodia, and every place where hidden beneath a frail façade, under a semblance of order, where a functioning government or society seems to function well with a calm exterior, there is a cancer from within.

As in the actual physiological form of cancer, the national maladies come in various virulent forms. Similarly, there is no vaccine for it and the task to fight it is not short of total excision. It is also very difficult to detect.

We see these warnings uttered over a century ago, albeit from an obscure writer from an obscure land.  The examples are as varied as the carriers of virulence come in many forms.  Just recently, America had been gripped by a condition that if we are not careful could metastasize into something horribly deadly.  If slavery was a cancer, the civil war was a raging battle to excise it and the country had begun to heal beginning at the turn of and through the mid-20^th century, that went into remission. For a while there, perhaps out of a hopeful longing, most of the nation see only the scabs of many wounds all over the country. Then perhaps the scabs had plateaued and only slightly noticeable.  Events of late, particularly in Charlottesville, VA, some sectors of our society succeeded in picking at the scabs.  The scales are beginning to unravel and it is seen to bleed.  The blood will divide the nation which will carry with it errant cancer cells that can spread once more. There does not seem to be any agreement in how to stop the bleeding, even as everyone seems to agree that re-opening the wounds will only cause pain, and there is no predicting what salve will work, let alone if there is any willingness from all sides to offer relief.  Again, if we are not too careful, the scabs will re-open wounds once more and we may find the cancer too painful to the touch.  Then, we will all be begging, “Noli Me Tangere”, as Jose Rizal once said.

The Spanish-American War had a handful of profound turning points for the Filipino people, not the least of which was the unshackling of three-hundred years of bondage, the dramatic improvement in education, the sudden surge in literacy, and exposure to modern knowledge. BUT, it was clear, as had also happened elsewhere, the people went from one colonizer to the next.  Granted, relatively speaking, the natives were now handled with softer gloves but they were virtually a colony once more, though legally a U.S. “territory”. Places like Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, even Hawaii, were protected territorial entities as well.  History books are vague about whether the Philippine Islands were a U.S. Colony until its independence on July 4, 1946. Let us set that aside because prior to all of those events, stormier ones preceded the history before 1898, three to four centuries earlier.

This is not a knock on the countries today that were involved in the colonization of half of the world then (between 1400-1500) but we must mention them by name as part of the historical record, adding quickly that today’s population are not the same ones then; in fact, we are addressing entirely different governments responsible for the colonies 3-4 centuries ago.  But we will be remiss not to identify, for lack of a better word, “the common denominator”.

The Philippines, from one side of the globe, had one thing in common with countries halfway from the other side.  The maladies they suffered, the subjugation of the native peoples, the superficial progress and their present day symptoms of trouble, can be traced to the colonization by Spain and Portugal of all of South America and the Caribbean and of course The Philippines. Then the French, the Belgian, the Dutch and British colonies made up the rest, covering the other parts of Asia and Africa.  Some countries fared better than others, post-colonial period, and historians and political scientists will agree or disagree with the how and why but the fact of the matter is the one nagging question: How come colonized countries had always suffered from stunted growth – economically and politically? If we run our fingers on the globe, starting from Mexico, southerly to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, all the way to Venezuela, Brazil and Chile, then from Algeria to Libya, Chad, Sudan to the Congo to South Africa, we see a pattern of free people that have a hard time governing themselves after their independence. If dictatorship or flawed elections, coups and violent turnover of government power were not the method, corruption was and still is the primer beneath the exterior paint that outwardly shows a people deeply reliant on a confused culture, a devotion to religion, but an unparalleled compliancy.

These colonized people were not properly prepared by a rushing exit of the colonizers.  Often the exits were forced by revolution combined with a weakened resolve by the colonizers either out of guilt or by its own internal upheavals at home.

BUT, we should set that all aside.  It is part of history. We learn from it and not repeat it. Looking back at the past does not move any nation one foot forward towards a better future. The social, economic and political cancer does not go away completely. Instead it only goes into remission. It stays hidden within the folds of human nature.  It calls for an even stronger resolve because cancer cells now can cross oceans and over connected lands.  A cancer cell hunts and destroys the good cells in order to perpetuate itself, to flourish and reproduce. If we allow ourselves to be willing hosts and be the welcoming recipients with our complacency, political correctness, unabashed but divisive political beliefs, and the unwillingness to recognize the symptoms, then we will split ourselves while the cancer keeps subdividing to make more malignant cells.  If we allow that, then soon we are only setting ourselves up to scream, “Noli me Tangere”.

{Post note: Noli Me Tangere is a downloadable PDF in various translations. I read the one translated by Leon Maria Guerrero who, as a Filipino himself, did a fine job of converting the original Spanish into words relatable to every Filipino citizen today. The other translations were all superbly done as well.}

  

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.