One Hundred and Eighty Three

I had a Major Amberson moment this morning while reading an article about tholin. 

Tholin is a porridge of carbon-based organic compounds cooked up by cosmic rays.  Although it’s only been synthesized in laboratories, scientists believe it also forms naturally because it apparently exists in abundance on all the planets in our solar system except our own, and Mars.  Ours is the only planet that we know has life, and scientists believe Mars may have also had life in the past, so they think tholin may be the raw material necessary for the chemical processes that give rise to life.

Scientists have succeeded in growing soil bacteria using laboratory-synthesized tholine, but they say it no longer occurs naturally on this planet due to the Great Oxygenation Event.  I wonder if that's true.

Life on this planet consists mostly of bacteria.  Most of them live deep below its surface, so presumably they're anærobic.  If their environment lacks oxygen, why couldn't it contain tholin?

Tholin may be panspermia, giving rise to life wherever it occurs, if conditions are right.  But although life on other planets would probably also be carbon based, it's unlikely to resemble us in other respects because we have yet to find another planet with the same conditions as ours.

Astronomers keep announcing the discovery of exoplanets similar to ours, where life, if it has arisen there, could be, should be, must be similar to us.  Or so they tell us.  But these exoplanets are never really similar to ours.

They’re almost never in the Goldilocks zone, as ours is.  That is usually occupied by gas giants.  Even when they are in the Goldilocks zone, their planetary system may not have a gas giant ‘guardian’ in the right location, or the planetary system itself may not be in the galactic habitable zone.

Not only does our planetary system seem unique, but within that system our planet seems almost unique.  Despite our system’s abundance of tholin, only one of its planets, and possibly one other, has given rise to life.  And even here ærobic multi-celled organisms like us live only in a thin layer on the surface of a world populated mostly by anærobic bacteria.      

Some scientists attribute the apparent paucity of life in the universe to its youth.  It appears that at the center of each galaxy is a black hole, and every black hole should have a corresponding white hole, spewing out material as the black hole sucks it in.  The fact that scientists haven’t yet detected any white holes, but only deduced their existence from black holes, leads them to believe the universe is still too young for its black holes to have given rise to white holes. 

It occurs to me that a black/white hole (they’re obviously not two separate things, but the beginning and end of a process; what we think of as things are often better understood as processes) may be a failed singularity, in the same way that a gas giant is a failed star.  Just as gas giants are too small to suck in enough material to initiate nuclear fusion and become stars, so black holes are too small to suck in enough material to become singularities, so they become white holes instead – or they will eventually.

If our universe is an organism in the same way that Lovelock said our world is an organism, it may be that universal stupidity, which seems to be its defining characteristic, is merely immaturity. 

One Hundred and Eighty Two

γνῶθι σεαυτόν, said the oracle.  Know thyself.  I know that I am nothing. 

Cogito, ergo sum, said Descartes.  I think, therefore I am.  I think of nothing, therefore I am nothing.

Told that the oracle had called him the wisest man in Athens, Socrates said he knew nothing.

The wisest men have always said that what we think we know is false.  This world of things is an illusion that veils the real world.

The wisest Westerners have always said that we alone are real in this world of illusion: souls trapped in bodies, or minds trapped in matter.  We mistake it for the real world as dreamers mistake their dreams for reality.

Do dreamers ever mistake their dreams for reality, and ask themselves, as Chuang Tzu said he did, whether they are men dreaming they’re butterflies or butterflies dreaming they’re men?  I’ve always known when I was dreaming.

The wisest Easterners have always said that the self which dreams, whether it dreams it’s a man or a butterfly, is also an illusion, part of the dream.  I’ve always watched myself, the self in my dreams, as I'd watch an actor in a play.  My life never seemed real to me.

When I was a child, I’d sometimes wake to find myself lying on my bedroom floor, with my mother bending over me.  The first time it happened, she said I’d been crying “Help them!” in my sleep.

I stopped sleepwalking, but for years I woke in the middle of the night, the sudden silence of my bedroom making me aware that, a second ago, my head had been filled with cries.  Now I no longer dream.

The world sleeps, and from time to time it dreams.  Life is a dream, and too much living becomes a nightmare.

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving 
Whatever gods there be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river 
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

One Hundred and Eighty One

Leonard died.

Why has this upset me so much?  He looked forward to his death as much as I do to mine.  And he had a good death—he lay down on the couch for a nap, and didn’t wake up—unlike most of the deaths I’ve witnessed, so why has this upset me so much?

Everything comes to an end.  It used to console me to know our end is not the end, and the world will go on without us.  But this is no longer true.

Leonard died a day after Notre Dame burned.  I’d been reading about it, and it left me depressed.

Victor Hugo made Notre Dame a symbol of France.  Individual Frenchmen and women died, but Notre Dame endured.  Even Hitler, who ordered the destruction of Coventry and Rheims, failed to burn Notre Dame.  But indifference to what Notre Dame represented succeeded where Hitler failed.

Leonard built something as great as Notre Dame: a family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  He talked about them constantly, and lived for them.  But he died alone because they're as indifferent to their history as the French are to theirs.

We’ve all forgotten our past, and live only for the present because we know we have no future.
 

One Hundred and Eighty

Lorsque au soleil couchant les rivières sont roses,

Et qu’un tiède frisson court sur les champs de blé,
Un conseil d’être heureux semble sortir des choses
Et monter vers le cœur troublé;
Un conseil de goûter le charme d’être au monde
Cependant qu’on est jeune et que le soir est beau,
Car nous nous en allons, comme s’en va cette onde:
Elle à la mer—nous au tombeau!