Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
What if we were it? What if we were the only intelligent life in the universe? Maybe there could be single cell organisms on a planet or a moon somewhere, but nowhere is there octopus, dog, dolphin, or chimpanzee intelligence, much less human intelligence anywhere beyond our tiny blue planet.
There would not be a single beautiful sunrise; Not a single work of art; Not a single note of music beyond our solar system. With no intelligent observer beauty, creativity, and appreciation of sound would not exist. The universe would still exist, but would anything have meaning? Anything?
Whether or not we are the only ones, we are pretty special… we have consciousness, we have thought. We appreciate beautiful things, and we can laugh, love, contemplate, create, feel, and flourish. We can also hate, harm, anger, embarrass, and injure. But that would be silly when you consider that we really might be the only ones. If there is nothing else intelligent out there, then the sum of human appreciation of everything is what gives the universe its meaning.
I like to think that the universe is actually teaming with intelligent life, but I also think we should live an existence as if we are the only ones… and live with meaning as if what we do as a species is all that matters in the universe.
Sometimes I remind myself that we are all animals. We come from a heritage of nonverbal primates, some of whom were more like orangutans and chimpanzees than modern man. I remind myself this when we are tribal; when we fight over land; and when we are cruel and violent towards each other.
Our frontal lobes are bigger, we have the power of speech, but we are still animals. Posturing, aggression, and violence are tools rooted in our DNA as mechanisms to protect us and our community from outside threats.
I remind myself of this when I wonder how we still fight to protect borders, made up lines on a map to mark the territories of different groups of us. I remind myself of this when men are violent towards women. I remind myself of this when we hoard resources while others are left without. This is not humanity at its finest, this is humans as apex predators with an alpha male dominance hierarchy.
If this wasn’t the case, the world would be more peaceful, more equitable, and less damaged. These are things we must strive for, despite our animal instincts.
I was hoping to see the launch of Artemis 1 to the moon this morning, originally scheduled for a few minutes ago (5:33am), but it seems there are delays due to issues with one of the engines. I’m fascinated by the idea of humans going back to the moon. 12 people have stood on this celestial body before… 12 people have left the earth and have stood on the moon looking back at planet earth. In the next few years that number will change. In the next hundred years there could be people living on the moon. There could even be a child born on the moon.
We aren’t going to see space travel beyond our galaxy any time soon. Voyager 1 was launched almost 45 years ago. At a distance of 156.61 AU (23.429 billion km; 14.558 billion mi) from Earth as of July 31, 2022, it is the most distant humanmade object from Earth… and it is less than one light day away, while the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away. There needs to be a quantum leap in technology before a human leaves our solar system.
So in the meantime, we have our own galaxy to explore and it only makes sense that the place we explore first is our moon. We may not be able to travel to the stars, but our moon is within our reach.
I was reminded yesterday that there are a lot of good people in this world. I’m not going to share the thing that led me to this, it’s not my story to tell. But the world seems pretty messed up right now. There is strife, upset, and war dominating our news feeds. And yesterday the kindness of strangers made a difference for a person I care about.
In our day to day experience we meet so many good people. We work with good people. We walk by good people. We spend our free time with good people. I watched a news clip about a Canadian woman who flew to the Ukraine to help support displaced orphans. Good people.
There are so many good people in this world. You are probably one of them. Thank you. And yes, I’m talking to YOU. Not some other person, you. Thank you for being inherently good. It makes a difference to the people you are surrounded by… and thus it makes a difference in the world.
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years, and disappeared in a mass extinction event 65 million years ago. Early hominids, the ancestors of early man only showed up 10 million years ago. If you were to draw a timeline from the first dinosaur to today, then the last surviving dinosaurs are closer in time to humans than they are to the first dinosaurs.
I don’t know why I grew up assuming that humans and dinosaurs co-existed long ago, but give me a break… I was only 55-60 million years off! Maybe it was drawings of humans and wooly mammoths? Maybe it was cartoons? But it’s a real time warp when you think about how long dinosaurs ruled the earth, and how short of a time humans have existed.
It’s even weirder to think of the time it took from the first steam engine to the time when our industrial lives started to threaten the well-being of our planet. Is this what intelligence life forms do? We’ve just been looking at time in millions of years, but the first steam engine was built just over 400 years ago.
Humans have been on this planet for such a short time, yet we place so much attention on ourselves and our significance, as conscious beings. This one species, on an insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, at an insignificant time in the existence of the universe.
Last night I went for a walk with my wife. Minutes from home we were walking on a quiet, empty street that doesn’t have sidewalks. Then a car approached from in front of us. We started to move to the side of the road, and noticed car lights coming from behind us as well. The cars crossed paths right where we were on the edge of the road, having had to slow down to cautiously make space for us and the other car. Then we continued our walk with no cars approaching us from either way until we arrived home.
I find it fascinating how we seem to be drawn, pulled to intersecting points with other people. For the amount of times someone walks by our house, or the front of my school when I arrive before any students, I’m amazed how often I have to wait for a pedestrian to walk cross the driveway before I can make the turn… amazed that as I wait, I can see no other pedestrians for an entire block.
In a car you are turning left and must wait for the one car coming the other way to pass.
At a shopping plaza you go to open a door to a store and the one other person in sight is coming through the door the other way.
On a path in a park, you are walking faster than the people in front of you, and as you go to pass them, other people are approaching from the other way crowding the path at your takeover point.
I think we find ourselves at these intersections at a rate that is greater than probability would suggest… The likelihood of such intersections happen far more than just by chance. Like magnets passing one another, there is a pull towards others, an unseen force that draws us into each other’s path. It isn’t a case of bad timing, it’s not that we are unlucky and forced to slow down, wait, or squeeze by someone else. It’s actually just the opposite. We naturally seek each other out on some unconscious level. We are drawn to human intersections.
We have an inherent bias that we believe things will happen in our lifetime, and conspiracy theorists are far more biased in this area than others. The next big event will bring the end of the world as we know it.
From the Bay of Pigs all the way to the Reagan era, World War III was inevitable. Y2K was going to send us back to the Middle Ages. Meteors, super volcanos, earthquakes, super floods, and yes, viruses, are all threats to humanity that will be the end of civilization as we know it…. apocalyptic threats to the human race that will happen any day now.
But the weird part is that somehow these are inevitable to happen in ‘our’ lifetime. We will bare witness. We will be the last generation to know what normal was.
Normal.
What is that? Normal as in a life of traveling by horse and buggy? Normal as in women can’t vote? Normal as in smoking in restaurants? Normal as in life before indoor plumbing, or before social media?
Our world advances in extremely fast and innovative ways, but somehow the human race will find its demise in our lifetime… or so conspiracy theorists believe. People will prepare for the end days, but they won’t live in the now.
“If I hold up this sign that says, ‘The world will end tomorrow’ long enough, one day I will be right.”
…that’s assuming the end will happen in your lifetime… but it probably won’t. We will see so many changes in our lifetime, but so will our grandkids… and maybe they will see the end times, but the simple reality is that it’s unlikely to happen in ours.
Humans, the earth, or the universe probably need a few more generations to really screw things up for us, for our planet, and odds are that this will happen after everyone living today is long dead. The end might be near, but it’s farther away than our short lives.
It’s 10:30 pm and I’m sitting in my hot tub. My phone is in a clear waterproof bag and I’m sitting on the edge with my feet in, to end my session. Usually I listen to podcasts or my book while enjoying my hot tub, but today I put Greta Van Fleet’s second album on and looked up at the sky. The moon is out and bright enough to give me a shadow.
It’s nice to see the night sky, stars, and moon since my last several hot tubs were all under rain or heavy clouds. As I stared up at it, it dawned on me that it is very unlikely that I was the only person on earth looking at the moon at that moment. How many of ‘us’ were taking a moment to look at the same moon? It’s a simple question with an impossible to know answer.
We all race through this stark, empty, and insignificant part of a truly vast universe on a tiny planet… together. The next time you look up at the moon ask yourself, “Who else might be looking at the moon right now?” Do this and the world seems smaller, more connected.
Yesterday I spent a good part of the day inside my own head. I don’t know if I’m the only one that experiences this sensation (or rather lack of sensation) or if it’s a quirk of the human condition we all experience? I was able to do my job, and I could interact with others, but I felt more like an observer than a participant. I wasn’t fully present.
This isn’t a headspace that I particularly enjoy. It is one where I don’t feel fully engaged in the world. I feel like a visitor in a foreign land, a stranger that vaguely understands my surroundings. I have to work to stay focused on a conversation because my thinking is too loud but not terribly interesting. I feel somewhat disengaged, not just from others but from myself.
Thankfully, the feeling is gone this morning. I don’t like to spend too much time ‘there’. It’s like the world outside my head is a movie that I must watch, but don’t really want to. Reading this now I feel like this should be titled head-case rather than headspace and wonder if someone reading this will recommend psychotherapy… but I also suspect that others will fully understand this experience. Is it really just me, or do others have these moments too?
I imagine for some people this can feel scary. For others, comfortable. For some they can put themselves here, for others they can’t leave. For me it is infrequent, it is not something I can talk my way out of, and it seldom lasts more than a day. It’s just a headspace that I sometimes get into… a mode of observing my own participation in the world around me, yet not feeling present.
It is wishful thinking to hope that people will not be fooled again by QAnon. This is a sad but true statement. The reality is that people are natural puzzle solvers who seek to make connections. We want to make sense of the world, and this leaves some people vulnerable to suggestions that there are connections that are not really there.
Our brains extrapolate, they naturally extend ideas. This has made us incredibly inventive and creative people. This has not helped us distinguish fact from fiction. This is where extrapolation goes very wrong. I think the problem is that while our brains are seeking to extrapolate and extend ideas, they are stimulated towards possible connections and simultaneously let down our bullshit detectors. Our brains really struggle to seek new connections while at the same time make good judgements about those connections we are seeking.
Have you ever played 2 Truths and a Lie?
Try to pick out my lie:
1. I’ve illegally bungee jumped off of a local bridge.
2. I cheated on, and successfully passed, the LSAT.
3. I stole a neighbour’s car when I was 17, dented the fender, and put it back without him knowing I took it.
Which one did you pick?
I know this doesn’t paint a very nice picture of me. I wanted you to see my dark side. Now before you even pick the lie, you are probably extrapolating things about me and the kind of person I really am. You also probably extrapolated that statement #3 was a truth because it is more believable and more detailed than the other two.
However, here is a strategy I used: I told 3 lies. In one easy step, I could’ve convinced you that 2 lies are true. It’s that easy to convince someone of a lie… or in this case 2 lies.
I’ve never bungee jumped, never wrote the LSAT, and never stolen a car. But had I not told you that, had I picked one as the lie, you probably would have believed the other two. What’s scary is, the more you know me, and the more credibility I have, the easier it is for me to fool you.
Here is an example in the media: This is how people like Tucker Carlson can dupe viewers over and over again. In this article, Fox News lawyers argued in court that Carlson is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’
They argued this in a libel lawsuit where Carlson was being sued and, “The Court concludes that the statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate.” Fox News told the court that this is what Tucker Carlson does, he doesn’t report news… and the judge agreed and they won the case. Think about this! Fox News said Tucker Carlson’s show is not news, but just exaggerated opinion.
However, he is broadcasted on a ‘News’ show, that gives him credibility. To a fan of his: He is in ‘your’ living room with you 5 nights a week. And he feeds you tiny little, often convincing lies… or should I say ‘exaggerated opinions’. Next you go to even less reliable websites and you hear the Tucker Carlson lies being repeated. Other lies are added to the things you know are true because you heard it on Fox ‘News’ from your buddy Tucker Carlson, and you extrapolate that these must be true too.
That’s right Dave is a car thief, oh and he cheated on the LSAT’s, and I seem to recall that he illegally jumped off a bridge too… The other interesting thing about our memory is that we don’t often remember what the lie was and we can easily put the lie in with the other ‘truths’.
Some people eventually catch on.
Many others will get fooled again. It’s sad but true.
