Tag Archives: life

Not a question of first or rare or distant

When thinking about whether we are alone in the universe or not, it seems to me that it isn’t a question of whether we (intelligent life) are rare? Or are we first/early compared to other intelligent life? Or are we simply too far away? But rather a question of enduring. Are intelligent civilizations enduring enough to travel beyond their solar system or galaxy?

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Scientists today are looking for life in our very own solar system. It’s possible, in our vast universe, that our quest for life beyond earth may be as close as Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It would probably b\e microbes, too small to see without a microscope, but that would still suggest that life is way more abundant than even most scientists would have imagined just a few years ago.

But I’m more a believer that the reason we don’t see alien life is for two reasons, the first being distance. Quite simply, even the nearest galaxy to our Milky way is astronomically far away.  “The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km (25,000 light years) from the Sun. The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is the next closest , at 662,000,000,000,000,000 km (70,000 light years) from the Sun.” If intelligent life started sending messages to us from the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy 10,000 years ago, it would still take 15,000 years to reach us if they could do the unlikely task of sending that message at the speed of light… and the crazy thing is, why would they send a message our way? 10,000 years ago there was no evidence coming from earth that we are a worthy planet to send a message to!

And the second reason we don’t see any intelligent life ‘out there’ in the universe is The Great Filter. Either it is extremely rare and difficult to get beyond simple, unintelligent multicellular life, or civilizations themselves getting to multi solar system travel capabilities are extremely rare. This second point is my belief. Civilizations are not enduring enough. It took Homo sapiens 300,000 years to become a scientifically intelligent life form that attempted to leave our planet and explore our solar system. During this time, we’ve been brutal to each other. We’ve created weapons of mass destruction and quite literally drawn lines in the sand to keep us separate from our brothers and sisters.

We’ve created religions that don’t like each other and think all other Gods are unworthy of following. We’ve created borders that keep ‘others’ out. We’ve created governments that are more interested in power than in caring for fellow humans. We’ve created corporations that worry more about profit than about caring for our planet. All the while we also create technologies that threaten the longevity of humanity. As technological innovations occur, it becomes easier for individuals and small groups to terrorize larger groups. It becomes easier for a single unstable person to threaten larger and larger populations around our planet.

What happens 50 years from now when a kid can create a devastating bomb or virus in their basement with readily available resources? Is that a world where we continue to advance technologically? Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said: “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. In other words, we will destroy ourselves and become far more primitive, much less advanced. Imagine our world with no power grid, and no internet. How long would it take to get back to where we are now? What if the next pandemic is far more deadly and has us living like subsistence farmers, keeping ourselves in tiny communities, afraid of outsiders. How many hundreds of years would we be set back, and would we be trying to explore the cosmos when survival is our greatest concern?

I tend to be an optimist, and I’m excited about the future ahead of us. I think my kids have the potential to live healthy, productive, and cognitively sound lives past 100 years of age. I think there will be universal basic income for every human alive, and that things like childhood starvation and extreme poverty could come to an end. Technological advances could make us live healthier, longer, more fulfilling and creative lives. But I also fear that greed, power, and beliefs in bad ideas could corrupt us, and undermine our potential. Are we 50, 100, or 1,000 years away from ravaging our planet or at least the human race? Or are we a species that will populate other parts of our galaxy?

If I was an alien who came to explore earth today, I’m not sure I’d report back to my planet the the inhabitants are intelligent? I’m not sure I’d consider humans technologically advanced enough to seek contact? I’d be conveying that earthlings are as likely to destroy themselves as they are to send someone out of their own solar system. I’d send a message home and say, ‘Let’s leave them alone for now and see what they can do in another couple hundred of their earth years?‘

‘Let’s see if this race of humans will endure?‘

Inconceivably vast

Webb’s First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The deep-field photograph, which covers a tiny area of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is centered on SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Volans. Thousands of galaxies are visible in the image, some as old as 13 billion years.The image is the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken. Captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the image was revealed to the public by NASA on 11 July 2022. (Wikipedia)

It’s too hard to fathom just how big the universe is. The image below only shows a few stars, they are the bright spots with 6 flares coming off of them… a by-product of the James Webb telescope’s design. The rest of the bright spots are galaxies. Galaxies that each hold billions or trillions of stars.

And if you held your pinky up to the night sky you would completely cover the area of the sky that this photo covers with a sliver of a finger nail.

We are so insignificantly tiny, and our Milky Way galaxy is so insignificantly placed in the universe. We just can’t conceive of just how inconceivably vast our universe is, and how insignificantly tiny our solar system is.

It’s too much to comprehend. And yet, here we are. So significant to each other, so connected to our planet. We get to live lives rich in mystery and wonder.

What other life is out there, or was out there, some time in the 13 billion years of our universe’s existence? Could alien life comprehend our existence? We’ll probably never know.

If there was life in one of these distant galaxies right now, we wouldn’t it know for millions or billions of years. The light we see in that photo above are from the past. To put it into perspective, if they were looking at light from our planet, they would be seeing light emitted from before dinosaurs roamed the earth… in other words they would be looking at prehistoric life on a planet with single cell organisms or perhaps no life at all… yet.

It’s too hard to grasp. It’s inconceivable.

Now, not waiting…

I was reflecting on retirement yesterday, and then today I listened to a podcast that mentioned we only live for about 4,000 weeks. We are lucky when it’s more, and when I consider that I’ve passed 2,800 weeks, it makes me appreciate all of the time I have left. This isn’t sad, it’s factual. And the fact is that every week, every day matters.

We’ve all had those weeks that fly by feeling like we’ve done no more than what needed to be done: Eat, sleep, work, repeat… with a few distractions along the way. And we’ve all had weeks that have felt special, even when the regular routine was all that was really done. What’s the difference?

Good conversations, acts of kindness, a delicious meal, a hug, a good laugh, or even a quiet moment of contemplation can help make an ordinary week a little more special. It would have been easy to use the word extraordinary rather than special, but that would be dishonest.

The reality is that it’s hard to live a life where every week is extraordinary. That said, it can be too easy to live a life where weeks just disappear, one less week to live, then another, then another. Every week doesn’t have to be exceptional, just well lived… well lived, not poorly wasted.

It’s fun to plan ahead for the future, but the time to enjoy life is now! Because we really don’t know how many weeks we have left, and so each week we do have is precious.

2 minutes of silent sunrise

Today is my first day without a father on this planet. I’m glad I got to see him in March because he died 15 minutes before I got on my flight to Toronto. Here’s a beautiful sunrise I got to see on the flight.

I’m m with my family now, although just one sister is awake. It will be good to spend a bit of time with my mom and sisters.

Enjoy the sunrise, appreciate what you’ve got, hug your family.

Unrecognizable future

Did you ever see the movie Blast from the Past? Here is the premise from Wikipedia:

The film focuses on a naive 35-year-old man, Adam Webber, who has spent his entire life (1962-1997) living in a Cold War-era fallout shelter built by his survivalist, anti-Communist father, who believes the United States has suffered a Soviet nuclear attack (in reality, a plane crashed into their house). When the doors unlock after 35 years (the amount of time his father believes the nuclear fallout will take to clear), Adam emerges into the modern world, where his innocence and old-fashioned views put him at comedic odds with others.

It’s a cute movie. It makes me wonder what it would be like for someone today to jump ahead and see what the future is like 35 years from now? What does life look like in 2058?

Will work look any like it does today? What about transportation? Money? Space flight? Religion? Politics? Artificial intelligence (AI) and computing?

There is so much that could, and will, be different from today. Some of these things might look similar, but some are going to look considerably different. I can’t imagine a world 35 years from now being less different today than 1997 was to 1962. Life in 2058 will be unrecognizable compared to life today.

For example: The entire monetary system is going to be digital. The workforce is going to be mostly different depending on how much AI has undermined many of today’s jobs. That same AI is going to change the way we integrate technology. Today it’s our phones that seem to be getting smarter and smarter but 35 years from now it will be integrated/cyborg technology that will be enhancing and enriching our lives.

I can imagine glasses or contact lenses or implants that give us information like map directions, names and details about people we meet, and even health data like heads up display data in a military jet today. I can imagine this working in a way with a hearing implant that allows us to have a video conversation like FaceTime on our phone today. Phones won’t be something we carry, they will be something embedded as part of the tools we wear or tools we integrate into implants.

If you don’t think that things will be drastically different than now, then you haven’t paid attention to the exponential rate of change that has happened since the 1990’s. In 1990 there was no Amazon, Deep Blue was 7 years away from beating world Chess champion Garry Kasparov, there were no smart phones, no electric cars, and Google was still 8 years away from being a company. Author Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Smart phones today would seem like magic in 1990. What does 2058 hold for us that will seem like nothing less than magic to us today? It’s cliche to say, but time will tell.

Always improving

I had a conversation with a good friend yesterday. He has a renovation going on and is quite involved in the process. He lamented about how busy he is and said something interesting to me. To summarize:

‘I don’t mind being busy, it just gets exhausting always doing things a little beyond what you are comfortable with.’

That’s a really interesting point. We live in a world where very few people, athletes for example, hone their skills and spend a tremendous amount of time doing only what they are good at. Most people are good at something and spend hours doing something else, scrambling to make time for the thing(s) they enjoy doing.

They love the design process, but spend most of their time building. They love building but spend most of their time ordering supplies and managing people. The love managing people but spend hours managing paper or digital files and documents. Beyond these examples, they spend time learning new, more challenging tasks and implementing them with beginner eyes, while not doing the things they know they can do well.

I understood my friend’s point and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to focus on the part of your job you are really good at for a while and not always be working on new challenging skills?’ Then we both had a chuckle realizing that we’d feel like we’d be standing still if we didn’t push ourselves. But that’s the impetus to ask the question,

Where does the push to always be improving come from?

Is it intrinsic? Is it organizational? Is it cultural? Are there places where jobs have not magnified in complexity and people are given the time they need to mostly do the things they love doing, and not just a lot of what they have to do? That doesn’t mean they stop improving, just that the things they improve on are things they really want to be doing. The idea of constantly improving is both appealing and exhausting. I think the key to making it feel good is to find reasons to celebrate achievements, to recognize gains, and to appreciate the journey… because there are always ways to improve… always more that can be done… always things to learn.

Disengaged

It’s apparent in schools, it’s apparent in the workforce… there are students and young adults who are disengaged with societal norms and constructs around school and work. They are questioning why they need to conform? Why they need to participate? There is a dissatisfaction with complying with expectations that schools is necessary, or that a ‘9-5’ job is somehow meaningful.

Some will buck the norm, find innovative alternatives, and create their own niches in the world. Others, many others, will struggle, wallow in unhappiness, and fight mental health demons that will leave them feeling defeated, or riddled with anxiety, or fully disengaged with a world they feel they don’t fit in. Some will escape this, some will find pharmaceutical ways to reduce or enhance their disconnect. Some of these will be doctor prescribed, others will be legally or illegally self-prescribed.

The fully immersive worlds of addictive, time-sucking on-demand television series, first-person online games, and glamorous, ‘living my best life’, ‘you will never be as happy as me’ illusions on social media certainly don’t help. Neither does unlimited access to porn, violence, and anti-Karen social justice warriors dishing out revenge and hate in the name of justice. The choices are fully immersed, unhappily jealous, or infuriatingly angry… and disengaged with the world. Real life is not as interesting, and not as engaging as experiences that our technological tools can provide. School is hard, a full day at work is boring, and it’s easier to disengage than participate.

The question is, will this disengaged group find their way? Or will they find themselves in their 30’s living in their parent’s basements or subsisting on minimal income, working only enough to survive, and never enough to thrive?

School and work can’t compete with the sheer entertainment value this group gets from disengaging, so what’s the path forward? We can’t make them buy in if they refuse, and we can’t let school-aged students wallow in a school-less escapes from an engaged and full life. I don’t have any solutions, but I have genuine concerns for a growing number of disengaged young adults who seem dissatisfied with living in a world they don’t feel they can participate meaningfully in.

What does the future hold for those who disengage by choice?

It’s going great!

Ever find yourself feeling hesitant to say things are going well… or even worse, ‘Going smoothly’? You don’t want to jinx it, to turn your luck around. So things at work and home are going good, even great, but when someone asks you how thing are going you just say ‘fine’, or respond ‘ok’.

You might share that things are good, but preface it with something challenging. Or worse yet you might add that you are busy:

“How are things going?”

“Busy, but good.”

Like Dean Shareski says, Everybody’s busy. Busy is not a badge of honour. So, why mention it? Why preface your well-being with a statement about being busy or any other statement for that matter:

“How are things going?”

  • “Great, but have you seen the price of eggs?”
  • “Great, except for my favourite hockey team lost again.”
  • “Fantastic, if only I had one more hour of sleep.

It’s not bragging to say things are good, when someone asks. Be good. Be great. Allow things to be wonderful. It’s not going to last forever, so why make it unnecessarily conditional? Enjoy the fact that sometimes things are going well without adding stipulations and parameters.

“How are things going?”

“Great! How are things with you?”

Baked just right

It would have been harder 150 years ago to bake bread or a cake to perfection. There were no thermometers in the oven, few clocks to tell how long it was in the oven, no real way to regulate the heat. It was an art as much as a science.

That idea of being baked just right comes to mind when I think about our universe. So many things had to be just right to ‘cook up’ our existence. If we live in a multiverse with countless other universes, it is likely most of them would harbour conditions impossible for a planet like earth to exist. This is for some people a way to reconcile their belief in an omnipotent and omnipresent God. For without the divine intervention of a ‘designer’ we could not exist.

But for me this is simply a game of numbers. In the billions of universes in a multiverse, we were the lottery winners. We won the grand prize of being able to harbour consciousness in a universe among so many others that did not have the right ingredients, did not have the right conditions, and/or were baked for too long or not long enough.

We exist because our universe was baked just right. And the fact that it was right enough for us, suggests to me that it is right enough on another not-so-near-by planet. We probably aren’t alone in this universe, but our universe is probably lonely in comparison to other universes.

We might not be the only one, but just like we are alone in our galaxy, our university is probably alone in being baked to perfection… for us. Maybe there are some nitrogen breathing conscious beings in another universe writing about the crazy possibility of oxygen breathing beings in a universe like ours?

We probably won’t need a couple hundred more years to figure this out. We are too inquisitive and we keep looking out into the universe and asking complex questions beyond my understanding. What I do understand is that we live in a universe that was baked well enough to produce us, and while we may not be baked to perfection, we are the lottery winners (or likely one of very few lottery winners) in the multiverse.

8 billion realities

With 8 billion people on this planet, we have 8 billion different ways to see the world. Not even conjoined twins see the same reality.

Is my experience of the colour blue the same as yours? Do I taste chocolate like you do? Are our wishes and desires the same? No.

We find our tribes that like similar things: sports, hobbies, food, music, pets, occupations, and anything that allows us to see others in a similar light. But no matter how similar, we still have a different slant on reality.

You are uniquely you. I am uniquely me. Our realities may collide, but what we observe is only for us to interpret and experience. Our interpretations and experiences will never match another’s. We live a singular reality.

That is why a tragedy for one is a lesson for another. An unforgivable act for one is the reason for forgiveness for another. A moment of peaceful solitude for one is a slow, uncomfortable moment of boredom for another. Here is where our life experiences are created, where we control our own narrative, create our own destiny… design our very own reality like no other.