Dust to Nothing

Dust to Nothing

    Let's face it, there are things way beyond our imaginations, things that we are simply unable to grasp.  Infinity or the beginning of time might be one, other dimensions perhaps another.  I am continually reminded of the readings of Edgar Cayce, the "sleeping prophet" as he was known in his time.  Once in a trance, he could be transported anywhere, always saying that our bodies and our worlds were simply frequencies that once tapped into you could become that person or that world.  Everyone tried to test him and for the most part failed.  In his trances he could be fluent in any language, could give detailed family histories and explain and walk doctors through complex surgeries; he could even diagnose and sometimes suggest cures for a person's disease (sometimes these diseases were unknown to the person)...all of this was exhausting (he eventually stopped doing such readings after being flooded with hundreds of thousands of requests to cure people).  On one reading however, he was asked to go beyond our world and beyond our dimension of life, and to describe what was out there (once awake, he would have no recollection of what had happened as well as no ability to continue in languages or other fields, returning to just his normal self)...I cannot, he replied, for you wouldn't understand.  The doctors and scientists were baffled as well as curious; try us, they said, we will understand.  At which point, Cayce said that they wouldn't...you can't even imagine beyond your third dimension, he said, how can I describe something that is in the fourth or even seventh dimension?

    Space is often like that, its distances so vast that we cannot comprehend something being so in front of us and yet so out of our reach.  To travel at the speed of light and still not come close to exploring our galaxy (an earlier video I posted showed how even at the speed of light, it would take us 100,000 of our human years to just reach the edge of our own galaxy) is nothing when clusters of additional galaxies are 150 million light years away.  But here's one surprising thing, scientists just broke through the edge of a particularly blocked portion of our Milky Way using radio waves...and discovered a surprisingly large mass of more galaxies, said Astronomy News...and also a bit more confirmation that we're being pulled like a giant tractor beam (not just our planet but our entire galaxy) surprisingly fast toward this Great Attractor (written about in an earlier post), like at a speed of 2 million kilometers per hour fast (or about 1.2 million mph).  What could be powerful enough to pull an entire galaxy?  And not just one galaxy...this Great Attractor is pulling hundreds if not millions or perhaps billions of galaxies at probably the same speed (wait, there are billions of galaxies out there, galaxies even larger than our own Milky Way which is considered just a "medium-sized" galaxy...uh, yup).  What could be so powerful?...we can't imagine.

    Here's another boggler.  The Cassini probe launched in 1997 (nearly 20 years ago and so named after Giovanni Cassini who "...was the first astronomer to recognize this dust in interplanetary space, and its presence around the sun, through telescopic observations in the 17th century") has a cosmic dust detector able to detect tiny particles far beyond our known stars (says the Cassini site: To understand their true size and consistency, this cosmic dust can best be visually compared to icy cigar smoke particles.  Under certain conditions, the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) onboard the spacecraft can even detect smaller dust grains called nano-dust.  A nano-dust particle is one-millionth of a millimeter in size.  Particles this small have as few as one million atoms, and are even smaller than a single influenza virus.  Detection of these particles by the Cosmic Dust Analyzer would be equivalent to the detection of a single raindrop falling into the Gulf of Mexico).  It is felt that these dust particles might be a key factor in understanding the origins of how life started on this planet...and these dust particles were "spotted" over 62 million miles away.  It was recently announced that after ten years of searching, 36 particles have been confirmed.  Life's origins!

    And now comes news of two black holes colliding, their weak gravitational wave (what??) coming from "about 1.3 billion light years away," said The Washington Post.  A shift was detected in space time "smaller than the width of an atom."  Even the NASA site (showing an animation of a black hole ripping apart a star) said this: The Star Wars franchise has featured the fictitious "Death Star" which can shoot powerful beams of radiation across space.  The Universe, however, produces phenomena that often surpass what science fiction can conjure.

    But back to our own planet.  The Peabody Energy Company's bankruptcy was both shocking and anticipated (the company is expected by most analysts to cancel their debts, eliminate jobs in restructuring and re-open at a future date). If you aren't aware of the size of their mines, such as their Powder River Basin holdings, take a look...

Peabody Energy's North Antelope-Rochelle mine in Wyoming.  Photo © Greenpeace / Tim Aubry)

    That's one open-faced coal mine in Wyoming, each loader dumping 115 tons of coal a second...40% of all coal in the U.S. comes from here says the BLM.  This one mine alone is massive, and it can continue to be dug at this excessive rate for another 200 years...and it was all once alive, coal and oil being the result of once-living plants and animals.  Formed well before dinosaurs, the Department of Energy sums it up this way: When these ancient living things died, they decomposed and became buried under layers and layers of mud, rock, and sand.  Eventually, hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet of earth covered them.  In some areas, the decomposing materials were covered by ancient seas, then the seas dried up and receded...During the millions of years that passed, the dead plants and animals slowly decomposed into organic materials and formed fossil fuels.  Different types of fossil fuels were formed depending on what combination of animal and plant debris was present, how long the material was buried, and what conditions of temperature and pressure existed when they were decomposing...For example, oil and natural gas were created from organisms that lived in the water and were buried under ocean or river sediments...Coal formed from the dead remains of trees, ferns and other plants that lived 300 to 400 million years ago.

    Take your compost and watch it break down into nothing.  Now imagine there being enough plant and animal life to create this much oil and coal, all after having broken down.  We can't imagine.  The idea of all this is simply to perhaps turn the other way, to not think about that which we cannot imagine but to think about what we can imagine.  Again, it might be something simple, something immediate, such as being with family again or returning back to health, or a new equality for people and animals; or it might be something as far flung as a belief long ago that in 10 years time there would indeed be proof of cosmic dust.   Helen Marriage runs a company called Artichoke that creates temporary memories, large floats and structures that people "...remember it more because it's gone."  In a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek, she said: Particularly in modern, 21st century life, we're tempted to believe that everything runs to a timetable.  If the train is ten minutes late, it really matters.  We get terribly agitated about the world not behaving.  But what I think is that nobody's life is measured by routine.  You don't remember every day you got on the No. 38 bus to work.  The things you remember are those special moments when you fell in love, or your kid was born, or you were chosen for the school play, or got a promotion.  You remember those moments...The thing about the temporary is it's that quality of, "Do you remember?"

    Our imagination helps us remember, even if our memories might disappear or even grow a bit distorted from what they once were.  I am watching this with my mother, sharp as all get out at times, and at other, well not so much.  For her, gravitational waves and billions of light years now mean nothing, or so I think that is what she thinks.  But her photos of family and her comfortable bed, food at breakfast, lunch and dinner...those are what matter.  Now is her time to let her imagination take over in whatever form that might be.  It might be as simple as making a new friend or tasting a new food.  But it is certainly not the huge coal deposits or distant stars...perhaps in watching our parents and our elders age, we ourselves will be filled with imagination.  Author Francis Weller was interviewed in The Sun, talking about his book  Entering the Healing Ground...and the Soul of the World.  In one of his rebuttal letters to comments sent to the editors on her piece, he wrote: I agree that we should not idealize traditional, indigenous cultures, but we do have much to learn from them about how to handle loss and suffering...In Western culture we value individualism and neglect what we have in common.  I am grateful for the reminders --of how to feed life and keep the soul vital-- from our indigenous brothers and sisters.  After gazing at our elders here on Earth, maybe we need to look upward, into a space we cannot even imagine, and ponder what other elders await us, each pulling us at speeds we simply can not imagine.