You Are Here...Or Are You?

    Okay, the last post brought up both my difficulty and fascination with the book Instant Science* but here were a few additional things that I found fascinating as I muddled through the final pages: our nerve cells: ...are the longest-living cells in our bodies; and: ...there are about 10 times more microbes in our bodies than there are cells; our skin: ...is inhabited by bacteria, fungi, viruses, and archaea...fungi and bacteria engage in molecular warfare as they compete for the same resources; and yes, we are truly made of star dust since carbon is a very difficult element to create but basically it's an element that "hosts" different numbers of neutrons which are labeled C6, C14 and such, and: ...all living creatures contain a tiny amount of radioisotope C14.  In a living organism, the percentage of C14 stays constant as it is continually being replaced by eating and breathing (this is how scientists can "date" something that is millions of years old, by the carbon "decay")...and last one: ...we perceive plants as green because they reflect green light.  Plants eat only red light.  Hmm, does any of this help explain why one (me, at least) finishes the book with a headache?  We eat and breathe isotopes?

    So what's the point of it all?  To that question I again refer to the other book I mentioned, The Socrates Express, where author Eric Weiner opened with this: We are hungry.  We eat and eat some more, yet we are still hungry...We reach for our smartphones.  With a swipe of a finger, we can access all human knowledge, from ancient Egypt to quantum physics.  We gobble it up, but still we are hungry...I've tried various means of satisfying the hunger: religion, psychotherapy, self-help books, travel...Technology reduces us into believing that philosophy no longer matters.  Who needs Aristotle when we have algorithms?  Digital technology excels at answering life's smaller questions  --Where can I find the best burrito in Boise?  What is the fastest route to the office?-- we assume it's good at the big ones, too.  It is not.  Siri may shine at finding that burrito joint, but ask her how best to enjoy it and she will draw a blank...Philosophy is therapeutic but not the way a hot-stone massage is therapeutic.  Philosophy is not easy.  It is not nice.  It is not palliative.  Less spa than gym.  

    The author admits that he wrote much of this down while taking a train because he can "think" and ponder on a train, much more so than on an airplane or a bus or in driving a car.  Perhaps it is the steady rumble, the passing scenery, the ability to stretch out without fear since you're on a track and someone else is driving.  I tend to agree with him, whether riding a slow-poodle Amtrak train through the Sierras or a high speed train in Europe or Japan.  One can relax and let the mind wander, perhaps even begin to think about life and where you are in it?  Last night brought a dream to me of a man (unknown) talking to me as if a new friend or an instructor of some sort, and somehow the year 1965 was mentioned as if he were explaining things (of what, I'm not sure); when he paused I remember looking at him and asking, "and then what?" and he gave me a curious look back and almost happily replied, "I don't know."  What followed, whether it came from him, or me as I casually began to waken, was another sentence, "does it really matter?"  

     Carole King's Tapestry album featured a song titled So Far Away, a song whose lyrics asked "doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?" Traveling around sure gets me down and lonely, nothing else to do but close my mind.  I sure hope the road don't come to own me.  There's so many dreams I've yet to find.  I remember that 1971 album (we called vinyl records "albums" back then) so still no link to my dream's date of 1965.  But my memory of that dream is clear and renewed the question of time travel posed by National Geographic.  One of the editors introduced the piece by writer Dan Falk this way: It’s a relevant topic, as we look to a New Year that promises not just a return to travel but the opportunity to improve the ways by which we see the world.  Time travel has been a fantasy for at least 125 years—H.G. Wells penned his groundbreaking novel, The Time Machine, in 1895—and it’s something that physicists and philosophers have been writing serious papers about for almost a century,” Falk writes.  “What really kick-started scientific investigations into time travel was the notion that time could be envisioned as a dimension, just like space.  We can move easily enough through space—so why not time?” ...Ironically, my wish to fly faster has to do with my dream of traveling slower—of spending more time and moving more intentionally in a faraway place in 2021.  

    So now we come back to pulsars (sorry, I'm jumping back to the last post once again), collapsed cosmic stars that have compressed everything including atoms into a dense mass, as in our sun (a million times larger than our Earth) now becoming the size of Manhattan (said the NASA site, something the size of a sugar cube in this condensed state would weigh more than a mountain).  Some of these pulsars spin thousands of times a second, and steadily release electromagnetic radiation which we can see if it's pointing our way, a cosmic lighthouse if you will.   It was pulsars that were used on the maps sent on the Pioneer and Voyager satellites back in the 1970s since, as another piece in National Geographic noted, a map using our point of reference has no bearing once you leave our solar system (think of having a street map of Manhattan when you arrive in Beijing; to add to this confusion, our sense of time has no bearing as well; in the book on science, Jennifer Crouch said that time makes no sense to mathematicians because if we can see the past and present, why can't we see the future?**).  Basically, the "map" we sent to space to tell other life forms where we are, is outdated (or will be in a few million years).

    This is likely making as much sense to you as the science book did to me (admittedly, a quick peek at the National Geographic article and graphics will explain it in a much more understandable fashion) but it turns out that our urge to be discovered may not only become a wild goose chase but more so a question of why are we even searching to be "found."  As Sir David Attenborough asked, why are we struggling to go the moon or to Mars where there is so much beauty to be found here on Earth?  Indeed, one need only to speak to someone whose language you don't know and that person may as well be an extraterrestrial.   In a piece from Redwoods, Native American Jake Rosales said: English is entirely unsuited for describing all things Indigenous.  Languages foreign to the lands and waters of this hemisphere do not contain the words, ideas, or even the sounds needed for conveying the depth and intricacy of Indigenous understandings of the natural world.  Central to the place-based cultural lifeways of Indigenous Peoples are our languages.  Our languages enshrine and order the unique attributes of these places and their myriad interactions, and the realities within which they exist—both physical and metaphysical.  Like the lands, waters, and skies, Indigenous languages are supremely beautiful and powerful.  They derive from and describe origins, behaviors, and relationships among the many beings and elements of specific places.  These places include the animal, plant, human, and spirit relations who have dwelt in them since time immemorial.

    It was in Discover that I read about another area of losing ourselves, that of developing Alzheimer's and the possible beneficial effects of marijuana.  Said the piece: Think of the brain as a car.  In children and teenagers, brains are in the throes of rapid development and change, like a car that tends to speed dangerously.  To help calm things down, the brain’s CB1 system naturally steps up and acts as a brake, no external THC needed.  This slows down brain activity and ensures a safe drive. (It may also explain why THC could be harmful for young people: The receptor is highly active on its own, and extra THC may overload the brakes and impair development.)   But with age, the CB1 receptor slowly loses much of its function, becoming less and less internally activated.  And that makes sense, from an evolutionary point of view.  Why would older people need a brake on brain activity?  While evolution might not care, though, it ought to concern us.  Like an old car driven too hard, too much energy and activity in the older brain may lead to the neurodegenerative effects of aging, including Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia...Most Alzheimer’s drugs aim to reduce either the disease’s inflammation, or brain plaques and tangles.  But THC attacks on all three fronts at once.  Whether suppressing any or all of these Alzheimer’s indicators diminishes the actual progress of the disease, or just treats the symptoms, is still an open question.

    If there is one good thing that this virus has brought us is that it is forcing us to think about what we want in life.  Those who are fortunate enough not to have to think only about surviving (eating or paying rent, or avoiding a fire or a bomb) now have the luxury to look inward.  If the virus unexpectedly took us tomorrow would we feel okay about our lives?  Did we perish clutching our bank accounts or did we simply wonder if we had done enough for others?  Perhaps our beacon for life in space is not so much a call for alien life but rather a call to have others "discover" us, a plea of sorts to assure ourselves that we are not alone.  But as Socrates would likely have said, we are not really alone at all.  Now that we have "time" to think, perhaps we should see this as an opportunity, a chance to become our own pulsars and broadcast our energy in all directions, to scream that "I am here" and to be heard...as Jake Rosales and Sir David Attenborough said, we don't have to look elsewhere.  It's all here.  Inside.  Yourself.  Your.  Self...You.

     

*Actually, there are a series of these books which include Instant Engineering and Instant Math, both of which sound even more intimidating...as but one example of this dichotomy of fascination mixed with confusion, here's her "simple" explanation of DNA: Cells copy DNA trillions of times in a lifetime, using half the DNA as a template.  Enzymes are proteins that control replication: -Helicase unzips DNA, to create a template.  -RNA primase begins the process.  -DNA polymerase adds complimentary nucleotides.  -DNA ligase ends the process.  Errors occur once in every ten billion nucleotides.  DNA polymerase checks DNA to minimize error.  Ahem, that was one of the paragraphs on one of the pages...and did I mention her page on how touch screens work?

**Now this I really don't understand but basically the piece explained why our sense of time wouldn't be recognizable to an alien species, which is why hydrogen was used instead: Hydrogen is a good universal alternative.  When a hydrogen electron flips the direction of its spin, it emits a radio wave with a wavelength of about 21 centimeters, the distance light travels in just over 0.7 nanoseconds.   What??