The Vastness of It All

      There are a lot of us mucking about on this planet, over 8 billion at last count.  Just attempting to count to eight billion would take well over half a century, 761 years by one estimate.  And yet, even with so many of us crammed together in cities and often tied up in traffic, there still seems to be a lot of space left on this planet.  A quick drive of a few hours most anywhere will find you facing farmland or rocky cliffs or desert sands or rolling hills.  It all seems near-incomprehensible since our planet is considered one of the "smaller" ones in the grand scheme of things.  But that is just the land, the portion we can walk on, or drive on, or dig up.  That land, in reality, is what we consider our "real" and touchable home.  But that land is just 30% of our planet; the rest is water.  Phys.org broke it down this way: 96.5% of all the Earth's water is contained within the oceans as salt water, while the remaining 3.5% is freshwater lakes and frozen water locked up in glaciers and the polar ice caps.  Of that fresh water, almost all of it takes the form of ice: 69% of it, to be exact.  Yikes.

      William Langewiesche is an award-winning author known for his lengthy investigative writings (he has also written nine books); but upon finishing his 2015 book The Outlaw Sea, he began the first few pages with this: Since we live on land, and are usually beyond sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world, and to ignore what in practice that means.  Some shores have been tamed, however temporarily, but beyond the horizon lies a place that refuses to submit.  It is the wave maker, an anarchic expanse, the open ocean of the high seas.  Under its many names, and with variations in color and mood, this single ocean spreads across three-fourths of the globe.  Geographically, it is not the exception to the planet, but by far its greatest defining feature.  By political and social measures it is important too -- not merely  as a wilderness that has always existed or as a reminder of the world as it was before, but also quite possibly as a harbinger of a larger chaos to come.  That is neither a lament nor a cheap forecast of doom, but more simply an observation  of modern life in a place that is rarely seen.  At a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, and when citizenship is treated as an absolute condition of human existence, the ocean is a realm that remains radically free.

Choppers of USS Eisenhower patrolling the Red Sea: Dept. of Defense

     He went on to note that when viewed from the shore, the horizon is roughly three miles away --"You can row to it and return in a very short time."  But imagine trying to patrol just the area you see.  As he noted: The point remains that the ocean is a fluid.  And when a ship passes by, temporarily displacing some of its molecules, the surface immediately closes in behind and erases the trail.  This leaves anyone hunting for a ship to face the ocean's other simple fact -- its surface expanse.  The Indian Ocean alone spreads across more than twenty-eight million square miles, an area that is nearly twenty-eight times the size of India itself, more than seven times the size of the United States, and indeed seven million square miles larger than all of Eurasia.  The Indian Ocean's western neighbor, the Atlantic, encompasses more than thirty-three million square miles --roughly the size of all the world's landmasses combined-- while its eastern neighbor, the Pacific, is twice again as large...The United States has ninety-five thousand miles of coastline and more than a hundred seaports capable of handling large ships.  It is the most active sea-trading nation on earth, accounting for a large percentage of long-distance maritime traffic worldwide and annually accommodating more than sixty thousand port calls by oceangoing ships, the great majority of which are foreign flagged, owned by offshore companies, and crewed by anonymous sailors -- almost all of whom come from troubled parts of the world where America is resented, corruption is rife, and authentic documentation can easily be bought.  And it is at that point that he brings you the power of the sea, it ability to crack large ships in two and have them vanish, the power to tame joyous pirates with rough weather, and the ability to rust away even the mightiest of vessels (although those TikTok videos making the rounds on the power of the North Sea are widely disputed, wrote the NY Times).  Enjoyed that cruise?  Before long, that aged and now-empty ship will be heading to India or another third-world country to be cut into scrap (which is often re-milled to become re-bar due to the declining quality of the steel); each year, approximately 700 ships head to this torch-cutting graveyard (offshore oil rigs are generally just toppled with explosives and left to sink into the ocean). 

     And then there are the fishing fleets.  New satellite data was summarized by Smithsonian and revealed that illegal fishing is far greater than was estimated, as in 72+% greater.  Said part of the article: ...the researchers found that between 72 and 76 percent of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not being publicly tracked—and as a result, they haven’t factored into previous reports on ocean use...But this data can do more than uncover possible illegal fishing.  “Vessel tracking could also transform environmental conservation efforts by revealing encroachment on protected areas,” write machine learning researchers Konstantin Klemmer and Esther Rolf in a perspective accompanying the paper.  More than 20 vessels per week crossed into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and over five per week entered the Galápagos Marine Reserve, according to the study...Beyond fishing, the maps also indicate that offshore energy has boomed in recent years—by 2021, wind turbines made up 48 percent of ocean infrastructure, compared to oil platforms’ 38 percent.  That more vessels and energy structures operate at sea than previously thought draws attention to the industrialization of the oceans, a process that some have coined the “blue acceleration.”  And while we're on the subject of oil, the U.S. is now the largest producer of oil in the world, passing even Saudi Arabia and Russia (Biden has authorized more oil production than any other President, said Newsweek)...we pump more than 13 million barrels of oil per day.  And our underground fresh water aquifers are the same with industrial pumps now plunging 1200 or more feet into the ground to bring that water to our cattle and crops.  How much oil and water is there?  And that's just in the U.S.

      So where did all these thoughts come from?  For one thing, if you've been reading about those pirate ships in the Red Sea (which is where 12-15% of all cargo ships travel), an activity which has jumped up in frequency and caused many cargo companies to reroute their planned paths, you can begin to visualize the challenges, not only for the attacking vessels but for the massive cargo ships plodding along and far from able to simply turn around.  Add to this, the fact that other ships such as the USS Eisenhower, sent to temporarily protect this shipping lane, can dispatch helicopters and jets from their decks (as was recently done with the choppers sinking 3 of 4 attacking vessels; more recently drones and cruise missiles have been fired by rebels).  It seems difficult to think that while seemingly alone on a vast ocean, a small dot on the horizon of either the sea or the sky could soon put your life in danger (luckily, the threat of what you can't see in the Red Sea, that of submarine attacks,* hasn't yet occurred).   One memory of the sheer amount of our planet's water came from a cruise my wife and I took in the Mediterranean many years ago, a "sea" which looked (on the map, at least) small enough to have land somewhere in sight no matter where you sailed.  Once out there however, the reality of the Med's size crept in rather quickly.  One night near midnight, I peeked outside our balcony over the railing and watched the waters coolly sloshing below; the sea's darkness matched the sky's and it was easy to imagine that a slip or a fall overboard now would drop the chance of anybody finding me to zero.  Looking up to the nearly invisible horizon, and to both sides, I saw only more dark water, an ocean-full it appeared.  No lights, just water.  And yet this was a sea, and not an ocean.

      And it was in those waters that I wondered how fish --and even ships like aircraft carriers and submarines-- can seemingly "float" so easily through it?  Going back to the book Wonders of Life by physicist Brian Cox, he explained: There are two primary issues with moving through fluids.  First, the fluid itself has to be pushed out of the way as a shape moves through it...The viscosity of the fluid will also play an important role...Golden syrup is more difficult to swim through than water, partly because it is denser, but also because it is sticky.  There is a dimensionless physical quantity (a pure number, in other words) known as the Reynolds number, which is widely used in the design of aircraft and submarines, and indeed in many problems that involve the flow of gases or liquids around shapes...Sharks are covered in scales called dermal denticles, near-invisible collagen structures made of the same material as their teeth...The scales are loosely embedded in their skin, tethered with rubber-bank-like tendons, allowing each one to move independently...But there are cases in which the laws of physics apply such stringent constraints that, through natural selection, they determine to a large extent the form of the animal.  The great white is an excellent example.  For a high-speed marine predator to be so large, it must be shaped like a shark because the laws of fluid dynamics dictate it.  Sharks with different body shapes would be slower, or expend significantly more energy reaching high speeds, and would therefore not have been so successful; gradually, from generation to generation, natural selection honed the shape of the shark.  Turns out that some of this engineering comes into play on larger ships such as aircraft carriers which have a bulbous hull attached beneath the water, its sole purpose being to "break" the water ahead so that the rest of the ship moves through with less resistance (I don't understand how it works but then I am not an engineer).

Artists depiction of cosmic ray hitting array:
Osaka / Kyoto Univ./Ryuunosuke Takashige

     The ocean is such an alien world to most of us that it can become a world which can inflate our fears of drowning and of sharks (although shark attacks are so rare that you have a larger chance of being struck by lightning; despite that over 100 million sharks are killed each year).  But the ocean can also bring us that relaxed feeling of gliding along as if in another dimension, that of floating or sailing.  In a dark sea, it can almost feel as if you are in space and "lost" in the unknown, drifting in yet another vast expanse.  As mentioned in an earlier post, supernovas** and cosmic rays unimaginably far away can trigger light and energy that we simply can't produce, as in exa-electron volts (one exa-electron volt is equal to one quintillion --a billion billion-- electron volts...what??).  But recently, a cosmic ray just hit one of our telescope arrays and did so with the force of 240 exa-electron volts...and scientists have no idea where that ray came from.  Said the report in The Guardian: Only the most powerful cosmic events, on scales far exceeding the explosion of a star, are thought to be capable of producing such energetic particles.  But Amaterasu [the name scientists gave to the ray] appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.  You trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing with high energy enough to have produced it,” said Prof John Matthews, of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper in the journal Science that describes the discovery.  “That’s the mystery of this – what the heck is going on?”  As to those "voids" (discussed in an earlier post where I wrote: The "voids" in space can be equally massive,  more than we can imagine; they are thought to make up a large chunk of the universe...) the recent issue of Scientific American devotes their cover and lead section to explain their enormity.

     Yet there is another vast arena to consider and that is the world within ourselves and our journey in it; to watch our strength and flexibility and youthful skin give way to age, the circle of life (for me anyway) has shifted its viewpoint to the opposite end.  Gail Caldwell in her book A Strong West Wind, one written as she neared the age of 70, wrote a memoir of her early days when the innocence of her childhood gave way to the recklessness of her teenage years, something we've all encountered in some way as we "grew up."  As she remembered: Rarely did I grasp my father's anger or my mother's fear, most of which were directed at me or my pursuits.  But the secondhand sorrows, the ones murmured about or shared more as story than as crisis, gave me an understanding chance to be sympathetic from afar.  They taught me that you couldn't always get your car out of the ditch, no matter how tough or determined or self-starting you were.  And they probably consoled me, reflecting as they did on the black stars in my own emerging galaxy, a place of teenage despair and moody hormonal reach that I couldn't yet name but didn't exactly hate.  I needed to know, I think, that you could be sad and half crazy and still have a life that meant something.  I needed to figure out for myself, which I would do over the next decade, that sometimes these definitions concealed or shrouded a brighter truth -- that what looked like an off-road ditch might well be another, better path...these are the mysteries for which there is no story; they are the air that circles the breaths we take, and they shape our lives as surely as winter, war, God, or luck.  And it is that subject of God which brings us to a fear that perhaps only our minds create, that of the end of life.  As the Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca wrote: We mortals are...lighted and extinguished, the period of suffering comes in between, but on either side, there is deep peace...we go astray in thinking that death only follows, when in reality it has both preceded us and will in turn follow us.  In their book A Beginner's Guide to the End, authors BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger wrote: Coming to terms with death means coming to terms with time -- and not just with the fact that the future is suddenly constricted.  Yes, there is that fear of missing out, but there is also a fear associated with looking back in time.  That fear has a name: regret, and what a ghastly beast it can be.  You begin to realize the impossibility of correcting the past, just as you realize you won't get to achieve every one of your dreams.  One way or another, mortal fear becomes connected to the fear of not living your life while you have it.  This gets at both the problem and the solution: all our new limitations, both forward and backward, can bring into focus what is still possible.

      The vast ocean (remember those pirates yelling, "avast, ye matey), the vast expanse of space, the vast unexplored areas of our minds...all valid and all testing our futility at trying to comprehend them.  But there's one more area of vastness that exists right in front of us, and that is the vast world of possibilities.  No matter your age or condition, physically and mentally, the possibilities can be endless.  So now imagine you're at the top of a 14,000-foot mountain, standing at a precipice with a near-vertical drop of 700 feet just inches in front of you, your toes shakily hanging onto that last bit of solid ground before you plunge into, well, nothing.  Now imagine feeling all of that but you're blindfolded...no wait, you're actually blind.  Such was the adventure for 46-year old Eline Øidvin, totally blind in one eye and the other eye able to see just a pinhole view a few inches in front of her.  Still, she an accomplished marathoner and now, a conqueror of Mount Langley in the high Sierras.  As she described in her feelings about that moment, she said, "I could feel it, and I could hear the emptiness."  Added the story in the LA Times, she also said this: Life can be scary, but fear doesn't help.  I've learned not to overthink these things.  John Lennon once wrote: Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes, they call me on and on across the universe.  Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox, they tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.  Vast thoughts.  Perhaps best not to overthink it...

*At this point, several movies from past years help to bring some of this issue to light.  Greyhound depicted the destroyers (2 American, 2 British) which had to cross that large part of the Atlantic during WW II, each acting as guardians of the 35+ cargo ships sailing between them and bringing necessary fuel and supplies to the Allied front in Europe (they then had to head back); this was the era of German U-boats, early prototypes of submarines (one difference was that U-boats needed to surface to "refill" with air); the treacherous "in-between" point of the Atlantic was when aircraft on either side could no longer provide air support, a point which U-boats knew and  successfully sank 5000 Allied ships, killing 15,000 people (the German survival rate was equally disastrous with 70+% of U-boats and their crews sunk and killed).  It was a treacherous crossing each time, and the movie shows the terror of being in that open sea with only crude equipment to tell you that a torpedo was heading your way.  On a more modern front, the fictional Hunter Killer gives a suspenseful yet fictional version of modern submarine warfare, as well as the larger-than-expected (for me, at least) size of today's torpedoes.  And lastly, the earlier movie of Captain Phillips (based on true events) shows the current dangers of pretty much being one of those "helpless" cargo ships in the Red Sea as well as the gutsy chances taken by attacking pirates.  All three (okay, maybe not the fictional one) show a different side of the "open" sea and how something so large can suddenly make one feel so alone and how far away from help one truly is...

**One interesting observation about supernova explosions came from SN 2023ixf which rested "a mere 21 million light-year away -- a stone's throw compared with the vastness of the oberservable universe" wrote Scientific American.  So consider this: explode a circular-like object (but perhaps one not as large as something 10x the mass of our sun) and you would think the debris would shoot out in all directions.  Here's what the scientists observed: There had previously been some debate, too, as to whether this ejected material would form a sphere around the star or some more asymmetrical shape.  The results for 2023ixf suggest the latter, marking the earliest-ever detailed glimpse scientists have obtained of the rapidly evolving interaction between a supernova’s shockwave and the surrounding circumstellar material.  “We are saying that the material is most likely in a disk-like structure,” says Sergiy Vasylyev, also at U.C. Berkeley.  The supernova’s ejecta expands in an “hourglass shape” as it impacts this disk.  That could point to a surprising source of variety in type II supernovae evolution arising from the varied orientations of debris disks with respect to their exploding host star.  “It tells you that these events are diverse,” Vasylyev says.  An hourglass shape?  What the...??