Rico Penguin

  It is a term that gets thrown around so much that it got me thinking. Following off the theme of the last post my question is this: Is anything you do not a waste of time?

  Perhaps it is just a matter of the glass being half empty, half full, or perhaps just twice as big as it should be. But isn’t everything a waste of time?

  Every book you read, every thing you do, every mark you make, each of these things will be null in respect to you once you die. Every person you influence in any manner will also die and with them the events become null. Given humanities overall inability to separate from ancient fantasy I have doubts that humanity will ever make it off the Earth. We are likely to see cycles of intellectual growth, great destruction caused by fantastical ignorance, and then a recovery period. This will extend the time and resources needed to reach a colony in space and just might push us up until the big end.

  That big end for the Earth of course being when the sun expands and swallows it. Every single activity ever committed by a person will be scorched to cinders and yanked into the center of the sun. In that moment every single action of humanity becomes moot. For the exception of maybe some satellites that are well out of harms way but it is only a matter of time before something destroys them.

  So really isn’t everything a waste of time? Then again how do you properly use time? Who is the judge of what is a constructive use of time? These are questions that so frequently seem to be treated as self evident when the answers are hardly so.

[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
Part 3 – From Solar System to Earth
Part 4 – From Solar System to Earth

  So time has passed and we have reached what we would now call Humans, Homo Sapiens, or any other clever naming agent you can grow to love. There is little to talk about here, not because much hasn’t happened, but because it is all easily accessible in the plethora of required history courses you will take in school.

  One can hope we’ll survive ourselves. Assuming we do we have many millions of years to go before the current theorized end comes (the scientific one not all the religious ones that pop up annually). We are years away from what is the predicted end. That’s a much less clean way of saying 1 Googol years from now, or (arguably) even cleaner would be 1 with 1 hundred zeroes following it. It’s a fantastically long time that even I didn’t quite grasp till I saw it written out in this post.

  Over this time we’ll have stars born and stars die. Black holes will grow and shrink (via a process championed by Stephen Hawking). Galaxies will soar away from one another with each passing day, planets will be consumed in the expansion of stars, the Earth will be scorched by the sun (all things left as they are). Eventually all matter will be stretched to an extreme and ever widening point where heat is no longer generated. This will leave an entire universe with absolutely no action which technically would also mean that time has ‘ended’.

  I’m skeptical as I’ve stated before. We have not accounted for the excess gravity all over (the idea behind the possible existence of dark matter) and frankly there tends to be new information found with each passing year and certainly with each passing decade. It’s not to say we don’t have ages, 1 Google years is an amazing amount of time. So many wonderful (and unfortunately terrible) things can transpire between now and the purposed end.

  My theory? While I’m hardly a better source than any astrophysicist I think that there is some currently unknown rubber band response to the expansion. At a certain point the stretch will get so extreme that everything will then rocket inwards. It seems quite reasonable to assume that this is what has happened the X amount of times in the past and will happen the X amount of times in the future. Of course there is also the possibility that the recoiling inwards is exponentially proportional to the expulsion outwards with each ‘bang’ and perhaps we are experiencing what will end up being the final shot. Who knows, it would be quite unfortunate but we still have far more time than needed for just about anything.

  It is currently the state of all things mortal or otherwise to reach a state of inaction, it would be nice if we put more energy into prolonging and enhancing the time of action we each have. With each dollar we spend on death instead of life we are creating a large imbalance that could indeed snowball one day. I just hope it hasn’t already begun.

  I’ve left out unimaginably large amounts of time, but that’s because who knows what will happen down to the number. The chaos effect makes estimating things highly difficult if not impossible. Neat stuff.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=2474

  This sort of news actually isn’t all that rare. It would appear that Europa more than likely has a serious amount of water underneath a thick layering of ice. Now the thing that people should always ask is if there is really ever a case where water exists and there is nothing living in it (without man-made interference). Even in the most extreme of aquatic conditions you will find some sort of life (no matter how small).

  To me it is not a question of if there is life on Europa it is more a case of what life is on Europa. Considering that the major building blocks of life are 4 of the 5 most common elements in the universe (Something like hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon if I recall…might be off on one or two of those, the non-essential one is helium which isn’t very conducive to making friends. Assuming I didn’t get hydrogen and helium mixed up Forgive me it is late).

  So if the Earth had a warm core, tons of water, and formed life. Europa has a warm core, tons of water, and a shell of ice to protect it from just about anything harmful (not unlike our atmosphere) it makes one wonder just what is living under that shell. I’d be happy with just about anything, even a tiny fish like creature with a couple eyes and a really cute grin.

  Food for thought . I’d write more but I had to transit back home (vacation over). So you’ll start seeing far more educational posts starting Tuesday, taking a course on prehistoric organisms (IE Dinosaurs), psychopharmacology (study of drugs essentially may be changing this course), history and architecture of museums, and finally Greek Epics if memory servers .

  Good night all and happy interstellar hunting.

  I know technically I should say “human” or “person” or something but frankly women on average already live 7 years longer than men, I’d say since I’m likely to die almost a decade sooner than a lady that I should be at least given the joy of popping my gender into the title. There will be at a time someday when its ironic.

  There are so many reasons that the human life is just sadistically short. The wonderfully bright radioactive mass bursting brightly at the center of our universe lives for an estimated 10 billion years. That means that at best I’ll survive likely 1 hundred millionth the span of our sun. In the history of our universe a human life vanishes so quickly that its not even a blink, it’s hardly a trillionth of a blink if that. We take up something like two square feet of area when the very planet we are standing on takes 5 in a half quadrillion square feet…we are the tiniest of tiny ants upon a small rock in the middle of a vast expanse.

  Some people talk about heaven, an afterlife, but I’m not satisfied. I don’t want an afterlife, I want this one. If I were to paint my own heaven ala, what dreams may come (good movie), it would merely be our current reality but with me immortal (and likely invulnerable). But all in all it would be the same thing. I love reading about this world, watching it, seeing it evolve, I want to watch the continents change and move. For new land masses to split and for others to crash into one another.

  To see the first massive space ship begin its trek across space warping space and surviving the impact of hyper fast matter with nothing more than the shields wrapped around it like saran wrap. I would love to colonize my own planet, terraform it, and begin my own civilization. I want to watch a star die at the absolute smallest safe distance I can possibly imagine.

  I want to see a time when we come to a point where we no longer are discovering the universe but making our own. I think in the end I just want to see a point in which the life of man doesn’t vanish into nothingness, to see a point where the irresponsible nature of a half dozen fanatics cannot nearly obliterate everything.

  It is truly a frail and meek existence we life in, I hope to see a point in which life ends on our terms.