Archive for the ‘The Universe’ Category
Sleep, Salvador Dali, 1937
Just once, I’d like to experience alternate reality. It’d be so cool. Its applications easily transform a life of drudgery into one of utter convenience and comfort.
How? Glad you asked.
Need a vacation? Press capital “A” and “R” and “enter” on the keyboard. And there you are, adrift on a tranquil otherworldly beach, fingers tracing a path in the water as you doze contentedly on a bamboo raft. The best part is, it doesn’t cost you a cent. Only a bit of a time share of the brain is all that’s needed for a quick and secure purchase.
But why limit yourself? Imagine all those options now available at the tap of your fingers…
A teenaged daughter melts down in the throes of a mind-bending temper tantrum, the cause of which is as remote and unidentifiable as the chances of the United States winning the World Cup. Tap the keys and gently glide her towards the closet et voila! She vanishes into an alternate reality where organization, good grades and a clean bedroom floor rule the culture.
Or the unreasonable boss whose unending, bellicose rants that spew unfathomable opinions regarding what’s possible and what isn’t, and invariably differs from yours, everyone else’s and even the client: an accidentally-on-purpose keyboard maneuver zaps the offending creature-person into a universe filled with vegetarian peace mongers whose lives are governed by reason and silent meditation.
Sending people off into ARs is terrifically, wonderfully cathartic. If one had the will to jettison any nasty, reprehensible being into a space-time continuum that requires that person to experience/do what only the reaches of fantasy could dream up, prisons would be a thing of the past.
AR isn’t necessarily punishment for evil. It’s also a reward for good. The desperate street person stands in a lush, vibrant Eden after offering assistance to a stranger. A poor young mother struggling with an empty refrigerator and bank account suddenly grapples with luxury in a 110-roomed mansion, complete with a safe stuffed with cash hidden behind a library portrait.
One often sees ARs pop up in science fiction. Alternative worlds, even universes exist, habituated with mirror versions of ourselves living lives alien to our own. Trouble is, where are these places? Presently, we can’t seem to determine how our own universe came into being, let alone figure out its size. Where are we supposed to locate a portal to the plane of existence that remedies, curses, challenges or accentuates the very qualities humans of Earth lack or ignore?
It’s around someplace. It has to be. I have about 30 socks waiting to join their partners there.
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Image: Lynette Cook, NASA
There’s a brisk business in the sci-fi fiction world wherein writers devise plots regarding worlds thousands of millions of light years yonder, only reachable by wormholes or imagination. At the same time, astronomers here on earth keep their eyes stuck to their favorite observing instrument of choice seeking out new planets, and, because there appears to be an obvious lack of wormholes (or so I believe; I could be wrong), they use their imaginations to conceive images of what these new worlds would look like.
On Independence Day, I sat on the porch of my parents’ house (so hard still to visit and not see my mother there) and flipped through the offerings on Endgadget. A posted article entitled, “The first potentially habitable alien planets we ever found – might not actually exist,” written by Richard Lawler caught my attention. In it, he writes about Gliese 581g, a planet orbiting Gliese 581, a star located in the constellation Libra. What made Gliese 581g so intriguing is its location in the “Goldilocks zone,” so called because it’s the correct distance from its sun to possess a moderate temperature for liquid water – not too hot or cold. It had also been determined that the planet didn’t spin on its axis and one side was perpetually in the dark. Artists created imaginative drawings, dreaming up visions of what this planet could look like.
Alas, it appears to have been all for naught. Spectrographic readings taken from Gliese 581 now indicate that 581g might actually not exist. How is that possible? The short answer is that the very signals that determined a planet might be located in a particular place also can be attributed to another source, say, “space stuff.” What would have produced a signal for the spectrometer to read no longer exists. It faded. Disappeared. Or, alternatively, may have been misread.
What a delicious idea for a plot.
Take it from the 581g’s point of view. Of course, that wouldn’t be the name of the planet. In my head, it’d be more like Ulele or Onodon – a whispery moniker reminiscent of mystery and exotica. For millennia the habitants, fiercely protective of their unique home, shrouded their visibility because of a unique feature Ulele/Onodon hosts. A signal accidentally launched by a careless Uleleian/Onodonite as it lit its cigarette on a rations replenish break, triggers a spectrograph that sits in the Earth lab of Dr. Jill Jackson, a red-headed ball of fire pouncing on a grand opportunity to stake her position as the sharpest astrophysicist in the universe. Having maxed out her credit cards and on the brink of credit collapse, she aims for the Nobel Prize and its generous financial reward and reveals her discovery to fellow scientists. Unbeknownst to her, the Ulele/Onodons are hot on her trail, thanks to sensitive instruments tuned to the merest hint of detective devices such as the one Dr. Jackson uses, and seek revenge…but not before re-cloaking their planet. Vowing to hunt her down like an unwanted cockroach in a Harlem apartment, Ulele/Onodon Fowler Falx is hot on her trail, and won’t stop until she’s obliterated and vanishes from view…just like 581g.
See, that explanation is much more entertaining than, “We thought we saw something…honest!…but it just…disappeared. Or, a similar incident as detailed above really happened and no one will admit it, because as any watcher of any sci-fi series involving space generally hide evidence regarding alien encounters. Since the jury is out on aliens’ actual existence, I’d like to seize this celestial development and give it a life, thicken its plot and give it hope for the future.
Keep your eyes to the skies, folks. The universe is filled with enigmas.
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The universe, as credited to Wikipedia
Ever lay on your back on a summer night, looking up at the sky and think to yourself, “Where does it all end?”
Or begin.
Or go.
Or…
Ask a person to explain the universe is and guaranteed you’ll receive an answer just as expansive. Frustrating to conceive of an area that defies convention. For that’s what it is: an enigma.
Sure, scientists the world over have struggled to define just exactly what it is that the Earth inhabits and how it came about to be. Mathematical calculations summarize what is perceived to be forces governing its structure, but as soon as one explanation arises, another takes its place.
Take, for instance, the recent talk about finding traces of waves of the original big bang isn’t all it seemed to be. Could be interstellar dust, although optimism remains that perhaps evidence of the Big Bang is still present in the astronomer’s findings. And not to discount their discovery, because if they truly do find remnants of all that is, ever was and will be, my God, that’s like touching the face of eternity.
Though I’m not a scientist, I do wonder how an event so enormous, so unfathomable to most mortals, could have left a trail of crumbs in its wake. It has been determined that the universe began 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago, more or less. That’s all calculation, the only tool available to determine its age. It’s also calculated that the observable universe is 48 billion light years in size. Nothing to sneeze at, of course. These numbers are only the result of of the logic of numbers and not the result of a person who stood at the rim and said, “Well, then, here we are…at the end.” Unless, of course, you’re a person named Doug who’s actually hitchhiked your way from one end to the other. In my opinion, he’s in a place to know at present, but he’s not giving up his secrets anytime soon.
My mind shuts down when I contemplate the enormity of all there is. It gets worse when I attempt to ponder what caused its creation. That Big Bang came out of…what? What was before it? Could it be that there was a universe that lived, breathed and died before it? Or perhaps time bent backwards and regenerated its youth to live in another incarnation?
Will we ever know the answer?
Only the eternal reaches of the universe and time can tell.
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Moon, Stars and Beyond 