Don't kill people

Some things are complicated. This isn't.

There is no reason to kill apart from self-defence. Full stop. Whatever justification you think you have means exactly nothing.

This is a pitifully simple dictum, and yet it proves elusive on even a casual survey of the Google News homepage. Headlines like;

Ivory Coast: UN warns attack could reignite civil war

Teenager shot dead by gang

Two Christians killed in wave of Baghdad bombings

I am in general optimistic for us, as I have said before, but there are times when I feel like disowning my species. Surely, I think, I can't be cut from the same genetic stock as those who maim and slaughter like it's the norm? I know I am not alone in this.

The human mind, as a rule, is fickle and easily manipulated. As much as we would love to believe that our mind is a temple which no other may enter, it really isn't true. Ideology, social pressures and pathology can overcome even the most deep-seated aversions and principles. Perhaps if more people were aware of how easily they can be controlled they would be more equipped to fight against it.

Regardless of what we might like to believe, us humans are quite fragile organisms. A bullet, a stab wound, a particularly nasty fall or a particularly violent infection is all it takes to end us. All the more reason to take extra care.

It isn't naive to cherish life.

Faster than the speed of light

The concept of exceeding the speed of light has been dead since 1905, when a fellow named Einstein published a paper called 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies'. And yet, the idea persists.

Pretty much every Hollywood sci-fi story since the genesis of the genre includes it. Even so-called 'hard' sci-fi which attempts to retain a veneer of scientific plausibility makes an exception for the fabled FTL drive.

Turns out, you may never reach or exceed 299,792,458 metres per second in this universe. This commandment is often qualified with 'unless you have infinite energy'. But since there is no such thing as infinite energy in this universe, that is a pointless qualification. Just like you may not adjust the gravitational constant, just like you may not adjust the mass of the electron, you may never reach or exceed the speed of light. Full stop. Deal with it.

There is no reason to presume that reality will yield to us simply because we wish it.

Einstein gave us an out in the form of time dilation - relativistic speeds allow you to travel great distances in comparatively short subjective times. Say you travel a distance of ten light years at 99.5% of the speed of light. To an outside observer, the journey will take a little over a decade, but to you, it will seem to take only a year. At 99.5% of the speed of light, nine tenths of the objective journey time is not experienced by the subjective observer.

At greater fractions of the speed of light the effect becomes even more pronounced. At a constant acceleration of ten metres per square second (approximately the same as acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface), you could reach Alpha Centauri in under two and a half years, the centre of the galaxy in eleven years, the Andromeda galaxy in fifteen years, and the edge of the observable universe in twenty-four years.

I'll let that sink in. The edge of the frakking universe in under three decades. Nothing Star Wars or Star Trek dreamt up could do that.

It seems more than a little childish to throw a tantrum about not being able to travel faster than light when reality allows you to cross the universe in mere years of subjective time. Yes, you'd need a beefy energy source to do this, but it's not as though exceeding the speed of light wouldn't need a similarly energy-dense medium, even if it were possible.

Atomic Rockets provides a very good elaboration on these points.

2000 vs. 2010

Saw a really interesting graphic on io9 yesterday.

It's quite sobering to realise that over three quarters of the world's population now has access to a mobile phone, and nearly a tenth has broadband internet access. These numbers are pretty good metrics of ease of social connectedness, and can only go up as time goes on, with phones and computers getting cheaper and more disseminated.

The environment section is also quite telling. Global warming skeptics/deniers have never exactly been well-endowed in terms of evidence, but the data is right there in easily digested visual form. Average global temperature has risen nearly a degree in a decade. Not good. The figures for endangered species and impacts of natural disasters aren't exactly endearing either.

Even when the data is right there, people still have difficulty placing facts above their pet ideology. If there's something we need to teach in school, it's deference to the truth. No matter how much you would like us not to be held accountable for our destruction of Earth's environment, it just isn't so.

If only we had politicians who could grasp the concept of long-term only gains, then we would get along much better.

Ainwa in hindsight

As we might have expected, everything was perfect. The Undying Maker, in wisdom, has seen fit to install us in a beautiful valley. Our settlements have been prepared for us on the side of the valley, on a gentle incline. A stream flows at the bottom of the valley, weaving through the foliage, no doubt following a path carved expertly by the Maker to sustain our thirsts.

Our new home valley runs parallel to the path of the star. We have not yet seen the star disappear below the horizon yet, since it has been mere esks since we awoke in this place. As I write, it is nearly overhead, and casts a gentle red incandescence over us.

At the time of our arrival, the star was low in the air, and it's unobtrusive, yet friendly glow, Maker be blessed, was nearly obscured by the trees through which it infiltrated. These trees, we noticed later under better light, are part of a larger population; a forest which seems to cover the entire valley on one side of our position.

The Maker's servants direct us to name this direction 'west', so we do so. By analogy, they explained before their departure, the opposing direction must therefore be 'east'. In the terminology of the Maker's servants, which we faithfully adopt as our own, the star has spend the last ten esks rising in the sky from the west, and will, if the Maker approves, continue downward to the east.

The orbs of Bottled Light with which we are already acquainted are already dotted around our fine settlement. We about twenty of the blessed spheres against the dim sky, up on the ridge of our valley, and have sent parties to retrieve them before the inevitable stardown. We expect, as the star dips below the horizon, that they will exhale their gathered light to sustain us through the dark, just as the Maker intends.

The servants have left us now, having journeyed west into the forest. We did ask the Maker's servants, as we awoke and looked onto surface of this new surrogate Home, what is wished of us, yet we received replies we are not intended to comprehend. The Maker, in wisdom, will certainly reveal the meanings of these answers in time, once we have proved ourselves by proliferating through this new world, this surrogate Home, this Ainwa.

The Machinery grafted to the being of each one of our number did warm as we stepped onto Ainwa for the first time. We take this as a sign of good things in the future, as we establish ourselves as the Maker wishes. We, the People, earnestly thank the Undying Maker for such grace. We also earnestly hope that we may prove ourselves worthy to return Home once our time on Ainwa comes to a close.

From the Book of Testimonials, a part of the Collected Texts of the Circle of Three Gifts

-------

Or at least that was how it was meant to be.

The Maker no longer answers our cries, of course. The once-blessed orbs of Bottled Light have been extinguished. Our expansion is over, and the faithful are returning to the most holy place where we first set foot on Ainwa. This valley will become full over the next few esks, as our People return to the place we all came from.

My own Machinery is more of a burden than a blessing. It failed me several days ago, and is mere dead weight upon my person. The Healers testify that they can safely remove the Machinery, but I would sooner rip out my own soul before I allowed one of them to touch me. I still have hope that the Maker will return to us, though the knowledge that the Healers have not yet procured a living subject to test their procedure does not endear me to them either.

There are whisperings that perhaps our time on Ainwa is coming to a close. Some in the Circle maintain that the Maker wants us to go Home, and suggest that we expedite the process ourselves, before the Machinery fails all of us.

So of our three Gifts, Light and Machinery have now failed. What of History?

Singing mice

Get a group of mice, tailor their genomes for increased rate of mutation, selectively breed for novel traits and let go. It's evolution writ fast in an artificial environment, and it's what Japanese biologists at the University of Osaka did in a nice bit of open-ended research.

Some of the mice ended up with longer limbs, odd tails, but they've had at least one surprising result. One sub-population of the mice can now sing - video here.

Aside from the core appeal of the idea of a mouse that sings (or chirps, as the case may be), these mice might help further our knowledge of how structured sounds (eg. birdsong), language and even the capacity for speech can evolve, especially in terms of the genes involved.

The researchers are quoted as claiming that the discovery may lead to discoveries on how human speech developed, but this seems just a tad too far-fetched for me. Mice and humans may be just too distant, phylogenetically speaking, for there to be any guarantee of a connection between the genes responsible for human speech and these mice singing.

The mice were genetically modified so that they were prone to DNA replication errors, improving the probability of mutations arising, some of which would then lead to interesting, novel traits. When the researchers identified novel traits, they would selectively breed the mice to carry the traits forward. It is a matter of semantics whether this deserves to be called accelerated evolution, since some would argue that natural selection must be involved for the term 'evolution' to be appropriate, and there is only artificial selection at work here.

In this case however, I'm happy with using the term accelerated evolution to quickly convey what was done, even though many writers have misused the idea of accelerated evolution to refer to something that happens to individuals (i.e. "he's evolving"), rather than populations over generations.

It is also intriguing to think of what applications this technique might have in creating novel traits in future. Who knows what kinds of traits could be imbued in future engineered pets or lifestock animals?

The lead scientist on the project: "I know it's a long shot and people would say it's 'too absurd'... but I'm doing this with hopes of making a Mickey Mouse some day."

Solsticetimes

You may or may not be aware that it was the 25th day of the month of December last week, and Christmas was celebrated by a significant fraction of the humans on this planet.

Believe it or not, I've been asked several times why I, a godless heathen, take the effort to celebrate Christmas. I didn't think I needed to clarify, but here's my carefully crafted reply.

The first reason is simple. My family members are nominally Christian, and they celebrate Christmas. They'd like me to participate, so I do. It's pretty passive, really, but that's not the only reason. The second reason is that Christmas really isn't a Christian festival any more.

Christmas is so relentlessly secularised (by way of commercialisation, unfortunately) that any original religious context is virtually absent. Occasionally I go to church on the 24th or the 25th, but it's just observance of ritual. I don't really think that god is up there to care one way or another. But it's nice to observe ritual once in a while, because we humans are social beings, and ritual keeps us together and makes us feel good.

We all celebrate Halloween, even though none of us (well, few of us anyway) actually believe in ghosts and ghouls. The ritual itself breeds camaraderie and togetherness, even though no one actually believes in the things that led to the festival and its rituals. I even endorse burning effigies Guy Fawkes in November, even though he certainly doesn't deserve the hatred that such a ritual implies. It's just ritual - the original meaning, legitimate or not, gone regardless.

And it's not as though the Christians are the only ones who celebrate in midwinter anyway. The date was set because of pre-existing pagan festivals like the Roman festival of the Rising of the Unconquered Sun. The solstice seems like a fitting time to get together and celebrate.

When I celebrate on the 25th of December, I am not really celebrating the birth of J.C. I'm celebrating because why the hell not? An annual time to give and receive gifts and spread goodwill sounds good whatever the justification.

Even in spite of the commercialised nature of modern Christmas and its promotion of consumer culture, I still think it is important. If the feeling is behind the gifts you give and receive, then who is to say that they are illegitimate?

The origins of the festival, and what other people think of it, are secondary to what it represents now, to us as individuals.

Christmas Eve Sunset by subadei

Scales

It might not seem like it, but I am not an individual. I am a conglomeration of tiny single-minded agents, each acting according to its own interests (programmed in by generations of differential gene survival). None of these agents know I exist. They are incapable of even conceiving that something like me might exist. And yet, the aggregate of their interactions with each other equals me.

The exact biological identity of these agents is not really important. It depends on exactly what I consider the core of my being and what is accessory. It might be reasonable to treat every cell in my body as a single tiny agent, contributing in its own way to generating me. In any case, the facts are that I am not an individual, I am a group.

As I already said, not one of the neurons in my brain knows that I exist. Not one of the cells in my blood knows that it is helping to keep me alive. Not one of my muscle cells knows it is helping me move. They just selfishly follow their programmed instructions.

At this point, it is worth clarifying what I mean by 'selfish'. Each and every one of these agents is selfish in the sense that it follows its own instructions, and only its own instructions. They do not go out of their way to assist other agents, except if their programmed instructions demand so. A white blood cell may assist other cells by engulfing pathogens, but it has no concept of the implications of these actions. All it 'wants' to do it eat pathogens.

So if these agents can generate my mind as a side effect of their selfish actions and interactions, though they have no concept of doing so, is it reasonable to posit that the same can work on different scales? Treating individual humans as agents, say.

I'm intrigued by the idea that society itself might be conscious. After all, it certainly acts intelligently. The society as a whole is orders of magnitude more intelligent than any individual human within it. In fact, due to the added benefits of individuals working together, the intelligence of the society is greater than the sum of the intelligences of the humans that comprise it.

But can our pedestrian concept of consciousness even apply to something like a society? Can a society be self-aware, for instance. If a system makes predictions of a future state of the environment, with itself in that environment, we might infer that it is self-aware. Society certainly does this, so might it be self-aware?

With these kinds of examples, we are running headlong into the Chinese telephone brain - a well-known thought experiment in the philosophy of the mind.

Suppose that every citizen of China is issued with a telephone and a book of rules. With these tools, each citizen will reproduce the activity of a neuron in the human brain, with telephone calls taking the role of synaptic signals. Obviously, this would be much slower than the human brain, but would the system as a whole be able to think?

Many people have an instinctive bias against even considering the idea that systems outside our own everyday scale might be conscious. We are groups of simpler agents, and there are greater, more sophisticated groups above us. If the groups above us are more intelligent than we are (as their behaviours testify), then why should we deny them the possibility of consciousness a priori?

Perhaps, by drilling down into what we really mean by consciousness and trying to generalise our definitions onto exotic systems, we might discover something surprising about what our own minds really are.

The idea that every individual neuron in our heads might be, in a sense, conscious is ludicrous to us. Perhaps a larger societal mind might find the idea of each human comprising it being conscious to be similarly ludicrous.

Natural selection

Natural selection. Nature, the mother. Blind watchmaker. Fumbling for parts. Groping at molecules.

Lights out. Glasses smashed. Eyes opaque. Ears ringing. Fingers numb. Nose blocked. And yet.

Creation.

Indistinguishable from Magic

We are told that what lives here started out there. And thus, here became the temporary abode, and out there became Home.

In the early days, before Ainwa was given form, we are told that the Undying walked the ground. The Undying wiped the ground clean, and moulded what became Ainwa from the rock. The Undying sculpted the mountains, filled the lakes and planted the forests. The Undying put two moons in the sky and set Ainwa revolving around the star.

The Undying moulded the first People from dust, we are told. The Undying breathed a brilliant consciousness into the first People, and gave them awareness.

The Undying presented them with three Gifts.

The first was Light. Sacred, glorious orbs that would inhale daylight and exhale it gently over the long nights. The Undying told the People to take Bottled Light wherever on Ainwa they spread, and to be thankful whenever the night came and they were grateful for the nourishing glow.

The second was Machinery. A seed of mechanical life was planted within the first People. The seed would grow around them, strengthening them, letting them know that the Undying was always with them. The People were told that the Machinery would guard their souls, and would return them Home after they took their last breath.

The third Gift, and the greatest Gift, was History. The Undying educated the People about their origins. The Undying told them about life in the early days, and the intelligences which had prospered then.

In the fathomless aeons below Ainwa's time, powerful beings had swam. Reality was clay to them. But still, reality was not enough. As time went on, and reality cooled, they retreated from reality, writing their consciousness onto the interiors of stars, and lived in bliss inside their own mentalities.

The Undying, the People were told, was one of these beings, returned to involvement in reality.

Endowed with Light, Machinery and History, the People spread throughout Ainwa, as the Undying looked on. Many did not survive, and returned Home. Those that remained consoled themselves in the knowledge that their lost kin had returned to the Undying.

More time passed.

And thus we arrive here.

---

So you might have guessed, this is another fiction quickie written in half an hour. I'm actually quite invested in the idea of writing something longer, perhaps a riff on Arthur C. Clarke's dictum 'sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. I really want to write something in the far future, after the brightest stars are all gone, and the ravages of entropy are truly being felt, but in the style of a fantasy.

What you've just read might be considered the first draft of the first part of a longer piece of fiction. If I decide to pop along with this, the ideas will probably change considerably. I already have indistinct concepts relating to a non-functional nuclear weapon (owing to the half-life of uranium), abstract intelligences written as patterns in the cores of stars and ghostlike apparitions, reflecting personalities located light-years distant.

It feels good to put something on paper (well, you know what I mean), so there's some record that the ideas exist.

Literary self-analysis

I think it's healthy to examine one's own style of expression, in writing, particularly. I've noticed that my own writing has a few key features.

I write a lot of flowery prose. This is driven in part by how I feel when I'm writing something - I want people to meander and curve through what I write, however, I feel that making a reader follow a convoluted path can sometimes choke my intended meaning. As with absolutely everything, there is a balance to be found. Reading back the last few paragraphs helps a lot.

I think this problem is compounded by the often abstract, figurative nature of what I write. It wouldn't be such a problem if I kept to describing only the literal.

I also tend to use quite a lot of big words. I do this for two reasons. Firstly, to improve precision of my writing and to reduce ambiguity. If there is a small ambiguous word and a larger unambiguous word, I'll use the larger word every time (unless it interrupts the rhythm). The same applies if I can condense a string of shorter words into a single longer word.The second reason is to add a stylistic flair to what I write. Small words are fine, but they're universally dull.

I also tend to coin neologisms on the spot. I have a goal at the start of a sentence, and if I can't find a perfect word, I'm liable to modify an existing word or hammer together two words to fit the role.

Obviously, the drive to add flair isn't enough in itself to justify twisting, prosaic passages with inaccessible vocabulary and terminology. It needs to be backed up with the need for precision and those two need to be balanced against the need for writing to be accessible and fairly concise.

When I'm writing to forward my own perspectives, I've noticed that I will often qualify what I say with 'I think', 'I feel', 'I believe', 'personally' and etcetera. This is because I know that not everyone who reads this will be a skeptical, humanist, liberal, non-theist, and I don't want to look like I'm imposing my opinions. Nonetheless, I do feel that having to qualify the things I say in this manner can interrupt the flow of what I write.

In terms of structure, I believe that I overuse the single sentence paragraph. It's done for emphasis, and for maximum effect, should be used extremely sparingly. I've noticed that whenever I want to drive a point to a conclusion, I'll mark it with a single sentence paragraph. This is a habit I should probably get out of, and I'm trying to minimise my use of single sentence paragraphs.

My paragraphs are generally over-short. I try to make sure that each of them covers a single point. Perhaps I need to expand my definition of a 'point'.

Existential crisis

For a hypothetical addressee.

So you've woken up and realised that in the grand scheme of things, you aren't all that. Congratulations, welcome to the fold and etcetera. You'll be glad to know that you are far from alone.

In fact, what you've gone though happens so often that we have a name for it - existential crisis. Pretty much anyone who doesn't entirely buy into the claims of religion will experience it at some point in their lives, and gradually become aware that their life has no intrinsic worth or meaning.

The vast majority of people are scared by this eventual conclusion. I was one of them. I didn't want to dwell on it - and I dearly wished that I had never opened Pandora's box. You can put off the crisis by distracting yourself, but it grows on you, and demands resolution sooner or later.

Some people, when faced with the prospect of their life having no intrinsic value, turn to religion. They generally resolve the crisis by bathing in the reassuring claims of their favourite faith, and emerge from the crisis a hardcore religionite - utterly convinced of god's existence. They respond to criticism by digging in deeper. To me, taking this path symbolises valuing a reassuring fable above the hard reality. I could never follow this path. I care about the truth too much.

The other path is often taken to be the more difficult to traverse. But to me at least, it was the only real option. As I said, I simply care about the truth too much to take the easier way out.

I resolved my own existential crisis by asking myself a question:

Why is it so important that I be the centre of the universe?

I was unable to answer this question. I still am not. It seems to be a combination of evolutionary heritage and cultural pressures that our happiness (with exceptions like you and me) depends on a belief that we are somehow significant in the grand scheme of things.

I am content not being important. There are things that make me happy in themselves, like writing, being with the people I love, drawing, helping people in need, deep contemplation, music, and appreciation of the natural world outside.

In light of the many gifts we have been blessed with, asking for yet more seems childish. I have enough. I don't need to be the centre of everything to be happy. I'm not that vain.

Once you have conditioned yourself out of the belief that your happiness is tied to you being the centre of the universe, infinity doesn't seem that daunting any more. It's a friend that you've learned to live with.

I hope that you will come with me on the second path.

Observation

Lina opens her eyes.

Crowded walls meet her.

She finds herself in a compartment about two and a bit metres in each dimension. The sleep inertia of her prolonged torpor wears off quickly. Now entirely awake, she pulls herself out of her wall-mounted bunk and hangs in the space 'above' it for a moment. She blinks twice as her eyes adjust to the soft, but still cold, lighting.

Lina's eyes now search for the nearest handhold. Picking one out amongst the tightly packed myriad of storage lockers and bundled cables proves to be an easier task than she was expecting. Memory assists her somewhat, of course. She pushes off her abandoned bunk and glides over to the handhold, gripping it firmly.

Now she rotates so that the hatch of this compartment is directly above her head. She pushes off the handhold gently and silently glides toward the hatch. She reaches it, plants her feet on the opposite wall, and turns anticlockwise the wheel embedded in the hatch's centre. The resistance of the wheel tries to rotate her clockwise. Lina again wonders a thought that is now familiar to her, why put a manual lock in a weightless environment?

The hatch now open, Lina coasts into the adjacent compartment. It is a much larger space than her own cubby, which was barely large enough to house the bunk, plus enough personal space as not to seem crowded.

Hand/footholds dot the walls of the compartment. There are additional lockers built into the walls here, most larger than those in Lina's cubby. At the far end of the space, there are a pair of rugged-looking seats, served by wraparound displays. Lina's motor memory is returning. Still drifting toward the seats, she deftly catches the headrest of one in both hands, and in a manner she might share with a weightless ballerina, pulls herself down into it and engages the straps.

Lina sets her hands onto the cold, dark control interfaces. At her touch, they illuminate. A warm glow shines on Lina's face. The transparent, wraparound display behind the control interfaces also ignites in a flourish of colour. Information spontaneously organises into charts, tables and schematics before her eyes. Lina's left hand dances over a few controls.

Outside, on the hull of the tiny space station, a parabolic antenna blossoms, gently unfolding like a monochrome orchid, and pitches around to target Earth. It catches radio waves in its wake, already six and a half hours old by the time they get out this far, and channels them in to Lina.

Earth has been whispering while she slept.

Sounds now accompany the warm incandescence of the consoles. Overlapping voices, most human, some synthesised, are kindled before Lina. The trickle of voices feels therapeutic. The independent cadences and rhythms of each voice, in aggregate, form a soothing, organic pulse. The heartbeat of a distant Earth?

She picks out a few snippets in languages she understands:

...litigation over smart gels...diplomatic tensions rise with...

Her declarative memory is now completely intact. Lina Dalton, her brain says. Makemake observation outpost zero one, it follows up dutifully.

...a new leader for the new eastern bloc...

Lina's right hand now comes to life. Her fingers, navigating by touch and memory alone, find familiar controls and activate them. The walls above her console are peeling away. Five alloy shutters retract in synchrony, revealing a panorama of the outside universe to Lina. Printed diamond windows keep the air in. Lina is now sitting in a bubble, nothing but vacuum on three sides, with the body of the space station behind her.

...there are more things in heaven and...intellectual fortitude...east-west conflict...

Modest computer-driven graphics are overlaid on the perfectly transparent diamond windows. A few points of light - Alpha Centauri, Polaris, etcetera - are identified with unobtrusive labels. Earth is not identified. It is too small. At this distance, its angular diameter is smaller than what can be seen by the human eye.

...yankee zulu bravado...we small peop...

Lina receptively takes in the sounds of an invisible world. She can feel, almost viscerally, the steady heartbeat of Earth, expressed in the voices of its denizens. The concert of sounds pulses as one. Each individual voice melts smoothly into the others. Like a tranquil river, the voices flow into her. Lina feels the presence of a brilliant world, bathed in the light of intelligence, pulsing with the activity of billions, yet still acting as in singular.

...even more accurate than...actuarial escape vel...

Her heart almost beating in sync with Earth's.

...d signals over...the paragon of anima –

And then, in the space of an instant, the voices cease.

Echoes live for a moment longer before being struck mute themselves. A deep silence falls upon the compartment - total and absolute, yet far louder then the sounds had been. Lina jerks back to full awareness. The voices still ring in her mind, but are fading fast.

Lina examines the displays. No failures. What had happened?

Over the next few minutes, Lina uses every tool available to try and track down a malfunction. Every time she fails to find one, an uneasy eventuality grows in her consciousness. Nothing wrong with the antenna. Speakers perfect. Nothing in the line of sight. Earth had just stopped talking.

Finally, Lina works up the courage to test her final hypothesis. Her hands move deliberately over the controls, and come away almost shaking. She examines the records of her radiation counters, which, as part of the antenna assembly, had been trained on Earth. At the precise moment the voices choked and died, an unmistakable spike in gamma radiation was clearly evident. The presence of the spike confirms the horrid, unthinkable thought that has been looming since the Earth's heart stopped beating. It’s as if that same spike has been shot through her chest, for all the subtlety.

So it was nuclear weapons.

It was all just talk and politics; the what-if scenarios of the high-minded. No one had given any credence to the possibility that it might actually happen.

Light of any description - including radio waves and gamma radiation - takes six and a half hours to get out this far. Six and a half hours ago, the Earth died. Did they kill each other, or were they all murdered by one sadistic party? How complete was the destruction? Severe enough to plunge the planet into radio silence. What about EMP? Part of her doesn't care. Part is empty, stunned. The rest just wants to throw up.

What the fuck do we do now?

Deep time

"We must ask ourselves, we who are so proud of our accomplishments, what is our place in the cosmic perspective of life?" - Robert Jastrow

Today I wish to consider the prospect of the future. Not simply the future, mind, but the deep, deep future. I want to examine the depths where everything becomes irretrievably dark, and see what awaits us in the deepest future of the cosmos. And why do I want to do this? Partly because I can. Partly because I must.

It starts with the stars. Stars are element factories. They smash hydrogen together and create heavier elements. The first stars were massive, and lived their lives in a figurative cosmic heartbeat. They exploded, new second generation stars formed from their remains. These too exploded, giving rise to a third generation. The cycle can only occur a limited number of times.

There is only enough hydrogen in the universe for another one or two generations, and then, slowly but surely, the stars will start going out. The biggest stars will go first. Sirius, Vega and their kin will be extinguished in mere hundreds of millions of years.

In three billion years, our own Milky Way galaxy will have begun to merge with our largest neighbour, Andromeda. They will circle each other for a time, their arms mingling. The galactic union will be consummated by the merging of the supermassive black holes that form the cores of both galaxies.

In five billion years, our own sun will take its last breaths and venture quietly into the night. There will no spectacular farewell for our parent star - it is not massive enough. No, the sun will simply inflate and fizzle. This will probably mark the end of the road for Earth as well, but the descendants of today's humans might still survive by journeying to other stars. The party isn't fun any more - everyone's leaving.

But the universe is a closed system. You can buy time, but sooner or later, everything winds down to nothing.

By the year one trillion, there will be no stars like the sun left. The only stars left will be diminutive red dwarfs, tiny balls glowing feebly with a barely perceptible incandescence. By this time, star formation will have slid to a half as hydrogen stores run dry throughout the universe.

But wait, there's more.

Red dwarfs need fuel, just like the long-dead larger stars. They don't burn it as quickly, but by the year twenty trillion, the last red dwarfs will be winking out. The universe will have become very dark, and the last sources of light are going. To our eyes, it would be simple blackness. No constellations. No nebulae. No galaxies. Planets and moons might still exist, but nothing we'd recognise as life could survive on their now-frigid surfaces.

Continuing to forge through deep, logarithmic time, black holes will eventually be the only objects in the universe. All activity in the cosmos will wind down to a halt.

But the cosmos has one last surprise. Black holes don't live forever either. They constantly lose imperceptible amounts of mass, evaporating over time. The universe's last call will be the death of the last black hole. From that second onward, the universe will consist of nothing but elementary particles, separated by great stretches of space.

These particles will continue to spread apart as space expands, but the universe is now essentially dead.

In the deep future, the universe will get painfully dark, painfully cold, and painfully big. The immense nothingness alone would eliminate us, if we somehow managed to survive for that long. This is all that awaits us. There will be no eleventh-hour rescues, no escapes, no way out. This future is inevitable, and it gets closer each passing day.

So take these thoughts and internalise them. Realise that This. Will. Happen. Make yourself realise that this is not a fiction, not a story. It is reality, and reality is hard to take sometimes.

Cyanotheces 51142

When Craig Venter made synthetic life earlier this year, he gave possible future applications of synthetic biology. High on the list of near-term applications, he mentioned designing microbes that use sunlight to produce hydrogen. Well, nature has beaten him to it. Sort of.

These handsome things belong to a species of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) called Cyanothece 51142. By day, they make glucose with carbon dioxide and sunlight, like most plants. But by night, an enzyme uses the glucose plus nitrogen in the air to produce ammonia, which gives off hydrogen as a by-product.

What we have on our hands is a bacterium that makes hydrogen using energy from sunlight. This is significant because hydrogen is likely to serve a major supporting, if not leading role in our future energy economy.

The idea goes like this. Energy is very difficult to store in any great magnitude for a prolonged period of time. Renewable energy sources like solar power and wind power are intermittent, so a long-term means of storing huge amounts of energy is necessary. Hydrogen gas can be created in endothermic (energy-consuming) reactions, and can later be combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to give energy and water.

There are no natural sources of hydrogen gas, so a big problem with this concept is the present lack of an efficient means to make hydrogen. The amount of energy you put in to create the hydrogen vastly outweighs the amount you get back at the end. If we could bring the values closer to parity, it would go along way to making a hydrogen economy feasible.

By genetically tweaking organisms like Cyanotheces 51142, we might gain an efficient way of using the energy of sunlight to produce hydrogen.

Of course, there are other problems with a hydrogen economy. There are concerns over hydrogen's energy density, our ability to store it safely, and our ability to make efficient fuel cells to recombine the hydrogen at the end of the process.

But nonetheless, the discovery of this little critter can only be good news.

The destructive impulse?

"We see something beautiful, untouched and pure and have the overwhelming desire to taint it."

Reading this blog post, I was enticed to consider something about us. Are we destructive?

You may be aware that most places in the UK presently look somewhat like this:

Fresh snow seems to trigger something inside all our heads. Seemingly regardless of age, the urge to put your footprints through it is universal*. What does this say about us? That when we see something untouched and serene, we instinctively try to spoil it by introducing defects? Maybe.

Another way to look at this situation is from an artist's point of view. The snow is a canvas - a blank substrate, and we feel the need to put ourselves in it. Snow angels, snowmen, messages in the snow...even the imprint of our footwear is somehow personal and profound to us.

We're all artists deep down, and the world is our canvas.

I don't think it is symbolically destructive to put your feet in virgin snow. I think that it is just an unconventional kind of self-expression. Not only a way to put your thoughts and emotions in the world, but to leave marks that say I was here. That at a specified time, at a denoted place, a given person once existed.

*Or at least close to universal. Research would be needed to isolate out cultural variations, and try getting university funding for the study of that urge people get when they see fresh snow. A part of it is undoubtedly just inattention - many people walk through snow without a thought for the marks they leave behind. Nonetheless, this urge obviously exists in some form.

Thoughts under a shooting star

If you don't already know, this past week our little world crossed the orbit of the asteroid 3200 Phaethon (say it FAY-a-thon).

As Phaethon orbits, getting closer to and further from the sun in perpetuity, debris breaks off from the main rock and gets strewn about its orbit. Well, as we passed through this debris trail, some of the objects entered our atmosphere, causing the annual phenomenon known as the Gemenid meteor shower.

Long-exposure of a Gemenid meteor. It's up left.

The Perseid and Leonid meteor showers (midsummer and November, respectively) have been persistent disappointments to me, due in part to light pollution and frequently cloudy skies above the West Midlands. However, this year, I saw my first Gemenid.

They're slow-moving, fairly bright compared to the background stars and can be mistaken for planes if one doesn't look too closely. This was only the second shooting star that I recall observing, and seeing this one reminded me of the first, a few years ago.

I was in Devon on a residential school trip for geography. The place we were staying at, from what I remember, had a garden up front, with a solitary bench, that looked out on to an open, flattish landscape with hills on either side. One night, myself and a friend were on the bench and happened to observe a fantastic meteor pass overhead and trace a nearly perfect vertical path to the ground.

Everything about the scene seemed to conspire to make all the details perfect. The angle of the bench, the exceptionally clear skies, the brightness and vector of the meteoroid, the way the hills framed the sky. All of the variables in play came together with an uncanny synchronisation, that as a whole seemed to suggest that something profound had just happened.

If I had the kind of mind that was prone to invoking an intelligent overseer, I might have concluded that the scene was designed purposefully for my benefit. But of course, it wasn't. Unlikely things happen all the time. In fact, it would be more interesting if odd synchronicities didn't occasionally emerge.

The scene had an air of perfection to it, and in that particular moment, I experienced a fleeting sense of oneness with my surroundings, and awe at the cosmos, that left me in hushed silence for several seconds. Just because I'm not religious doesn't mean that I deny myself spiritual experiences.

Assange on bail

Julian Assange gave an interview to Newsnight after his release on bail last night. I give him kudos for giving the interview in the snow.

"There were some five million web pages including my name...four million of those also mentioned the word 'rape'. There are thirty-three million web pages altogether on the internet that mention the word 'rape' in any context...so this has been a very successful smear campaign."

So 12% of all web pages mentioning rape also mention Julian Assange. Damn.

Personally, the sexual assault allegations seem highly dubious. All the back-and-forth by the Swedes and the withdrawal of one of the supposed victims makes me extremely doubtful that there is substance behind them. I don't know if Assange will be extradited or not, but I would be incredibly surprised if he was convicted on the basis of these allegations.

When a person is accused of a serious crime, but is not convicted, I normally wonder how their reputation could possibly recover. However, the allegations in Assanges' case have been so badly handled that I suspect his reputation was damaged only a fraction as much as it could have been.

His bail was delayed because of an appeal by the British prosecutors (not the Swedes - fishy that) on the grounds that he had a high risk of absconding. This strikes me as the prosecutors desperately doing everything possible to keep him in jail. Assange wants to clear his name, not live underground for the rest of his life.

At least that's my idle analysis. In any case, I'm very interested to see how this plays out, far more interested than I am in the brouhaha over student fees.

Here's the interview:

College

Lunchtime today, Solihull College broke up for the standard two-week midwinter holiday. This represents the conclusion of my first full term at the college. I thought now would be an appropriate time to look lack on my decision not to stay on at my secondary school's sixth form, and go elsewhere.

Before Solihull College, I went to King Edward VI school in Aston. It is what one would describe as a good school. It's a grammar school, and on the league tables, well, see for yourself. It's over half a decade ago now, but I remember feeling more or less ecstatic when I got the news that I had been accepted. As I said, this is over five years ago, so I don't know how accurate these memories are.

Clearly, the initial appeal didn't last. Over my five years there, I slowly became more and more unhappy. I was taking a sizeable amount of time off in the latter end of year eleven, made more conspicuous because my prior attendance was quite good. At the end of year eleven, the idea occurred to me, prompted by my mother - if you're so unhappy, why not just go somewhere else?

And I was initially skeptical. Yeah right, I thought, as if. I felt somehow compelled to stay because of the prestige attached to the institution. And then I realised that leaving might actually be a good idea.

So I did.

Just this week, I think I've finally pinpointed exactly what it was that made me so unhappy about KE Aston. To me, it felt like an enclave closed off from the world. Not unlike a cult (though I'm not trying to compare my secondary school to a cult), I felt as though I wasn't actually living in the world. I felt as though I was living in a little bubble parked a short distance above it. It made me feel dependent, and, as I got closer to the time when I would leave, I felt like I wouldn't be able to cope if I actually did.

In hindsight, I definitely made a good decision leaving. I feel like I'm in the world. Yes, the teaching at Solihull College may not quite be up to the standards of KE Aston, and the students may not all be Oxford/Cambridge candidates, but Solihull College feels real to me.

I'm certain that, in the final analysis, I will made the best decision. I'm still hammering along with mainly A grades, and I've made more friends in one term here than I ever had in five years at KE Aston.

Secrecy and government

"We open governments." - WikiLeaks slogan

Authoritarian regimes must necessarily operate in secrecy. This is because such regimes are in opposition to the public's interests, and catalyse forces among the people that oppose them. Successful regimes prevent this by concealing their activities from the people.

Hence, before authoritarian rule can creep in, government transparency and accountability would first need to be disposed of. Leaks force transparency and accountability, even when the government in question may not like it.

This is why WikiLeaks and its kin are so important - the make leaking easy by offering anonymity to sources, and doing the publishing themselves. They help prevent the kind of concealment that is necessary for an authoritarian regime to be viable, acting as safeguards to prevent democracies from turning into autocracies.

Julian Assange explains WikiLeaks' intentions in his own words here (pdf). It's worth reading.

Husks

Everything in your life has been leading to this moment.

They got you when you were young. Took away your dreams, your aspirations, anything you ever desired for yourself, and locked them away in a box. They left your head empty - robbed of the things that made it whole. They left you half-gone, your mind a screaming void, howling for purpose.

Then, when you were emptiest, they relented. But not quite. They poured new dreams into your head - theirs.

Like a desperate, starved animal, you gleefully swallowed the foreign dreams, and laid them down inside your mind as if they were your own. Like a Reed Warbler tending to a Cuckoo's eggs.

You were emaciated, atrophied, withered. Dead in spirit if not in body. They made sure that the things that had once filled your mind were long forgotten, and then they infected you with alien aspirations. And you, crying out for something to fill the aching void, accepted in an instant.

And the new dreams comforted you. They sent out roots of their own, and wrapped themselves around the many-layered creature that is your consciousness. The new dreams offered a way out of the tormenting nothingness you had tasted, and it was that exit that you embraced.

Everything in your life has been leading to this moment, and now the moment is over. The dreams are finally fulfilled. You should be happy. The dreams. Not your dreams.

And suddenly it's as if half your soul has gone.

There is nothingness. A vast, engulfing nothingness that swallows up everything you've ever experienced. Every thought, every emotion. All of them, good and bad, virtuous and twisted alike, now absent. The void does not discriminate. The nothingness howls at you, peeling away the layers of your being.

The shallow comfort of foreign dreams is gone, not even a memory remains. They left you as a discarded instrument. You want time to flow backward. In the face of forever, all you want to do is shrink - to return to the womb and sleep once more. Anything to make the emptiness go away.

And then - as you teeter on the brink of eternity - a box. You start to remember.

Entropy's march

We are dying.

As you read. As I write. As we live our lives.

We are dying.

Why?

Take a new deck of cards. Spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds, all in pristine order. Now shuffle. They aren't in order any more. Shuffle again. Still not in order. In fact, you can shuffle from now till the stars go out, and you will, in all likelihood, never end up with a perfectly ordered deck again.

Welcome to entropy - the reason you're dying.

Entropy is the observed, inexorable march from order to disorder that seemingly prevails everywhere in nature. Glasses break, they don't spontaneously reform. Your desk will become untidy, and will not become tidy by itself. Water flows downhill, not uphill.

Constantly, things are sliding down toward disorder. Of course, when it happens to us, we don't call it entropy. We call it aging.

We humans are kept alive through the exquisitely structured chemical reactions of metabolism. And yet, metabolism isn't perfect. As it ticks over, it lays down accumulating damage that will eventually cross a threshold and kill us. This is how entropy is written on our soul.

The same thing that keeps us alive is what eventually kills us. The cosmos giveth and the cosmos taketh. Death is just a consequence of being alive in the first place.

Life is a package holiday, and death comes inclusive. So don't let it get you down. It couldn't be any other way.

Instead, dwell on this.

You get to live twice as long as your great, great, great grandparents. Twice as long. Twice as much time to live your life. Twice as much time to love your friends and family. Twice as much time to help your fellow primates. Twice as much time to leave a positive mark on the world.

Optimism in the cosmos

Reading some of these posts, you might think I'm pessimistic about humanity's place in the cosmos. Well, that's only a half-truth.

The universe is indifferent to our existence. It doesn't know we're here. If we were all snuffed out tonight, it wouldn't notice we were gone. It owes us nothing. It simply is. It doesn't care one way or another. In many ways, this is more difficult to accept than if the universe were actively out to get us - many people would prefer to believe in a hostile universe than a blind, apathetic one.

At least if the cosmos were malevolent, we would have an outside force to which our failures could be attributed. But if the alternative is true, if the universe truly doesn't care, then there is no one to blame our failings on. There is no parent looking over us and no cradle to return to when we become afraid.

But take heart. If we overcome our fear of being tiny, there are wonders to be had.

We dutifully explore our own origins. We design and redesign agriculture, without which billions would starve to death. We manufacture vaccines that spare unthinkable suffering. We create great works of art and culture, and contemplate our own cosmic circumstances.

And we are beginning to explore the stars.

The significance of our lives, and our fragile little world, are then determined by our knowledge, wisdom and bravery. So on the contrary, I am an optimist till the end. I find it preferable to embrace a difficult truth than a reassuring myth, but I feel there's potential to our species yet unseen.

Why blog?

I have two big reasons for writing a blog;

1. I like writing. You might have noticed that I enjoy writing a great deal, and my skills will hopefully improve with practice and experience.
2. Release. I have profound thoughts sometimes, though I do speak as a biased party. It feels somehow satisfying to record them. It's the same impulse toward self-actualisation that leads some to keep diaries.

Most likely, these two reasons are related more than they appear. If you would allow me a moment's speculation, perhaps the impulse for intellectual and emotional release is the same impulse that leads me to enjoy writing. I would not be surprised to discover that this self-actualisation impulse is what leads humans to produce works of art, or otherwise try to effect lasting change on the world.

I will be nothing but glad if you, dear reader, gain some intangible benefit from this blog, but I am writing primarily for my own gratification. I will be similarly glad if expressing ideas here helps to spread them around, but this blog is not chiefly intended to proselytise.

Here at least, I don't care if your worldview and ideas differ greatly from my own. You're an intelligent being, and that makes you worth cherishing.

The machines and Zeno

Zeno quietly observed the contradictory machines travelling down into the pit. The gentle, somehow light manner in which they glided over the rough ground clashed strongly with their bulky frames and firm, heavy contours. The machines were powerful, but the eerie silence when they were in motion unsettled him. Under the darkness, Zeno could discern no obvious wheels at the base of the machines. They were either tracked or some manner of hovercraft. Or maybe his vision was just deteriorating faster than he thought.

The machines were not identical. Some were larger than others. Some looked specialised for shifting ground, others for prospecting and surveying. Not one of them looked harmless.

Zeno could not pick out details, but nightmarish protrusions disfigured the profiles of the vehicles, probably instruments and actuators. Silhouetted against the darkness, the machines looked like the favourite tools of Satan, or perhaps forged especially by some capricious general to strike fear into their opposition.

The horrendous, hushed convoy finished its short trek down to the bottom of the pit. Zeno stealthily crawled forward and craned his neck over the edge, so he could see the gulf below. The machines were no longer clearly distinguishable from each other. The darkness was so inexorably permeable, mingling in amongst every object, that he could discern only a fuzzy, terrifying mass at the bottom of the pit.

Without taking his strained eyes off the assembled hands of the Hades below, Zeno fumbled about behind him for his binoculars. Of course, the antique apparatus was powerless against the poor lighting conditions, but Zeno felt better about at least making an effort, though all he expected to see was a larger indistinct congregation.

Zeno's left hand clasped around a barrel of the aged binoculars, and he pulled them up toward his face. As he hefted the dense apparatus towards his outmatched eyes, something slipped.

He lost grip of the binoculars, and they slid out of his hands, dropping like a rock down into the pit. Zeno's heart choked, his hands clenched.

Shit, he cursed silently.

They dissolved into the murky darkness about a metre down. Zeno suspended his breathing. Nothing could be heard for several seconds, and then...smash. A brittle collision could be clearly heard, reverberating off the hard rock walls of the pit. Cringing at his mistake, Zeno could feel the glass lenses shattering and the wooden barrels splintering inside himself, imagining the ground coming up to punch the now invisible binoculars.

Maybe they didn't hear, hoped Zeno feebly.

But the machines were no longer silent.

Tim Minchin and his Orchestra

So on Tuesday 8th I saw Tim Minchin on the first date of his UK arena tour. Taking care not to overstate, I quite literally loved every minute of it.

Muchos kudos to Katie for coming with even though she was ill. I love ye.

I'd seen a few of his live shows on TV before, and had seen a few of his songs on YouTube, but of course, seeing him live was so much better. Plus there was a 55-piece orchestra present, which contributed to the experience.

This song, especially, was memorable.

I really like how he is able to take skeptical and quasi-humanist principles and apply them in a way that is simultaneously strong and yet still somehow gentle and thoroughly enjoyable (though I do speak as a skeptical sort, perhaps die-hard believers would have a different reaction).

Though he does have a self-effacing and lighthearted stage persona, many of his songs are quite profound. If I Didn't Have You echoes almost exactly how I feel about love, ditto for White Wine in the Sun, which feels like a distillation of my feelings about midwinter festivals.

I would definitely have stayed for an additional hour.

And also I have a bag. I am so fucking rock.

Refreshing depressing

Peter Watts is my new favourite author.

His particular brand of character-driven science fiction drives all the right themes home for me, with a tinge of realistic world-building. I could never get through H. P. Lovecraft, because his characters are almost literally cardboard cut-outs. It can't hold my interest. Watts, however, makes his characters three-dimensional, and they echo his themes.

The first novel of his I read, Blindsight, was an original take on first contact and an exploration of consciousness - concluding that consciousness is most likely worse than useless from an adaptive standpoint, and us humans are oddballs indeed for possessing something like it. It's essentially a philosophical treatise, but with a plot that manages to be non-trivial. The book is worth reading simply for his realistic treatment of vampires (yes, you heard right).

I'm now reading Starfish, which is the first of a trilogy, and I continue to be impressed. His daring is refreshing; the main characters are rapists, pedophiles and abuse victims, shoved into a cramped environment under 300 atm. of deep, dark seawater.

I also like Watts because he releases his works as free ebooks, which is fast becoming my preferred medium, not least because I have close to zero money and couldn't afford the dead tree versions anyway.

Dots in the dark

We don't have many good constellations here in the north hemisphere. Orion's our best, of course, but there's so much light pollution about you'd be hard pressed to see him even on a clear night.

Last Tuesday, it was a very clear night. I was still awake at about one AM, and by chance happened to look at the sky. Orion and his friends, tiny, brilliant pin-pricks of light against the dark veil of night. I don't know why the stars affect me this deeply, but they do, and I'm glad for it.

Each of those sparkling dots is a mighty ball of searing thermonuclear plasma, as big as, or bigger than, our own sun, perhaps shepherded by smaller spheres, like our tiny world orbits our sun.

I stared up at the stars, dumbstruck, neck craned. I want so much to sail among them.

The sky makes some people convinced of their religion. It makes me convinced of the opposite. I imagine a civilisation riding around one of those distant shimmering orbs, proudly proclaiming 'We're at the centre. Everything was made for us," and I consider how seriously I would take their claim.

Love

I don't believe in love at first sight.

Allow me to clarify. I know that you can see someone for the first time, and feel they're special. It's happened many times to me. It's just your evolutionary history talking, subconsciously evaluating their appearance and their mannerisms, but what does it matter? So what if you're programmed to feel this way about certain kinds of people? It does nothing to undermine the feeling itself.

When it happens, I know that my brain is being gently bathed in dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, and that's what makes me feel this way. But I don't care.

I do believe that the feeling grows over time - maturing from infatuation into love. Oxytocin is a powerful thing. With experience, you get closer. You find out more about the other person. They find out more about you. You share new experiences. You get closer in each others' memories. The times before you met get blurrier. A neurochemical connection is forged between the two, courtesy of your biology. After time enough, you don't remember and can't imagine life without them.

I don't think there's one person out there for everyone. I think that you meet a candidate, and then you have a chance to make them yours, just as they make you theirs. Love is a thing best seen with hindsight, not foresight. I guess what I'm saying is I don't believe in love at first sight, but I do believe in true love.

You start with an infatuation, picked out by your biological programming, and from there you're in the driver's seat.

Isn't it beautiful that our evolution is capable of producing something so sublime and intricately brilliant? If if wasn't an undirected force of nature, I'd thank it.

A solid ethical base...

I sometimes wonder how people who don't think like I do understand ethics*.

By that, I mean the people who are not sceptical nor scientifically literate, but are also not especially religious. I know how the religious fraction of PWANMs rationalise it - they have their books, so there's no room for musing there.

Of course, their actions are informed by their consciences. But a conscience is just an evolved mechanism to promote social cohesion, promoted through kin selection. Don't misunderstand, there's nothing wrong with obeying your conscience (it does get it right most of the time - ain't that a coincidence), but to do so blindly conveys a certain...unresponsibility, at least in my eyes.

To blindly obey one's evolutionary programming, rather than self-analyse and evaluate, seems a characteristic in common with an automaton.

Perhaps I'm not in a position to judge, considering how I am unsure exactly what I think about ethics. I bought into Sam Harris' ideas for a while, but then I noticed he was just dodging a deeper question (yes, Sam, I agree that the optimum path to maximum wellbeing can be found using science, but why is wellbeing our metric for 'goodness' in the first place?). I should have twigged earlier that it couldn't be as easy as that.

Perhaps it isn't the fact that others don't have answers that I'm bothered by, perhaps it's that they don't even ask the questions. In fact, I'm certain of it.

In any case, I feel quite strongly that an awareness of ethics that goes deeper than 'I do what my conscience says', can help one become a better person. For instance, I've noticed that I'm more polite to others than the average person. I smile a lot. I donate a little more to charity than my peers (It still isn't much - I am a student after all). I think before I say things, especially if my words might have consequences. I simply cannot leave a conversation if I think I've upset the other person. I try to keep the knowledge that everyone I talk to has a history, desires, principles and emotions at the forefront of my mind.

This is an extremely unscientific anecdote. I'm open to being proved wrong. Until then, a conviction that simply asking the questions about ethics can make one a better person seems appropriate.

I also don't mean to self-promote. I know full well I'm far from perfect, and I have flaws aplenty, just as we all do.

*I use this word deliberately. 'Ethics' conveys a more honest, rational approach, rather than the authoritarian, monolithic connotations of 'morals'. I am told that morals are universal principles (eg. ten commandments), whilst ethics are heuristics for individual situations. By these definitions, I'm not sure morals even exist, but ethics seem like useful things to have.

**PWANM - people who are not me

To pass through life oblivious...

A vast majority of people on this planet will live their lives without ever knowing the things I know. That sounds self-indulgent and condescending, but I don't mean it to be so. I simply consider it sad.

I know, for example, that the atoms that make up my fragile biological form, have been rattling about at the bottom of Earth's gravity well for the better part of 4.5 billion years. Atoms in my body now have been part of Voltaire, Shakespeare, da Vinci, and yes, even Hitler and Ghengis Khan.

I know I am not a static thing. Constantly, atoms enter me from the ecology outside. Constantly, atoms return to that same ecology. I am forever changing. I am a pattern with continuity in time. And not even the pattern is constant.

It is beautiful to think that one day, billions of years hence, this world will likely be obliterated in the nuclear fire of an expanding star. At that instant, all those atoms which have been bottled up for so many thousands of millenia, will finally be released, retracing the steps of the journey they once took before.

I am glad I know these things, because I know how painfully easy it would be for me to have, by accident of birth, be born into a culture which was unaware of them. I would have gone my whole life unaware of the miracle of the stars.

I like to think that I would still have yearned for them.

It pains me, deep in my chest, to think that I am constantly surrounded by people who could easily access this information if they wished, and let these sublime truths fill them, but they choose not to. They choose not to. They find the study of the world we live in distasteful.

I go to college at the moment. I would dearly love to make them listen to ten minutes of Carl Sagan rather than another derivative rendition of 'Journey'.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "I know that the atoms in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people in the street and say ' have you heard this?'"

Exactly.

I console myself by understanding that regardless of what could have happened, I do know these things. It's my goal to help other people know them too.