Gravity

Back before I went through hospitalization and what-not, I was primarily concerned with “small ball”—trying to keep my now-ex-fiancée happy and that sort of thing. Stuff they talk about in pop songs.

Nowadays, I’m much more interested in things that interested me when I first visited the elementary school library. Here’s an example: What are we doing here? Is there life on other planets?

When I was in college, I took some astronomy courses, and I learned that the galaxy is HUGE. Satellites have gone quite far from Earth, and as of today, we’ve never seen any other life. Indeed, so far as we can tell, Earth has the only life nearby.

Isn’t that odd?

Along similar lines, humans are supposedly primates. Yet humans are not covered with fur and have opposable thumbs. Isn’t that weird, too?

EDIT: Apparently, chimpanzees and gorillas both have opposable thumbs. The broader point stands.

Following a series of strokes, my life is much different. I was engaged and ready to not concern myself with questions related to existentiality. However, those questions are not going to simply disappear. They want answers.

I keep thinking that we are at an inflection point in history. The world is dramatically different than just 30-40-50 years ago. I highly doubt we’re at the end of change.

Where we live, time is mediated largely by our distance from the sun, as it’s a major source of gravity for us on Earth. However, if we were much further from it, time would move more slowly. So to us, 100 years is 36500 sunrises and sunsets, but if we were on another orbit, much further from the center, 100 years on Earth would take much longer. And so the idea that things are happening very quickly is tied to where we are. Moreover, we are in a time where we have enough pieces to make changes much faster than before.

And so what? No idea.