Nobody Cares

When the word “nobody” is normally used, the intent is to describe the absence of a person... a lack of anyone... an empty space. If you go up to a house and knock on the door and get no answer—the door stays closed—you're likely to assume that nobody is home... the house is empty. We tend to feel there's some kind of deficiency when we use the term “nobody.”

In Buddhist meditation one is sometimes advised to think about being nobody—as a mental exercise, to ponder the possibility that you are not who you've come to believe you are; that there is another way of conceiving of your being. It can be an antidote to an ego that has gotten a little too puffed up, or a way to shake up your usual assumptions of yourself, or a way to cast off those attributes that your culture has planted in you. We can occasionally use a little deflation of our self-importance, in order to regain a more balanced perspective.

But I sometimes like to play with the concept of nobody, as if there really was a person named Nobody. It can put an amusing and curious twist on some familiar and pessimistic thoughts. When we're emotionally down, we sometimes wonder if anybody cares about us. But then we can console ourselves that Nobody cares! When I'm feeling down, telling myself that Nobody loves me can take the weight off the emotion.

Am I wandering aimlessly in life, feeling lost? Well, Nobody knows where I'm going; Nobody thinks I'm on the right track. The answers to the big questions in life tend to remain beyond us, such as Why am I here?, or What happens when I die?, or Will I find happiness? Some people think they have a response to these profound queries. They're fooling themselves, however, for Nobody really knows.

The world's wisest philosophers give us conflicting answers as to what consciousness is, or what our mind is. They disagree and argue endlessly—each sure he's right. I think they are all off base; for Nobody really knows.

Sometimes I think I might continue this idea during the next national election. We have in Washington, DC a bunch of childish politicians who do very little about fulfilling their functions. Maybe next time I'll vote neither Republican nor Democrat. I'll vote for Nobody, because Nobody is honest and Nobody will do anything to straighten this mess out.

So if you're feeling lost or confused and uncertain where to turn, take solace in the fact that you're not alone. Hey, Nobody cares. Nobody will help you out. Nobody is there for you.

More Snow

It's beautiful, but I'm getting tired of it.

Defining Life

A question that continues to pester science is: What is life? One of my dictionaries offers this definition: “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.” That seems to cover the topic quite well, but it has a problem: it may work well for distinguishing life on this planet, but how about other worlds in space? It also assumes that we know what an animal and a plant is—as well as being able to tell what “functional activity” means; and finally, death. These definitions depend on what we know about life on Earth; leading us to think that we will recognize life elsewhere when we see it, wherever it is.

But as we look out toward other bodies in the universe and wonder if we're alone or not—if life may have emerged elsewhere—could we even recognize it on alien worlds? In recent decades scientists have discovered here on Earth several species of what are now called “extremophiles”: microbes that live in habitats that we once thought were impossible for life; such as next to hot and toxic undersea volcanic vents; highly acidic pools of water; and deep underground locations, far from the sun and any source of plant nutrients. So our definition of life—and the conditions under which it can survive—has had to be widened.

Now we are on the verge of exploring other worlds in our solar system, upon which we know some of these extreme conditions exist: Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn's moon Enceladus, and others. Scientists are eager to check them out, and we may well be able to do so, in another decade or so. An even greater stretch of our ability to detect life may come when we develop better instruments to evaluate the properties of planets orbiting nearby stars.

Our ability to tell whether life exists “out there” hinges on the adequacy (or breadth) of our definition of it. Researchers keep offering updated definitions, but for every one put forth, other scientists quickly come up with a counter example even here on Earth that nullifies it. Take the reproduction part of the definition of life given above: What if we found some entity on the moon Europa that seemed to be alive, but showed no evidence of reproducing? Maybe it just has a very long reproductive cycle. How long do we wait, in order to say yes or no? What might death mean on Enceladus? How do we judge whether something has “functional activity” on an alien world?

Our current understanding of biology is still a little too primitive to come up with a clean definition of life here on Earth, let alone on some outer-space planet. For example, in the late 1970s the two Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars had the explicit objective of determining if life could be found there. The limited design of the Viking experiments, however, did not allow a decisive answer. NASA may have even conducted the wrong kinds of tests.

We'd better keep our minds open and not try to nail down the definition of life, until we are able to get to an alien world and observe what conditions prevail there. It just might show us something beyond our wildest expectations, and even beyond our current ability to wrap our heads around.

Trapped

Air bubbles traped in ice... just I feel trapped indoors with all this snow.

Look, Over There!

I have written numerous blogs about how scientists are relentlessly breaking down the barriers we modern humans once thought existed between us and other species of animals. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors saw it differently; they saw themselves as closely related to all things around them—animals, plants, and even rocks. They perceived spirits to be residing in all of these things—including themselves.

But when we humans became agricultural beings, and even later became literate, we found reasons to separate ourselves from and place ourselves above all other creatures. We came to believe that we were special, favored, superior... fundamentally different from all other living things. We liked that feeling.

Science, over the last few centuries, however, has been knocking us down a few pegs—increasingly so in the last few decades. For example, we once considered ourselves to be the only critter smart enough to recognize our own reflected image. Not so. Experiments have demonstrated that many species of animals can do it too. OK, but surely we are the only sophisticated tool maker and implementer; again because of our smarts and that opposable thumb of ours. No again. Well, OK, but no animal has language with our formidable power to communicate with our buddies, right? Again no. As soon as we were able to admit that our definition of language was far too self-centered, we could begin to see that other species have their own exquisite forms of language. Even trees keep in touch with each other, using a very sophisticated set of pheromones, as well as through inter-webbed roots with other trees.

Here is yet another human peg recently knocked down: even lowly ravens have been observed to point out objects to their buddies. It was previously believed that only humans and their close cousins the great apes were able to point to something and have their companions turn their head, follow the finger, and recognize the object. I read a couple of years ago that even dogs can get “the point” and grasp what their owners are trying to show them. I have a pretty bright dog. I've tried this experiment on him, and continue to be surprised when he turns his head in the direction I'm indicating.

But wait. Ravens don't have fingers with which to point, and if they tried to point with a claw, wouldn't they just fall down... or do they point with a wing? Of course, if these birds are that smart, couldn't they figure out how to point some other way—such as using their bills? Yes, and that's exactly what they do. By pointing to food items or nest building materials with their beaks, ravens have been observed to carry out this type of complex communication.

This pointing phenomenon is defined as using “deictic (DIKE-tik) gestures”—ways in which one person (or ape or raven) demonstrates and points out something of interest to a cohort. Young children use deictic gestures even before they develop a spoken language. Hey, they are as smart as a raven!

Knowing how ravens can point, it occurred to me that maybe it'd allow us to capture one of them quite easily. There's an old folk tale that says the way to capture a bird is to put salt on its tail. We could save the salt for dinner and instead point to something behind the raven, and when he turns around to look, we can rush up and grab him.

A Break

Getting tired of the snow, so I thought I'd post a photo of summer.

Out of Gas

Soon after the universe was created in the unique event dubbed the Big Bang, over 99% of the early universe's material was in the form of ephemeral clouds of the lightest and simplest of all elements: mostly hydrogen with a dash of helium. So where did all those blazing stars come from, and even more curious, how were all the heavier elements created, so that rocks and humans could later arrive?

The very first stars formed when those clouds of hydrogen gas began to lump together here and there, in the early universe. As gravity drew a huge glob of hydrogen tighter and tighter, the pressure became great enough that the hydrogen atoms began to fuse and ignited, the same way a hydrogen bomb does. The process emits enormous amounts of light and heat. We call it a star.

As a star's nuclear furnace cooks away, it's turning its hydrogen into helium. At the end of the star's useful life it will most likely blow up, blasting and spewing the remaining hydrogen, along with the created helium into space. We call it a nova or super nova. Of the original hydrogen that started the furnace, about 30% is left and is exploded away; the other 70% was transmuted into heavier elements—mostly helium, which is also blown away. And this process goes on in subsequent stars, forging heavier and heavier elements.

This nuclear process has continued for some 13 billion years now; stars igniting, burning for a few billion years, and blasting their remnants into space for the next generation of stars to be formed from the remains of the earlier ones. It's the universe's great recycling system.

But isn't there a limit to the number of times this recycling can occur? If every star consumes some 70% of the hydrogen that formed it, isn't the universe going to run out of hydrogen some day? Won't our great universe run out of gas? Well, yes, it will, and astronomers have recently detected that gradual depletion process. The universe isn't yet quite “running on empty,” but we certainly are slowing down. The rate of star formation has dropped off; it peaked when the universe was only a few billion years old.

The universe has only so much time left, but it needn't worry us humans too much as yet. It'll be many more billions of years before the last star is born, and billions (if not trillions) of years before they all wink out. Let our grandkids worry about it.

(On a more serious note, the fact that the universe will someday end—albeit may be trillions of years away—has significant implications to those who once thought we inhabit an eternal cosmos. That's the topic of another blog.)