God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
~Stephen Hawking

In this particular post we will be discussing one of my favorite universal phenomena, black holes. They are the most powerful force in the cosmos, able to wreak havoc and destruction on an incomprehensible scale. Yet they also seem to be a major key to the formation of galaxies and a big reason why any of us are even here to talk about it. We’ll discuss this, what we think black holes are and what they may do, and end with a scenario involving a black hole near Earth. This is not a scientific text. I’m just a pop-science junkie and I am fascinated by the mysteries of the universe.  So let’s begin at the beginning.

In the late 18th century cosmology was still very much in its infancy. We had  a pretty good picture of the solar system and how it operated, but the distant stars still eluded us. There were many theories for how the universe was constructed and mos tall of them came back to a steady state model.  This theory proposed that the universe was always here just as it is. It is infinite, eternal, and unchanging. This included theories about the spontaneous creation of matter to fill this infinite, eternal space. And if you were  a physicist alive at the time, it would make perfect sense to you. The technology was limited so the theories had to be as well.  The “discovery” of black holes came about during an experiment to test the effects of gravity by John Mitchell. Mitchell, a geologist by trade, dabbled in various arenas of science. And by dabbled I mean made revolutionary discoveries that would have made Einstein tip his hat.

During his various tests he attempted to measure the effects of gravity on light. Again the science was limited by the technology but in 1783 he wrote a letter to the Royal Society in London detailing what he called, “dark stars”. Bodies containing an absurd amount of density that “trap” everything near it, including light. he lamented that he didn’t have the tools necessary to further study this possible phenomena but he hoped his efforts would help future generations discover the truth. A true scientist in every sense of the word. But his work didn’t get many looks. It didn’t fit well with the steady state model that dominated science and it would be more than a century before that model changed. Light was seen as  a wave. A wave without mass. So very few people could be convinced that gravity could so strongly effect something with no mass. So Mitchell’s study sat unnoticed until a patent official from Zurich changed everything.

In the early 20th century the steady state model was coming to an end. The technology was beginning to catch up to the science and people were viewing the universe in a different way. Followed closely together was Albert Einstein’s theory of relatively in 1915, and Edwin Hubble’s 1925 paper detailing stars beyond our own galaxy. Yes, at this time we still assumed our galaxy was it. Nothing beyond it but empty space. Hubble proved otherwise with a telescope large than any that had come before it. But the big discovery relevant to our issue was Einsteins ‘s theory. It changed the concept of space, time, and gravity. Now they were all linked. Einstein’s theory proposed that sufficient mass curves spacetime significantly, and nearby objects fall in toward it. Given the speed of the object, it will either crash into the mass or “fall” into an orbit around  it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbhuRcmSkMg

It also became apparent that light had a dual property as both a wave and particles. This reopened discussion on “dark stars”. If a dense mass curved space enough, and light was a series of particles following a definite path in space, the mass could indeed “trap light”. All paths the light would travel are now bent back in toward the object and light cannot escape from it. But the objects being discussed now were no longer dark stars. If gravity could have such an effect, what would be its limit? How far could it collapse an object?   Karl Schwarzschild was at the forefront of this study. His work, also released in 1915, proved that a star of sufficient mass would collapse in on itself to a point that it literally falls in on itself.  Many were skeptical. They felt some device was in place preventing such a catastrophic ripping of spacetime. And indeed there was. But only for certain stars who did not have enough mass to fully collapse. They would reach a point then settle into what we call a neutron star.

Schwarzschild black hole model

But now it was almost accepted that black hoes were a possibility. It was still very much theory though. Mostly because it was insanely difficult to actually find and catalog a black hole. Well, the absurdity of it all was a turn off to many as well. A “hole” in space? Where does it go? What happens to the material sucked into it? Gravity was and is one of the big mysteries of the cosmos. Gravity is weak. It can be overcome with a tiny magnet. But it is constant. It wins in the end through sheer attrition. It takes a great amount of energy to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull. It extends all the way out past the moon but lessens as you move further away. With a black hole we are talking about an object with a mass thousands or even millions of times greater than the Earth. There was also the argument about whether black holes were actual physical objects or not. A small group of physicists believed strongly that they were but most of the community had already brushed them off as unfounded speculation on Einstein’s equations.

For decades researchers on black holes was relegated to the basement of physics, like  a zoologist looking for Bigfoot. But important people still took interest. In 1939, a team of physicists led by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, determined that black holes were indeed a possibility. If  a star of sufficient mass began to collapse, no known force was available to stop it.  In the late 50′s the black hole picture began to morph into what we know today. Schwarzschild’s model was studied relentlessly and a  new term, event horizon, was invented for the  “flat surface” framing his models. The event horizon is the point of no return. Once you cross into it there is no going back.  A black hole’s gravitational pull actually isn’t that strong outside the event horizon. But once across it the pull is tremendous and nothing, not even light, can escape. And this is also where physics starts getting real weird. Imagine for a moment you are in a space shuttle orbiting a black hole. You’re watching a fellow astronaut move toward the event horizon. He’s moving, and moving, and moving, then all of a sudden he stops. Frozen motionless in time.

But the other astronaut is still moving. To them time is still moving along just as it should. This is gravitational time dilation.  As you move closer to massive objects, time slows down. As Einstein’s theory shows, space and time are one. So a significant warping of space will result in a like warping of time. The astronaut in the ship will also see his comrade redshifting  as he or she approached the event horizon and the visible light reflected from them becomes less and less. Eventually it will become so dim you can no longer see them even though they are there. Then our astronaut friend becomes one with the black hole. But what exactly does that mean? This would be the next big battle in black hole research. Where does everything go and does it just disappear? And do things actually “escape” them?

Artistic rendering of a black hole "feeding", provided by NASA.

In the mid 20th century talk began about what a black hole is exactly. It is all still just theory after all. Even though research on them is taken more seriously, there is still a school of physicists who insist they don’t even exist. And even if they did it would be under exotic conditions they had yet to find in the universe. But, the “known universe” was only  a few decades old at this time so no one should have been so absolute about something they just discovered. What boosted interest in black holes was the confirmation of the existence of neutron stars when scientists observed  a pulsar in 1967. The same theories that led to neutron stars also led to black holes. More great young minds began taking black hole research more seriously and the field increased significantly. It was also around this time that the term ‘black hole’ actually began to be used.

Over the next few decades equations were produced to define and describe the structure of black holes and the concept of the singularity. A singularity is a point where things merge and become one. It was theorized that every black hole contained a singularity at its center. Singularities were, and in some places still are, the most controversial part of black hole physics. Number one, physics was incapable of describing it. In a singularity the laws of physics we understand do not exist. Up is left, right is purple, and the trees sleep with the  moonlight. Gravity becomes infinite.  Infinite is a tricky word that many mathematicians and physicists dislike. It’s not a real number.  You get into the concept of “imaginary numbers” and other voodoo tricks we use to try to grasp what we can’t grasp. Just take  a moment to think about infinity. Think about infinite gravity. An endless pressure forever increasing.

Still, theories were produced that proved to be mathematically sound. But science needs observation and it’s currently impossible to observe a singularity. The next big point of contention is what happens to matter drawn into that singularity. Early theories suggested that the information of an object, it’s essential quantum make-up, was lost or destroyed inside the black hole. This caused an uproar in the scientific community. One of the basic tenets of physics is that this cannot happen. You’ve probably heard it simplified in the phrase “matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed”. Matter just becomes energy and vice versa. The conservation theory. All energy in a system is constant. You just can’t up and remove it from the universe. A major supporter of this theory was Stephen Hawking, probably the most famous scientist since Einstein. He believed the information crossing the event horizon  was lost to the universe forever and that every black hole was essentially the same regardless of what information it consumed.

With the dawn of quantum mechanics,  many of Hawking’s previous theories began to crumble. In quantum mechanics all information stays the same at the quantum level no matter what happens. It’s make up now determines its makeup in the future. But Hawking was suggesting that the radiation patterns in every black hole would be the same and so different quantum makeups would conform into the same type. Quantum mechanics proved this was pretty much impossible.  Even inside  a black hole. Not only was information not lost, stuff actually “escapes” black holes in the form of radiation and various cosmic rays. Black holes emit jets of gas and energy away from them as they feed, stretching light years into space. Some longer than entire galaxies. In 2004 Hawking was forced to admit he had made an error and gladly accepted the new findings.

By the mid 70′s observational data was beginning to leak in on black holes. Black holes can’t actually be observed.  Thus the name. However you can study the area around it to see signs of its existence. Most notably it’s effect on the gravitational fields of nearby objects. Scientists began observing gravitational abnormalities in various areas of space and cold only come to one conclusion. An object of incredible density was nearby. But they couldn’t see it. Still it was the most reasonable conclusion. Nothing they had discovered could even come close to producing the effects seen. This research led to another shocking discovery in the last decade or so. It seems that almost every galaxy in the universe, especially ones like our own, contains a supermassive black hole at its center.   Supermassive black holes are just that. Black holes of an inconceivable size. It is accepted fact that stellar(normal) black holes are created from collapsing stars. But the star that forms a supermassive black hole would have to be so colossal that it seems impossible to think it could even pull its self together let alone sustain the processes necessary to form a black hole. They could have possibly formed when a proto-galaxy collapsed in on itself.

A possibly more believable theory is that they began as stellar black holes long ago and absorbed enough matter over time to reach this titanic size. Or that they were created during the turbulent moments following the Big Bang. No matter the reason they seem to be tied to galaxies in some ways. And just how remains unclear. For the longest time we felt the size of a supermassive black hole and  it’s galaxy were tied together. That theory went out the window in December of this year. Scientists discovered two black holes of colossal size. One black hole ten million solar masses in size and the other almost double that. A solar mass is the size of our sun. It’s 20 million times larger than our sun. And they are far too big to be in the galaxies they are in. Or so we had thought. And how do they get there? Scientists believe the galaxy forms around the black hole. As the black hole feeds, the energy it emits pushes the bulk of the galaxy back out of its reach and gives it room to grow. Another discovery was made earlier in March and for the first time scientists caught a black hole feeding.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Z5AS3TTS4

But we’re still no closer to figuring out exactly what they are. Again, we love observations, and gamma bursts on a satellite just don’t give us enough to paint a clear picture. And everything about the singularity contained within is pure conjecture. As OI said before, many people are not comfortable with the word infinite. So many physicists feel there is a limit to what can be packed into a black hole. So when it reaches its limit does it just “throw up” the excess? But, of course, some physicists think there is no theoretical limit. Because some people think black holes are more than just a collection of densely packed matter. Some theorists believe black holes are actually gateways to other dimensions.

Yeah it's getting crazy

There is science behind this though. Real science. A few decades ago talk of other dimensions was best left to science fiction writers.  Now it’s one of the most popular subjects in labs and classrooms around the world. ‘Cause who ever said there were only 3 dimensions? Einstein’s equations produced a lot of things he never thought they would. That any scientist ever thought they would. One of the most interesting and compelling is the possibility of other dimensions.

As I stated before, gravity is a weird thing we are still very much trying to figure out. It’s distribution across the universe seems, uneven. One of the biggest discoveries of the 20th century was Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe. What we found out decades later is not only is it expanding, the expansion is speeding up. An incredibly surprising revelation considering that, given the amount of observable matter in the universe, it should be physically impossible for it to still be gaining speed. It’s like something we can’t see is accelerating the expansion of the universe. One possibility thrown out early on was “dark energy/matter”. Another clever trick to explain what we don’t understand. According to physicists about 90% of the matter that make sup the universe is missing or can’t be seen. Hence the term, dark matter.  A way to explain the expansion and why stars at the edges of galaxies move as fast as those further in. Another thing that just shouldn’t happen.

But some physicists are contesting the notion of dark matter. They believe the extra gravity is coming from other dimensions. Some believe there is a whole universe right next to ours, and it exerts its gravity on us and we on them. Maybe the reason gravity isn’t as strong as other universal forces is because some of it is lost to these other dimensions. And black holes are just gravity wells connecting two universes. But how messed up is it if every black hole contains a universe? Including ours. And gravity just flows freely between them all. Connects us to them. Plans are already underway to test these theories. I look forward to the results.

The following is highly theoretical and extremely implausible.  But, not impossible.

It is morning(eastern time), February 12, 2012. All around the globe people are beginning and ending their days. Not knowing this will be the last one ever on Earth. At 10:00 a.m. EST, a huge deviation in the orbit of the moon is detected. Almost as if something is pulling it off course, closer to the Earth. Confident it’s a calibration era, machines are reset and the test is run again. The results are the same only now the orbit is further degraded. Hours later reports come in all around the globe of huge seismic activity. As though every plate on earth were going off simultaneously.  And some creepy data suggesting that mountains are shrinking. Falling back into the earth.

Then the sinkholes begin.  Enormous chunks of earth, some the size of a state, begin falling away. Officials are at a loss to explain what is going on. Then 7 hours after the initial reading on the moon, the news come in. And it is grim. Experiments at the large hadron collider have produced an until now unknown side effect. A black hole. It has sunk to the center of the Earth and is now eating it away piece by piece. In less than 24 hours there will be very little left of the planet that is once our home. The black hole’s modest size has only increased its hunger and it devours the earth at a rate far greater than some of its larger brethren.

Panic and chaos erupts across the globe as everyone realizes this is it. Some find peace with what is happening while most lose their fucking minds. Coastal areas are destroyed as the steadily approaching moon wreaks havoc on the oceans. Oceans that soon fall away to be eaten by the beast at the center of our globe. As the earth begins to fracture and distort the core ceases to produce a magnetic field. Remaining plant and animal life slowly begin to suffocate as the Earth’s atmosphere is pulled away. 15 hours after the initial discovery there is nothign left living on Earth. And the planet is barley recognizable. Looking almost like  a dented tin can it continues to fall in on itself toward the awaiting black hole. Any human who may have fallen toward the black hole Earth on would have experienced something freaky. If they go in feet first that is where they will first feel it. And it won’t be all at once. The black hole will exert a constant even pull that stretches the very molecular fiber of your body as you are unraveled like an old sweater. A spaghetti string slurped up by the black hole. Not a bad way to go.   Painful? Oh I’d have to think it’s unbearable. But its gotta look pretty cool.

20 hours in and the Earth is gone. Replaced by the cosmic entity that devoured it. But it’s not over. Soon the moon reaches the event horizon and joins us in the singularity. All becomes one at the center of the black hole. No trace that the Earth ever existed. That humanity was ever here. And then it turns to look at Mars.

So I hope you enjoyed this highly unscientific discussion of a strange scientific phenomena. And don’t worry, the odds of the LHC producing a sustainable black hole are so tiny they aren’t even worth considering. And if one got anywhere near us, cosmically speaking, we’d know well ahead of time. Which would just wind up being torture since there isn’t anything we can do about it. But, maybe in the thousand years it takes to get here, we can figure out how to get the fuck outta here.

I received this in my email this morning.  We all get these emails from well-intentioned friends and I usually skim through to see what the emailee wants me to do with his/her email after I have read it.  This one was different, I started reading and kept on it all the way to the end.  Corporations aside, we really were pretty green growing up.  It does not matter if this story really happened or the writer just made it up, the point is it made me think about our planet and how while our intentions are admirable in this new generation, we would be wise to learn how the older generation did things before we make fun of them.

The Green Thing

At Raley’s the other day, the young cashier suggested that I bring my own grocery bag because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.I apologized to her and explained, “We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. The former generation did not care enough to save our environment.”She was right, our generation didn’t have the green thing in our day . . .Back then, we returned our milk bottles, soda bottles, and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled .. . . but we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

In our day, we walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right . . . we didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But, yeah. . . we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one radio (or some a TV) in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a 19 inch or smaller screen, not a screen the size of the state of Montana.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.  Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But, yeah . . . we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.We replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull . . . But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. Mama was sometimes seen walking the 2-mile round trip “downtown.”

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.  But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful the old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Progress is usually a good thing but in reading this email I thought about how progress sometimes is not always new, just a different, better or faster way of doing things.  Some people still recycle their soda cans and plastic bottles and recycling is still an industry but it is now voluntary and if you don’t recycle you just pay the CRV anew everytime you buy merchandise in that kind of packaging.  But we were recyling back then because we got our money back on those bottles we returned an very few people would imagine buying a new six pack of coke without returning the emplty bottles.  I mean, who wanted those bottles cluttering up their homes?  Some people still use a push mower but usually only because they have such a small patch of lawn to mow.  Usually they power up the big machine and some even think they need the big John Deere riding mower because their neighbor has one and look how much easier it is to ride while working.  Some of these activities were beginning to change even while I was growing up and I am 58 but I can remember most of them.

So, did we really progress that far in green thinking or did we really just change the method?  I know we have not started holding corporations responsible for what they are doing.  We certainly have not extended our green technology in a big way.  Maybe because it takes us longer to get corporations to take their share of the responsibility?  And now the Republicans and Tea Party or should I say RepubicTeas want to reduce EPA and other regulations even more.  If we cannot get Corporations to stop polluting with regulations, how on earth will we be able to do so with weakened regulations?  Part of the problem is the RepublicTeas and their religous philosophy feel man has dominion over  the world and man will do on his own what is right.  Well I think we have plenty of proof that is a foolish notion because they have regulation now and how many companies could each of you name who have poisoned our earth?

Related articles

• The Green Thing (spokelement.wordpress.com)
• How The Older Generation Destroyed The Environment… They Didn’t Have The ‘Green Thing’ Back Then (aleksandreia.wordpress.com)
• Should be required reading (junksciencesidebar.com)

An Italia short documentary on Rossi and his device.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9I_CJti-RU

Now one important point if it’s fusion or not and he’s added no high cost gimmicks, it does not really matter if it’s cold fusion.  If the device can produce a 30x energy multiplier cleanly and cheaply it is indeed a game changer on every conceivable level.   The best part is Rossi says they are building a commercial size application of his device in October at Greece so we should know it’s viability as a clean and cheap energy source very soon.   If the production of these commercial devices are delayed for unexplained reasons or found to be a hoax at least we will not have to wait for years or decades to decide that this device was not viable.

Off the top of my head the only way there could be some fusion going on is through some induced nuclear crowding but even that is hard for me to visualize because in some way naked proton ions from Hydrogen would need to get through the electron clouds of all chemicals in the vessel.   The only way it could be fusion is if the catalysts he uses somehow aligns the Hydrogen nuclei extremely and I mean extremely close to each other on the order of a pictometer (trillionth of a meter) since the Bohr diameter of a proton is 53.9 pictometers.  Hot fusion requires about 45 million ºC to create energy plasma which is a free flowing sea of electron and proton ions.  It’s actually considered a different state of matter.  Hot fusion also requires “heavy water”, Deuterium-Tritium rich water where Deuterium and Tritium has 1 and 2 neutrons added to the Hydrogen’s proton, respectively.   You may be able to visualize how cold nuclear fission would be difficult considering at ambient temperatures atoms and molecules have electron clouds around them so accomplishing a psuedo plasma state which would required for cold fusion would be extremely unlikely.  Even ionized Hydrogen (one positively charged proton) does not exist as a free proton in water it actually exists as a Hydronium ion (H₃O⁺) It’s too bad even if you did have nuclear fussion that the resulting amounts of Helium would be too small to measure to validate the fusion reaction.

My best guess (if the device is validated), what may be happening could be something as simple as leveraging chemical electrolysis to turn water into free Hydrogen and Oxygen, catalyzed by the Nickel.  Then the reaction between Hydrogen and Oxygen which is highly exothermic would create the heat turning the remaining water to steam.  Rossi already uses Hydrogen as a catalyst so this is not far off.  So it could be not a nuclear reaction at all but some kind of super catalytic reaction.

Here is a video of Rossi showing how the device works.

Rossi crunches the numbers on the efficiency of his device.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrTz5Bq6dsA

There are some big questions about this character Rossi who is not a scientist by training but a philosopher even though he has worked with energy technology much of his life.  Rossi has a very checkered past indeed.   Rossi in his past energy ventures has been widely condemned for creating what we would refer to as EPA super fund sites for leaving untreated toxic waste in leaky vessels in Italy.  Rossi is certainly a character and characters like him have proven the scientific community wrong many times in the past.

There is more nuttiness involved because an energy conspiracy website that was formed in 2007 called freeenergytruth.com who claims for 100 years clean energy sources have been withheld from the public, supports the Rossi device and tacitly claims evil big energy interests with the US and other governments are try to squelch the technology.  The only reason I post a video they made about Rossi’s device is because it does give a succinct account of what Rossi claims the device can do (actually they describe the possible gains better than he does and their website has allot of good info on alternated energy technologies too despite their questionable claims).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZJUSG2IO6o

For entertainment purposes only.  Some of Free Energy Truth’s conspiracy theories.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BYb-XIa7qU

Whether this device works or not is not all we should take from Rossi’s efforts. Today there are thousands of scientists around the world that are working on new energy technologies. So if this device does not work it just becomes part of the prior art so scientists know what not to try again. That’s the way science works thousands and thousands of experiments, sometimes more to get one to work.  That’s why when I use to work in R&D we jokingly called it “Remorse and Disappointment”.  However the point is we need to fund these technologies so scientists can do as many experiments as possible because whether it’s one in thousands or one in millions of experiments, game changing technology does happen and the more experiments that scientists can perform the higher likelihood of success.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.
~Emily Dickinson

I have a morbid fascination with death. Let’s just get that out of the way early. I’m sure that as time wears on, and I come closer to the end, my attitudes will change. But I’m young and I do not fear death like I should. I’m not wise enough to know any better. When I say I’m lucky to be alive right now, I mean it. I can’t even say I come from a “small town”  because the small town you think of when I say that is MUCH larger than the one I was raised in. It’s one of those little communities you either escape from or die in. Either of old age or the “proclivities of youth”. Around the 3rd or 4th time you regain consciousness and realize you’re still alive, you begin viewing life and death in a whole new way. Some people take stock of their life so far and turn inward. They diagnose themselves and their life and wonder what they could be doing differently  or for the better. Some people  “panic” and begin “living life to the fullest”. Cramming as much random activity into each day as they can. And some people, like me, start thinking they’re the frickin’ Highlander.

Death is the ultimate consequence of life. All living things die. Some in a day, some not for hundreds of years. Humans are the only ones who know what this means. The only ones cursed with the knowledge that existence is finite. We’ve witnessed other mammals “mourning” fallen companions but they don’t really understand what has just happened. But, for most of us, death doesn’t enter our daily thoughts. Time brings that appreciation. As we age, people we know pass away. Death became a very real thing for me when my great grandparents passed away. It also gave me an insight into the ways we deal with the loss of loved ones. Tears do fall but many people  choose to celebrate the life and not mourn the death. I discovered I was one of these people. I shed tears for them but when I thought back on the memories with them, I was happy and not sad. And I knew they died with no regrets, having lived a long full life.

But what if it doesn’t have to be this way? What if we could eliminate death and live forever? That is really what we will be discussing.(Much of what I put forward has been discussed on Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.  I suggest you check that episode out. It was very good.)  Not so much death but overcoming it. A tall task. Death is an all consuming universal force. We are all equal in Death’s eyes. Before we can talk about immortality we have to first find a way to artificially extend the human lifespan. Humans are by no means the longest living organism on the planet. There are tortoises that live almost twice as long as us. Trees still standing that were here when The Pyramids were being built over 4,000 years ago. One tree named Pando, is estimated to be around 80,000 years old(that’s ridiculous!).  So why can’t we live for thousands of years? Genetically we are not much different than a tree. We have just about the same DNA, the same make up, we just grew into different organisms. But, if you go back far enough, man and trees have  a common ancestor. I shit you not.

The great Carl Sagan

And we are made of the same stuff. So, theoretically, we should be able to extend out lifespans to ridiculous lengths as well.  Perhaps without end.  Many scientists think this is the case. Before we discuss some of the current theories for life extension, let’s talk about the process of aging. Aging is the name we give  to the process that changes our bodies over time. All men age. Some  women apparently stay in their 30′s for decades. Never question this though. Just trust me. Never question it.

Anyways, aging sucks. We reach our physical peak somewhere in our mid 20′s. After that we plateau for a decade or so. Two if we’re lucky. Even if you stay in peak physical condition you will begin to notice yourself losing ground to younger people. It happens. The joints will just keep aging and you can’t physically generate the force you could before. But, you’re in great shape so relax and just enjoy it.

You are a collection of cells. Cells age and they divide to reproduce and “keep the bloodline going”. After  a certain number of divisions they begin to slow down. They become more sensitive to the stresses put on the body, lose much of their ability to fully regulate themselves, and you become far more susceptible to disease. Death by old age is actually a misnomer. No one dies of old age. It’s always a disease, an organ failure, a genetic unbalance, or something along those lines.

So now researchers are looking at aging as a genetic condition and one that could be “treated”. One theorist in particular,   Aubrey de Grey  , believes he knows how to stop the aging of cells and keep us perpetually young. A pathway to immortality. Aubrey’s theory seems pretty simple from the outside. Cells take in a lot of “junk”. to keep us young and healthy they remove that junk. But cells age and lose some of their strength over time and the junk starts to pile up and damage the cells. Here are the 7 damages De Grey believes matter most, provided by Wikipedia:

1. Cancer-causing nuclear mutations/epimutations:These are changes to the nuclear DNA (nDNA), the molecule that contains our genetic information, or to proteins which bind to the nDNA. Certain mutations can lead to cancer, and, according to de Grey, non-cancerous mutations and epimutations do not contribute to aging within a normal lifespan, so cancer is the only endpoint of these types of damage that must be addressed.
2. Mitochondrialmutations:Mitochondria are components in our cells that are important for energy production. They contain their own genetic material, and mutations to their DNA can affect a cell’s ability to function properly. Indirectly, these mutations may accelerate many aspects of aging.
3. Intracellular aggregates:Our cells are constantly breaking down proteins and other molecules that are no longer useful or which can be harmful. Those molecules which can’t be digested simply accumulate as junk inside our cells. Atherosclerosis, macular degeneration and all kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s disease) are associated with this problem.
4. Extracellular aggregates:Harmful junk protein can also accumulate outside of our cells. The amyloid senile plaque seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is one example.
5. Cell loss:Some of the cells in our bodies cannot be replaced, or can only be replaced very slowly – more slowly than they die. This decrease in cell number causes the heart to become weaker with age, and it also causes Parkinson’s disease and impairs the immune system.
6. Cell senescence:This is a phenomenon where the cells are no longer able to divide, but also do not die and let others divide. They may also do other things that they’re not supposed to, like secreting proteins that could be harmful. Immune senescence and type 2 diabetes are caused by this.^{[citation needed]}
7. Extracellular crosslinks:Cells are held together by special linking proteins. When too many cross-links form between cells in a tissue, the tissue can lose its elasticity and cause problems including arteriosclerosis and presbyopia.^[7]

De Grey has faced some criticism from researches in geriatrics and regenerative medicine but he believes the two need to combine and look at this with a shared perspective. They just believe De Grey doesn’t have the tangible proof needed to begin serious study into this idea. And you have to agree with them. The theory seems sound but he has not shown them real proof of it yet and ,without that, you can’t really convince people to get you the funding you need.  But I believe Aubrey De Grey. And I believe him for one reason: Aubrey De Grey has been alive for almost 150 years.

Aubrey de Grey is in fact, Grigori Rasputin!

Now let’s talk about cryogenics. Cryogenics is the study of how things react to colder and colder temperatures. For many people the term brings to mind human Popsicles in tubes. Well, that’s kinda where they’re going with it. The field of cryogenics we will be discussing is called Cryonics. Cryonics is the study of how to preserve humans and animals indefinitely at cold temperatures.

But first, a story. A story about zombie dogs!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

O.K., not actual zombie dogs but dogs who have come back from the dead. The Safar Center at the University of Pittsburgh has developed groundbreaking procedures in the field of “resuscitation medicine”. They study how to bring people back from the dead. Bu less Frankenstein and more First Aid. Injuries resulting in great amounts of blood loss most often lead to death. Your body becomes anemic as the blood,  and with it oxygen, seeps out of it. The organs begin shutting down and eventually the brain dies of asphyxia. The Safar Center is working on ways to  keep people alive in these critical moments until aid can be rendered or, in extreme cases, bring them back from clinical death. Time is of the essence though. Once the heart stops, the brain isn’t too far behind. If the brain is left for dead for more than a few minutes there is little that can be done.

So the folks at the Safar Center have come up with a pretty crazy technique using a pretty common fluid: saline.  If you’ve ever given blood and plasma you will recognize it. It’s that cold feeling liquid they pump through you as they draw out the plasma.  Saline is just sterilized salt water. It is often used on patients who are severely dehydrated and for many other purposes ranging from contact cleaning fluid to nose irrigation. For this particular experiment, a super cold form of the saline solution was used.

This next part may offend some people. The experiments were carried out in 2005 on dogs. 24 dogs of various sizes and breeds. They were drained of blood and filled with the saline solution, then examined closely for 3 hours. After 3 hours the dogs were given fresh blood and revived. Over 2/3 of the dogs were revived with no detectable problems. My heart goes out to the ones that didn’t make it but they didn’t die for nothing. And I believe them when they say they followed every ethical guideline an experiment like this would entail. The tests were a great success. Before this most tests had only averaged out to about an hour. Now they were bringing these dogs back after 3 hours of clinical death with no signs of brain damage.

So, how? Well the key is in the saline solution. By directly replacing the blood with the saline they were sure they covered every organ and every skin layer. The dog’s circulatory systems kept them in a kind of suspended animation even though there was no registered activity. So every vital organ, including the brain,  had their deterioration slowed to a crawl. Once the solution was removed and the blood reintroduced, the body seemed not to notice that anything had ever happened. And for you dog lovers out there,  the tests on our friends seem to be over.  With this rousing success the Safar Center believes it has the info they need to get permission for human clinical trials. This new procedure could save many, many lives. Most especially on the battlefield where severely wounded soldiers could be kept safe for hours until help is reached. Another reason dogs are man’s best friend. Their sacrifice means your loved one may live through what would have once been a death sentence. So, next time you see a dog, thank them.

Now this is wildly different  from the type of cryogenics most of us think of. But the complete freezing of an organism as complex as humans is still quite tricky. Due in part to one extremely complex organ, our brain. What we’re talking about is basically what yo do to a steak you wanna save til the weekend. You pop it in the freezer and thaw it out later. But freezing affects everything differently. Especially if it’s too cold or for too long. We’re all familiar with “freezer burn”. You fix food suffering from it and it just doesn’t taste right. It’s because ice crystals have formed in the cells in the meat and pushed and shoved everything around and it’s just a mushy mess in there now. Freezer burn is the basic problem with current cryonics. It damages the cells and  just slowly kills us over time. Many human organs have actually been frozen and thawed with relatively little to no permanent damage. But the brain is proving a major obstacle.

It doesn’t help that we know less about the brain than any other organ.  Individual pieces of the brain have gone through  the process successfully but w can’t exactly tear the brain apart and put it back together again later. Yet. And it’s the yet that keeps the science going. Most of the science we see around us was first taken up before the technology to fully develop it was around. Right now technology leaps a level every 2 or 3 years. Cancer research from earlier last decade looks like the stone age compared to what we are doing now. The biggest tool to cryonic researchers may be the nanomoachine.  Microscopic tools injected into the body to repair and maintain. If these machines can completely reverse the freezing process, then suspended animation is no longer pop-science, it’s  a reality. The hope for the technology is to be able to preserve terminally ill people until a cure is found. A very noble effort.

From Wikipedia:

Benjamin Franklin, in a 1773 letter,expressed regret that he lived “in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science” that he could not be preserved and revived to fulfil his “very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence”

But keeping yourself on ice until immortality is discovered might not sound great to a lot of people. I got something else for you. But first, a question: How attached are you to the human body? I ask this because the most viable form of immortality may call for us to leave our human bodies for more  “permanent” accommodations.  Here’s what we know. You and everything that makes you who you are is carried on electrical pulses through your brain. And that’s it. How those impulses turn to consciousness still escapes us. But it’s an electrical impulse carrying information. That we get. No different than TV and radio signals and we can move those from device to device pretty damn easily now a days. But the simple binary signals we send through our machines are nothing compared to the process operating our brains and giving us consciousness.

If we ever wish to transfer ourselves to another vessel we must first learn exactly where we are in our brain. Our consciousness must stem from a central point in our brain. One man, Professor Olaf Sporns  at Indiana University, beleives he may have discovered that central hub, the medial parietal cortex. It is located directly between the 2 hemispheres of the brain and seems to  be the starting point for many of the impulses we wish to duplicate. Sporns believes that if we can fully map and detail this area of the brain we may be be starting on the road to “downloading ourselves” into machines. First, though,  we need to develop an artificial brain that can handle human consciousness. Still easier said than done. Again, our computers operate on a binary level. Ones and zeros. Powerful machines but still nowhere near as powerful as our brain. Our brains are currently at least a million times more powerful than the best computer out there. Quite a gap.

Quantum computers may be the answer to this problem. Quantum computers will not operate on a binary level. They can go from 0 to 9. A HUGE leap. For every bit a computer today processes, a quantum computer could process exponentially more. It can “think” of more solutions simultaneously than our current computers can. The processing speed would be greatly increased and come closer to being on par with our own brains. But quantum computers are still very much in the developmental stage. The most powerful one made so far is still a pale imitation of our own mighty processors and not much more powerful than current PCs. But the science is doable and quantum computing is matter of “when” and not “if”.

But maybe you love your human body. I know I love mine everyday…… moving on. So transferring yourself to a computer may not be that appealing. So let’s discuss one last proposition. Gene therapy. This is very similar to Aubrey De Grey’s process int hat we are changing things on a molecular level to extend our lifespan. Gene therapy is a reality and it only grows with each passing year. Basically what we will do is mess with your DNA and chemical makeup to keep you perpetually young. Kind of like going for a flu shot only your being injected with the fountain of youth. Cancer treatment is heavily invested in gene therapy at the moment. We know now that cancer is a genetic disease. It’s in you already and what draws it out can be obvious or very random.  Cancer is a mutation. One of many mutations responsible for evolution. Evolution is a series of mutations. Generation after generation dies from it until one generation breaks the cycle and the mutation doesn’t kill them but changes them. Alters their DNA instead of destroying it.

Removing all this from ourselves will greatly change our natural evolution. We are entering an era where we will have full control over every atom in our body. An era where we can shape humanity into whatever we want. No more disease and no more death. But, the question does come up. Should we even want to live forever? Let’s discuss just what immortality means. Cause it’s not as cool as you think it is.

Here are some dangers to eternal life if we can’t find a way to work around it. Our bodies may have no trouble excepting eternal life, our brains are an entirely different matter. One of our brains many functions is storage. It holds our thoughts and memories. It also has a limit. Your brain can store a ridiculous amount of information. You may forget some of it but it’s still there, waiting to be remembered. You can go your whole life and never fill it. But what about multiple lifetimes? what about eternity? Brains weren’t built for that. The longer you live the more information will fill your brain and eventually it will fill to the limit. What happens then? Well, you lose memories. And don’t be mistaken, you don’t forget them. forgotten things can be remembered. These memories are gone. No longer in your brain. Whatever bit carried it has been overwritten with new memories.

That means that as you go along you will lose pieces of yourself. They will be replaced by new ones but the old you is gone forever. What if you were the only one in your family who was able to receive this gift of eternal life? The pain of watching loved ones die as you remain will be hard enough. Now imagine one day never knowing they ever existed. Not forgotten just gone. As though you never knew them. When people ask you what it was like 2,000 years ago you won’t be able to tell them. You won’t know and there is no memory to “jog”. soon information in your head becomes so disjointed that you may begin to form serious psychological illnesses.

So now you don’t know you ever had a family. You can barely recall anything past a certain point and you may be going crazy. That seems bad enough but there’s something else to go along with it. If you hadn’t noticed, your perception of time “speeds up” as you age. every year goes by faster and each earlier years seem further and further away. This too is a natural thing. Over a single lifetime it isn’t too  terribly noticeable. Stretched out over hundreds of years and  it will become maddening. If the loss of memory wasn’t enough to push you over the edge, a sped up world might do it. Imagine reaching  a point where reality is moving so fast around you that you can scarcely interact with it. What was new is old  before you ever even get it home. People and things speed by and eventually you’ll reach a point where reality just pops into existence around you whenever you can observe it.  That is the kind of life you have to look forward to.  A world you can never belong to and barely know. You and your fellow immortals will be alone, unable to really interact with the world.

Let’s say you get over that. Maybe you prefer a solitary life and chose to enjoy things on your own time. Maybe losing touch with the past is just fine with you. At some point you will realize that even though you are immortal, the universe is not. i twill age and it will die. If you are still around in 5 billion years you will get to see the death of our solar system when the sun expands and burns it all away. Several billion more and you can see our galaxy collide with Andromeda. Spend a few billion years watching the stars dance and explode. But, eventually, the last star will die. The universe will break apart and not much solid matter will be left. Only gas and dust swimming through an endless sea of invisible energy. maybe you’ll get lucky and witness a new universe being born some billions of  years later. Probably not. So, if you can still live you will be in infinite nothingness. You will basically be dead. You can’t see, you can’t hear,you can’t smell, and you can’t feel. if you somehow adapted to survive the vacuum of space, this will be your existence. An eternity of nothing.

This is why turning over our existence to an artificial brain may be best. They can be calibrated to endure the eons. Our brains cannot. At least as far as we know. Science could change all that any day. So the question is, do you WANT to live forever? Do you wish to be there at the end of all things? Maybe it won’t be an end. Maybe we will have created our own stars by then. Designed our own solar systems and galaxies. Nothing is impossible. Only improbable. When someone hands you the key to eternity will you accept it? How will life change if we live forever? Would we still try to mate for life? If we’re still stuck on our own planet(though I doubt we will be in several generations) will birthrates be controlled? Think of visiting distant stars and galaxies. Time is no longer an issue. The only problem with a thousand year trip is finding entertainment. Luckily people are easily entertained.

After the Big Bang came the Great Darkness. In indescribable darkness, matter raced away from itself in all directions, pushing space into being as it did so. Darkly, it spun and coalesced, exploded and merged, exploded again, grew heavier, impossibly; formed stars that lived billions of years, died, and in that dying gave rise to new stars, stars that spun off particles that, trapped in orbit, coalesced into planets. Galaxies, containing billions of stars, expanding, moving away from each other, pushing at the frontiers where What Is Not yielded to What Is. Unfathomably, Improbably. And all in total darkness.

Because no one was there to see it. A spectacle of unimaginable beauty, resplendent with colors beyond our own limitations of red at one end and violet at the other, played out over billions of years, and yet this spectacle was for not. As bland as a painting of a snowflake floating in a glass of milk, or an inkblot on a lump of coal. For, for only a brief period of the many billion year history of the universe has anything been seen, anywhere, and only as the result of a chance occurrence. On our planet, and perhaps others, matter formed itself into something that could sense light, and by gradual modifications these light sensing mechanisms became more sophisticated, up to and including our own wonderful eyes. And these modifications; did they occur so that the beauty of the universe could be beheld and appreciated? No. Every modification, from the simplest eyes to the most complex, merely helped an organism secure food. Or not become food. Or perhaps a combination of the two.

Think about that for a moment. Do a gut check. Does it seem credible? That except for on our planet, and perhaps other planets similar to ours, and only in a relatively brief period of this and similar planets’ histories, has the grand spectacle of the universe been even partially visible to itself? And only through the vulgar mechanism of keeping one step ahead of a mouth or a grabbing appendage? That up until the time that these modifications came about, on perhaps this planet exclusively, even though it is made up of light and its very mechanisms are circumscribed by the speed of light, the universe was completely and utterly blind?

Such a scenario lacks poetry, to say the least. That a cosmos could be at once so dazzling and yet completely invisible to itself for such a long time, only to finally become visible through the merest chance on an inconsequential rock – somehow seems decidedly unsatisfying to my poetic nature. There, where my mind is free to wander and extend beyond what is rational and explained, the above scenario seems to me to have it all backwards. Eyes, my poetic mind persuades me, do not make sight possible. On the contrary, it is sight that makes eyes possible! Eyes did not develop because, for some odd reason, in a universe that up until then had been completely blind, there was suddenly some reproductive advantage to sensing light (imagine what an extraordinary moment that must have been, and yet so under-appreciated by its experiencer. Hey, now this is interesting. Munch munch).

Rather, eyes are a (but one, I dare say) manifestation of vision. It was not mindless food-seeking that brought them into being. Vision gave them birth, no less so than a painter’s vision gives birth to a masterpiece, and an inventor’s vision gives birth to a flying machine. Speaking of “flying machines”, in the same vein I posit that birds did not develop wings because there were things to eat up there. Birds rose to fill the sky because the sky, because flight, summoned them.

Viewed through the lens of reason, such notions are risible and wholly passe. Where is the evidence to support such outlandish claims? Where do these bizarre notions of vision and flight come from? Obviously, they don’t come from a scientific theory or an experiment, or from an objective, wholly rational observation of naturally occurring phenomena. Rather, they come from an area of human consciousness which science knee-jerkedly meets with cool skepticism, if not outright disgust: intuition, subjective feelings, and our mysterious human quality of looking for meaning in the cosmos.

Yet, how firm is the ground upon which science so confidently, even arrogantly, dismisses such rival attributes of human nature? For someone who is convinced that science is man’s greatest achievement, and moreover is our greatest hope for improving our condition in the future, the very question probably sounds preposterous, perhaps even insane. Nevertheless, I will dare to ask: as reason and intuition are both essential aspects of a fully human mind, can one arrogate to itself an exclusive “rightness” from which to dismiss the properties the other might bring toward understanding the universe which we inhabit, and our relationship to it?

Science, as we have come to define it, has a very brief history. For all practical purposes, it begins in ancient Greece, notably with Socrates, and his method of questioning hypotheses. From there we move to Aristotle, who applied the Socratic Method, with his own modifications, to a variety of fields such as ethics, poetry, politics, etc., and most famously, science. The derivation of the word is perhaps related to cutting, or more accurately, separating. The Greeks, with Aristotle first among them, learned about their world by dissecting and examining it, reducing it to its parts, separating what could be determined to that point, and then investigating more fully into those “parts” which remained mysterious. Aristotle applied this method to zoology, anatomy, botany, and pretty much all aspects of the physical world. What he accomplished, with his stellar intellect and unquenchable curiosity, is mind boggling.

Aristotle’s discoveries and theories went on to fuel scientific inquiry for centuries. His vast achievements functioned as a template for the Renaissance. The great Arab scientist Alhazen refined the scientific method into its current form roughly a thousand years ago. It came into its fullest expression through the Italian super-genius Galileo in the early seventeenth century. Completing the process, the great inventions, such as the telescope and the microscope, along with the higher mathematics of Newton, arrived on the scene in the century after Galileo’s achievements, giving birth to the era that we live in now, the Scientific Age. That’s pretty much the extent of it. The entire history of science (as we think of it), subtracting its fallow period in the Dark Ages, is less than two thousand years, roughly one percent of the history of our species. The duration that it has been the dominant way of seeing the world is much shorter, perhaps no more than three hundred years.

Given such a short history, we can only conclude that science, according to science, was not selected for in the human species. One must keep in mind that according to our present understanding of how natural selection works, traits only pass the test of selectivity if they help the extant, hosting organism to survive. Ask any biological scientist, and he or she will hasten to assure you that evolution doesn’t know what it is doing. It has no grand plan, no concept of a future, no notion of how newly acquired traits may spread among the entire species; no such scheme. Rather, it plays out one groping, clawing, devouring organism at a time.

Our large, multifaceted brains were selected for, most certainly. The knowledge we needed to explore caves, to use weapons, to hunt, to organize against stronger predators, was provided by those brains. The human resourcefulness and inventiveness that our brains made possible was selected for along the strict and narrow rules of natural selection. But science wasn’t. Remember, for only the last three hundred years or so has there been any demonstrable survival advantage to having scientific knowledge, most obviously in terms of decreasing infant mortality, and extending the average human life span by several decades. For the vast preponderance of the history of the species homo sapiens, approximately 200,000 years, the scientific method provided mankind with no survivability value whatsoever, proved by the obvious fact that we survived without it. In purest evolutionary terms, it is nothing more than a “lucky accident”, an ancillary feature of our large brains (which developed, remember, solely to help us secure food and avoid becoming food), that didn’t even begin to reveal its usefulness until twenty millennia after our brains’ development had made it possible! How utterly insignificant the very feature of human consciousness that devised the theory of evolution is, from the perspective of that very theory!

And yet the champions of science hold it up as a paragon against which all other features of human consciousness cannot even hope to compare. Did intuition and hunches help our species survive before science? Assuredly so. Did poetic and spiritual insights provide strength and succor to our lowly and set-upon species, huddled together in small tribes against a world vastly more threatening than the one we inhabit today? Bet on it. Without them, would we even be here? That I very much doubt. That science, coming along so late in the game, should nevertheless hoist itself to such a lofty and judgmental position seems rather presumptuous to me.

Imagine a basketball team that plays well enough in the regular season to earn a playoff berth. The team advances, all the way to the last few minutes of the championship game. A talented rookie comes off the bench, and makes a few clutch shots. A star is born! But no, because this rookie then kicks everyone else on his team off the court. He’s decided they’ve outlived their usefulness, and that he alone is the only hope the team has of winning the game. Every error his teammates have made throughout the season that he didn’t play in proves to him their unworthiness to even be on the same court as him. Their mere presence weakens his chance of bringing home the trophy. Well, I think we can all imagine how that would turn out! And yet that is basically the arrogant stance that science’s staunchest champions take. Any talk of hunches, intuition, to say nothing of spirituality and supernatural phenomena, is met with the same level of disdain our imaginary rookie shows to the very teammates whose efforts have made his appearance on the court possible. Religion? They are convinced that it has been nothing other than an unmitigated disaster for mankind.

Science is so convinced of its own superiority that it uses itself, its own methods, to judge the validity of those concepts that arise from other areas of human consciousness. If something can’t be tested in its laboratories, and proven according to its rules and methodologies, then it becomes fair game to be scoffed at and labeled woo woo. This strikes me as absurd. Imagine a chocolate lover telling you that chocolate is the only legitimate sweet. You proffer a banana. “What is this ridiculous object? It isn’t even black! It fails!” He dismisses it without even tasting it. Dutifully, you come back with a black banana. The chocolate lover puts it in its mouth and instantly spits it out, disgusted (understandably). The banana lover is in a hopeless situation. Playing by the rules the chocolate lover has set up, is it any wonder that chocolate always wins?

Don’t get me wrong; I love science. It is scientific triumphalism that I take issue with. What we have today is perhaps less true science than a raging tyranny of the left hemisphere of the brain over the right, and the consequences scream out at us. On the one hand, scientific experiments have improved medicine and lengthened our life spans, and technological advancement has improved the quality of human life. On the other hand, science has damaged the environment to the point where our very survival is threatened. Factory farmed, steroid injected animals harm our health. Acid rain weakens our forests (the very “lungs” of our planet). Oil spills and nuclear disasters point out the price we pay for our brave new technological world. Beyond all that lurks the mother of all environmental threats, catastrophic climate change. That we could have placed ourselves in such a dangerous predicament a mere three centuries into the Scientific Age should clue us that we should be going about things differently.

To me, the Great Lesson of our time is not that the ascension of science over the last few centuries is a harbinger of a new age of enlightenment, if we can just hold on and solve our current existential threats. It is that our survival depends upon striking a balance between the wonderful possibilities that science brings about and the poetic, intuitive, meaning seeking portion of our consciousness centered in the other hemisphere of our magnificent brains. If that balance cannot be reached, I for one have very little hope that mankind will escape destroying itself. We will,rather, hasten our return to the Great Darkness, clinging to our belief in an unconscious universe that is completely blind to our existence, and never even returned the favor of seeing us.

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