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Recycling and Acid Trips

To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: Recycling

Recycling and Acid Trips

Occasionally I have these moments of incredible perspective that make me feel infinitesimally small and amazed at the same time. Last night it was one that made me feel smaller than usual. I was thinking about the beginning of everything, the big explosion that started it all and the idea that those things happen over and over.

It started with me reading this quote from Carl Sagan that I posted on Facebook last year

“Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.”

I am an environmentalist at heart, but I recognize that it is really all about the impact it has on humans. People who say we are destroying the earth drive me crazy. We may be changing it, but we are not destroying it. Our environment has been changing since the moment the particles started clinging together to make the rock we live on. To believe we can keep the environment static is ridiculous.

Once the thought “particles started clinging together to make the rock we live on” entered my brain, I started thinking about the “Big Bang” and the fact that one day, our sun will die. Even if we are fortunate enough to find other planets to live on in other solar systems, one day our universe will begin collapsing and eventually form the dense particle that everything came from. What does that look like? It will be full of elements we will never see, huge atoms that could never exist under any conditions we could create. Whatever it is, all life, and all evidence that we ever existed will be erased and everything will start again. Billions of years will go by before life exists again.

I was trying to go to sleep but instead I wondered “how many times has this happened before?” and I wondered what the intelligent life form looked like each time, or if they even got to the point where there was an intelligent life form each time. The good news is, no matter how terribly we screw things up, it will all be erased when the universe is condensed back into that particle and it will be a fresh start each time.

Talk about recycling, that is the ultimate recycling program.



To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: RE: Recycling

I know there are many ideas as to what will happen, I have to admit physics drives me crazy. There are so many unknowns, and we are unlikely to ever be able to actually observe or measure the things we need to, to fill in the gaps. So, the model I choose is the recycling model. It is better than an ever expanding universe that is just going to die one day.



To: Sandra and Jim
From: Chuck
Subject: RE: Recycling

Sandra,

What a great read.  Your “notion” is not just better, but also much more likely.  I mean how could it really be any other way?

I’ve been fixated on the smaller recycling episodes – continental crust and see attached cartoon.  You have bested me by a Universe!

Chuck



To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: RE: Recycling

One of the things I fixated on was that everything has to be relearned again, everything, from discovering fire to the creation of calculus. Every time something new is discovered, invented or accomplished it is a big deal. But, what if it has all happened hundreds or millions of times in the past? The idea that EVERYTHING is erased just amazes me. I have never been on an acid trip, but I think these would be cool things to think about with a little acid.



To: Sandra and Chuck
From: James
Subject: RE: Recycling

I've been on acid trips dozens of times and thinking about stuff like this leaves you permanently damaged.  That's my excuse (and probably Chuck' s too). 

To: Sandra and Chuck
From: James
Subject: Re: Recycling

Well, I always think about the galaxy inside the pendant around the cat's neck in "Men in Black".  How many universes, how many times and is it all just a nightmare in something else's imagination . . .?  Our demise is assured.😈



To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: RE: Recycling

Yeah, I sometimes wonder about the “Whoville” possibility. It is difficult for me to accept that there is nothing outside the universe. Everything but time is finite, so there must be an end to our universe and something outside it. And even time being infinite bothers me.

"Time starts with the Big Bang."

Time is time you can’t just arbitrarily say “Time starts here”. But, if it didn’t start there, when did it start? because everything has a beginning and an end. Physics is supposed to provide answers and I felt like there were never enough answers to those questions. This comic strip was in the paper when I was in college and its timing was perfect.






To: Sandra and Chuck
From: James
Subject: Re: Recycling

So Sandra, do any of your ruminations have an impact on your belief or disbelief of a "supreme being "?

To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: RE: Recycling

No, I have neither a belief nor a disbelief. What I believe is that we don’t know. I assume I will learn the truth after I die (or I won’t). For someone who likes answers for things, I am surprisingly ok with that.


To: Sandra and Chuck
From: James
Subject: RE: Recycling

Well, I agree.  Have you heard the song "Let the Mystery Be" by Iris DeMent?  You'd like her.  It's a cool song about that.

To: Sandra and Jim
From: Chuck
Subject: RE: Recycling

At the risk of never again being included in Sandra’s very compelling deep thoughts...

I don’t know the song or artist ("Let the Mystery Be" by Iris DeMent).  But I remember Frank Zappa’s song “The Adventures of Greggery Peckory”  (sometimes spelled peccary).  Gregory Peckory invented the calendar.  And since Wikipedia did a good job describing the song’s story I take their work and provide you with edited excerpts:
The calendar, upon release, immediately causes chaos, as people suddenly can keep track of time and plan ahead, thus making life aggravatingly mechanical, and also allowing people to discover how old they were. A group of hunchmen, just a few of the "very hip young people" of the world, attack Greggery on the way home from his office one night, enraged at the prospect of birthdays and being aware of their own aging.
Greggery makes a phone call to find a "philostopher" . He is sent to a man named Quentin Robert DeNameland, supposedly "the greatest living philostopher known to mankind", who hosts a group assembly. DeNameland's authenticity as a philostopher is questionable, as he merely proclaims that "time is of affliction" – more specifically, "the eons are closing" – before soliciting for payment for attendance to his assembly.
So there it is.  Zappa’s take.  Sorry for the long diatribe, but I couldn’t help seeing parallels in Zappa’s Greggery the peccary and Bloom County’s Otis the penguin, as well as DeNameland and “Whoville”.  Zappa concludes “If you ask a philostopher he’ll see that you pays.”

And none of that required acid.  Just prompts from Sandra and Jim.


To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: RE: Recycling

Thanks Chuck, I didn’t think of it as deep, just a view from space. I get those occasionally, I like them. They make me feel insignificant, but that also helps make my problems feel less significant.


To: Sandra and Chuck
From: James
Subject: RE: Recycling

Whoa.  Your song is better than mine.


To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra 
Subject: RE: Recycling

I found both songs on you tube. Jim's was much easier to listen to and much shorter.  Chuck's was 20 minutes long and... I don't even know how to describe it. 


To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: FW: Recycling

I have to admit, I have thought about this a lot. Like the fact that everything has to be relearned, for example, all of the laws of physics have to be rediscovered every time a new universe is formed. But, what if it isn’t relearned, what if the laws of physics are different each time the explosion occurs? That would be kind of interesting. Too bad no one will ever know.


To: Sandra and Jim
From: James
Subject: RE: Recycling

Yeah, like after the NEXT Big Bang, NO worlds are randomly able to support life, so nothing gets re-learned by nobody.  Or are we in your creator’s Petri dish and she keeps applying the same physics to all the little universes (they’re too far away for you to see, but they’re in there) in her dish.  And she’s standing there wondering the same thing you are.  And so is the guy who owns the Petri dish that she is in.   AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Chuck is nothing, I am nothing , you are nothing, this conversation never really took place except in some real organism’s nightmare and he’s nothing either.

“Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be”


To: Sandra and Jim
From: Chuck
Subject: RE: Recycling

Huh. 

To: Jim and Chuck
From: Sandra
Subject: RE: Recycling

You are always so optimistic.



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