All this talk about society, existence, life and living and I’ve gone and forgotten about myself

HAR. HAR. WE SUCK.

"It all keeps adding up,
I think I'm cracking up,
Am I just paranoid?
Am I just stoned?"

-Green Day

At the end of this series, I can’t help but to feel pretty sorry and rather pessimistic about the current state of affairs of the ‘civilised’ Western world and just civilization in general. People are angry, the news media is ravenous, we’re tiny and stupid, and I’m losing my mind. I think a nice way to round off the series is to satisfy my ego and to simply ramble incoherently about topics which seem to have something to do with me on a slightly more personal level. Do not worry weary reader, I shall attempt to make this interesting… errrr I shall try my best anyway.

What I say may sound poignantly melodramatic, like an attention deficient teenager crying out for help, praying or hoping for intervention. So instead, let’s hang on to that hope, it is an excellent abstract. Oh the cruel, cold, cankerous irony. I wrote about depression being sold to us sheep… and in the process went and created my own pit of despair. At least mine is home-made, it has that personal feel to it. I don’t need to buy mine from Sky News, The Sun or CNN. In this way, am I a hypocrite? Or is that a bit extreme? Perhaps not knowing the answer to that question adds to the confusing depression. If I knew that I had spiralled out of control and lost it, then at least I could find some solace in the fact that I knew I was a depressed hypocrite. Not knowing is a terrible thing, we always want to know, even if it is just the illusion of ‘knowing’. “NO DO NOT TELL ME IT’S A LIE. I WAS HAPPY THE WAY IT WAS!” . Ignorance really can be bliss at times - clichés are clichés for a reason.

It is hard to actually be sure of anything anymore. All of life’s prior notions and perspectives are slowly being exterminated. The Dalek of age is patrolling the labyrinth of life and exterminating any childhood notion it can find. What is there left to cling to? Nothing is forever. Everything in life is transient, including life itself.

We can be certain that death and taxes are going to pounce on us sooner or later (thank ye Benjamin Franklin), and it makes you think. We know not when it will be our time. Death is an equal opportunities man, he doesn’t discriminate. Neither does the tax man for that matter, at the end of the day he just wants your money. Do I fear death? I do not know. I think I fear that I simply do not know what death holds for me (or anybody else now that I mention it). It will come sooner or later, and that will be that. I won’t be able to stop it and neither will Barack Obama. For shame.

In the short stay on Hotel Earth we start off with the hopeful ‘we’ll get the good stuff to your room once it arrives here’ treatment, only to find that it never comes. Yes, dreams rarely come true. The world isn’t the magical place that it was as a child. You learn there are responsibilities that come with growing up. All of your childhood dreams are dashed, spat upon, stomped, set alight and thrown off the edge of a cliff onto sharp rocks below. You realise that growing up is not such a big deal and that you were better off as a child, You learn that the grass is always greener on the other side somehow, simply because it is the other side. It probably is no better than where you already are, but you like to think that it is better over there. Hope is a wonderful thing - such a happy feeling that is borne of sadness, rising from the smouldering ashes of misery like a phoenix. We need to settle with what we have, and be grateful that we at least have that. That’s another thing which just adds to my chronic confusion. I’m here rambling about my madness and my so called ‘depression’ (which is really just a dramatisation of ‘pissed off with life’- I’m a moody hypochondriac) when there are people out there who have lost everything, their families, their livelihood and pretty anything else that made life worth living. My qualms with the world are mainly philosophical… theirs are as hard as stone.

Over the course of this piece of writing I have alleviated my depression somewhat by putting my troubles into perspective. The greater picture says it all. War torn lives, natural disasters, political injustices, dictatorships, genocides, domestic violence, animal cruelty and disease are out there, in whatever abundance or rarity and they are personifying the struggle of life. Here’s me with a stubbed toe and a formerly runny nose. Woe is me (!).

However, it isn’t all bad. I keep mentioning Hope. Hope is a wonderful thing. Faith can also be pretty decent; it seems to work for me. It doesn’t need to be faith in God or anything. We humans have an innate instinct to have faith in something, an innate feeling to believe. It’s there in all of us, genetically hardwired into our being. It is a cold, lonely existence when you have nothing to believe in, nothing to hold on to in the turmoil of the struggle for existence. If you can’t find your purpose, you might as well create your own.

Captain Nitrogen out.

Hail to the Extraterrestrials

It’s getting awfully crowded and lonely here on Earth

I have said it before. The universe is impossibly vast.

“Our Galaxy is just a single galaxy part of a local galaxy cluster. Our nearest neighbouring galaxy is Andromeda at 2 500 000 light years away. It contains around 1 trillion (1 000 000 000 000) stars.

There are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in the Milky Way.

If there were 200 000 000 000 stars in as many galaxies, that would mean there were around 40 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars in the known universe. And that’s probably an underestimate.”

Many stars probably won’t have planets in their orbits. Others most certainly will. Lets just say that it evens out to around 1 planet for every 2 stars. That would say that there are roughly 20 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 planets. Life has roughly a 1 in a trillion chance of evolving… so that’s still 20 billion planets which could harbour life. Then, not every planet may be capable of supporting some kind of life; we must remember that given the time, life could probably evolve in any environment. It may not be the kind of life that inhabits Earth, but it could be some sort of system that exhibits all of the characteristics that defines it as living. It will maintain negative entropy, obtain energy from its environment, be able to release energy for homeostatic usage and will react to change to avoid falling into equilibrium. Let’s round it down to around a potential 6 billion life supporting planets that are out there.

All of a sudden, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea, this idea of life on other planets. We must remember that extraterrestrial life doesn’t necessarily refer to little green men, or any bipedal organism. It could probably be microbial life, not too different from our bacteria in terms of shape and size. However, we are exploring new dimensions of life. All life harbouring planets may not be like Earth. They may be cold, they may be hot. What a planet essentially needs is the correct diversity of chemicals with which to build complex organisms. Extraterrestrial life may not require water or breathe oxygen like us. It may not even be carbon based. Given the time, life has the capability to obtain any form. It could be beyond our current imaginations.
Many of us assume that life lives by our perception of time. This is perfectly understandable, but is a common misnomer. Even on Earth, many organisms have long life-spans which are out of sync with the human sense of time. Plants, a different kingdom of life, are exemplary of this fact. Many tree species are capable of living for thousands of years. A giant redwood may be 200 years and still be relatively young as far as redwoods are concerned. The oldest multicellular organisms are the bristlecone pines of North America. They have been known to live for up to 10, 000 years. Other organisms from a different domain of life altogether, i.e. bacteria, can live for many thousands of years also. Some bacteria from colder environments are also reported to have life-spans as long as bristlecone pines, if not even longer.

This being said, life which may have evolved on other planets may also live for many thousands of years. Perhaps even millions of years. Cold planets, or indeed cold moons, may harbour small life forms which have ridiculously long life-spans. Our whole ‘a year is a long time’ thing is just ape perception.

However, intelligence isn’t quite as absurd as it sounds. If we refer back to the large numbers from before, detailing the sheer number of planets capable of theoretically harbouring life, and then couple it with the fact that the universe is over 13 billion years old, we could feel a glimmer of hope that somewhere out there is some kind of intelligent life. It may be more advanced than us, it may be less advanced than us, it may look like us, and it may not look like us. Life on Earth has existed for around 4 billion years. This is mainly due to the age of the Earth itself, and the period of the suns life cycle it happened to evolve in. Older planets than Earth may well have had longer to evolve life, and reach some kind of intelligence; perhaps life which has learned to utilise tools. We really don’t know, but the statistics and numbers do indicate that life should exist somewhere else, other than Earth.

This is all pure speculation, and many of the numbers I used were merely educated guesses, but what is undisputable is the sheer size of the universe and there are countless opportunities out there for some kind of life to exist. In the grand story of life itself, the Homo sapiens are a fledgling species. Other dominant groups, although they did not seem to achieve the intelligence necessary to extend their phenotype, dominated the Earth for millions of years. The dinosaurs, the insects, now it is the mammals. Though rather than a family of dominant animals, it is a single species of dominant animals. That is what intelligence gives us; exclusive dominion. We don’t necessarily need to share it with our mammal cousins (yeah, screw you Elephants). As far as human survival is concerned, this is a double edged sword. It allows us to survive, but then our populations get so large that we need to expand our territories. We seem to have got to the point where space is running out, and our bloated population is causing problems for the balance of life on Earth, and indeed the balance of Earths other systems. Other organisms are normally kept in check by predators or the availability of food. Well, we’ve forcibly inserted ourselves at the top of the food chain and we can cultivate our own food. Biologically speaking, controlling these two factors should allow us to reproduce until we run out of space, and that seems to be happening. When the population reaches a breaking point, what will we do? The only major threats to us now are viruses, other humans and ourselves.

Viruses are yet to be defeated by any real cure, and spread and mutate so fast that it nigh on impossible to halt a virus pandemic. We are indeed our own worst enemy, we the scourge of the animal kingdom. We kill each other out of cold blood, wage annihilating wars and poison each other in the name of big business. Finally, we wind up killing ourselves through gross unhealthy living, neglect and general laziness. When it comes down to it, a population crash is unlikely in the near future, the population of humans on Earth is rising at a faster rate each and every year, and technology to sustain life for even longer being developed at an alarming rate. I think it is wonderful that scientists are innovating such inventions, as death of a fellow human is genuinely tragic. Population must be controlled by prevention, as opposed to cure (which would unethical to the point of absurdity). The question is, how on Earth do you limit the population of the planet? To stop families from bearing children is most definitely a violation of their human rights. If people want children, then they are at perfect liberty to have children. Continuation of the species is a basic life process. So what must be done? ‘Education’, or rather brainwashing to change the minds of people so they do not want to have children. It sounds horrible and extreme, but the truth has a habit of being mean and sneery. The truth isn’t always good. Yet a fact of sentient life that we must deal with. The population could continue expanding as it is, and it will take its toll on the environment, very heavily. I am not saying this as a ‘tree hugger’ but as somebody concerned for the welfare of life on Planet Earth. An increasing population will mean moving into forest lands, and generating more energy and producing food, all which require space and fuel. Emissions will rise higher than ever, average global temperatures will rise, ice caps will continue to melt, there will be an increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, all of the freshwater being poured into the sea from the melting ice will disrupt the salinity in parts of the ocean thus disrupting delicate but life giving ocean currents. Weather systems and the distribution of heat around the world will change. Sea levels could rise, species could be wiped out, cities sunk and so on. It sounds like a horror story, or ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, yet it is just another example of chaos theory. Increases people could lead to a scenario like this, unless greener technologies are used globally (not likely given the current situation) or we humans colonise other worlds. Currently, the latter would be logistical nightmare, not to mention a scientific endeavour that would stretch the minds of scientists and empty the banks of nations – not something governments could do with currently. Verily, we are stuck in a rut. Perhaps if there were some kind of intelligent extraterrestrials out there, we could learn from them? If we moved to other planets, we would be kind of extraterrestrials, especially any children born on another planet.

Another point worth mentioning is that we wish to communicate with aliens; if they are out there, and we wish to communicate with them in peace… perhaps we should remember that we can’t even get along with each other over simple matters such as money. What could happen with aliens with the prospect of invaluable technology on the line? Well, given the distance they would probably live at, nothing. Our technologies wouldn’t enable us to do much to them except send them a nasty message which they wouldn’t receive until we changed our mind about being so mean to them – especially if they did have the technology to colonise other planets. Offence could lead our planet to be the next to be ‘colonised’… this sounds like something out of science fiction, and I think I am getting ahead of myself here. I shall stick with more plausible science and remain with the notion that any life nearby is probably not sentient, not advanced enough to communicate with us simply or doesn’t want to talk to us if they are sentient, and to be honest were that the case, given the current state of world affairs, I wouldn’t blame them.

The Age of Paranoia

Irony, Cynicism, Scepticism and Mortal Fear

“Forced conversation
Hidden agenda
You think we're stupid, how dare you
The rug has not been pulled
Over our eyes you fool
We can see right through”

-Billy Talent

Breaking news, ‘Trust’ is declared Endangered by the IUCN. Well, obviously that isn’t a real headline, but it could well be. We live in the age of paranoia. Trust is growing scarce; the world seems like a minefield, or the realm of the Hydra. The same old culprits are to blame, newspapers, news channels, an ever more daring and idiotic minority and just an aura of fear.

Parents are frightened of paedophiles at every corner, so much so that parents are too terrified to let their children past their front gardens. If it’s not paedophiles, its murderous rapists from hell, or gun toting gangs from the planet Gat. Well, that’s what BBC news said, with specific reference to abducting murderers. They presented some ominous facts about previous murders and how parents deemed that the outside world was no longer safe for the play of children or something to that effect. When it comes to a tragic story the news will inevitably want to milk it for all it is worth, every penny counts after all. They’ll plaster the headline with words like ‘CHILD’, ‘DEATH’, ‘UNSAFE’ and ’LETHAL BIZZLE’, all words that strike fear into the hearts of the average 20th or 21st century parent. If this truly was the case, every other adult who wasn’t a parent to the child would be out on the streets with the sole intention to abduct and kill your child. Political correctness is out of control, what with its absurd commandments; “Thou shalt not photograph thine babe in the school production or in the playground”. All parents can not be trusted? Taking a picture of the school production will cause them to run home and become aroused? Verily this is disturbed thinking of the most moronic degree. It would be more helpful for the doctor to supply you with a complementary child coffin at birth, for when they get beset upon by the great wide world outside. Indeed, there are villains out there, but that’s nothing a bit of neighbourhood vigilance can’t solve. We’re all so caught up with the terrors of the world that we have lost all faith in each other. Nobody is implying that you become bosom buddies with all of the inhabitants of your street, but some general awareness of each others existence goes a long way. Rather, it is ‘Every family for themselves – screw you, get out of my way you paedophile family, and stop looking at my child’.

But aside from the Political Correctness circus and the prominent Murderer Community of Britain (do they have a union?), we simply CANNOT forget about the omnipresent danger of terrorism in the civilised world! Cave/Mud Hut dwellers from the Middle East have suddenly mastered chemical engineering and are producing bombs by the truck load to blow up our Great Island! God Save the Queen! God save me! God save my democracy! God save Big Brother! Let us analyse this threat. People are worried about terrorists around every corner… there are advertising campaigns warning us about loiterers who are most likely terrorists and the news bleats about how fifteen would be terrorists were foiled before they blew up the world. Sounds like something out of a George Orwell novel to me. I know there are extremists in Britain and they probably shouldn’t be here, but as a result of these bearded maniacs the entire country is gripped in fear and worried that the island might sink under the waves. Apparently, people are worried about going into shopping centres. We shouldn’t write off the threat, but surely this is a step too far? People are still scared of planes and ‘try to spot the terrorists’? This is paranoia over the edge. The horrific events of September the 11th have ingrained in our mind that planes and terrorists were made for each other. News flash, how many flights have there been in the UK and US alone over the past decade, and how many of these were hijacked by terrorists? Now express that as a percentage and perhaps you’ll see a glimmer of the probability of the bearded bloke next to you being a terrorist… I don’t see how the beard suddenly transforms you into a suspect. Surely, this is a common stereotype that these ‘ultra-smart’ terrorists must have cottoned on to? This being the case, the terrorist would have adapted his strategy (by the concept of the evolutionary arms race), and would have gotten rid of the beard, to blend in with the majority.

In this world over-run by terrorists, paedophiles and abducting murderers, I wonder how anybody is still alive. Though I do admit, there may be some irony in the way I have presented the above piece, riddled with cynicism and fraught with scepticism. Perhaps I am just assuming the polar opposite argument to the media driven army that votes, and in doing so I’m not doing myself any favours, but the purpose of the piece isn’t to render everybody into a calm, happy-go-lucky, docile mood. The point being expressed is not one of ‘Do not worry, there is no danger, everything is just fine’, but the general view can’t be ‘Omnipresent danger, consuming us, frozen in fear’. The real world must be treated with rationality and we must just have faith in the fact that committing any of these heinous acts is easier said than done. With so many variables, it’s very easy to get caught out. The aim of these ‘Terrorists’ is to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy (being us). Being scared to go to shopping centres or constantly looking out for terrorists is only an expression of fear and is a sign of submission to the terrorists aim. They will have won. The aim of the terrorist is to strike fear, then to spread discord and enmity amongst people who normally get along, and pick apart the structure of our society. If the terrorists really were going to open hell on our door steps, believe me, we wouldn’t even be safe in our homes. Nations such as North Korea and Iran are reportedly prepared to sell weapons of mass destruction… for any hope of salvation, evolve into a cockroach or build a bunker or follow an option that is somewhat more practical – take a lesson from the Prophet Lot from the ancient scriptures and run – Run. Just run. Run and don’t look back.

Depression is the New Happy

Why So Serious?

There are a great many items for sale in shops which are wanted by the consumer - basically everyone. Who wouldn’t want an Iphone or a Pagani Zonda? You do not need to be a materialist obsessed with possessions to desire these items. They are pretty good. If they were being offered for free, I would first ask if there was a catch and then I would say ‘yes’ (you can never be sure these days, with loopholes and whatnot, ‘free’ could mean ‘extremely costly in some other undignified way – grrr marketing).



There is a peculiar item being sold to us currently and has probably been sold to us since we were children. It is being sold to us without us specifically asking for it yet we accept it without question in the most part. Depression is being packaged and sold to us continuously by the mass news media. Rupert Murdoch is perhaps the leading retailer of depression, or at least he comes to mind when I think of discount depression. The next news headline might as well be ‘Go kill yourself’ and it wouldn’t be much of a deviation from the current trend. If it isn’t a news item about the terrible state of the world, it is a news article which just puts the state of society into perspective. It is probably inadvertently achieved as a large amount of energy is dedicated to celebrity news and gossip. Hmmm. I’m sure a bit of this news can’t be a harmful thing but it sells better than hot cakes, I wouldn’t be surprised if people were shovelling pages of previous Heat magazine issues into their mouths for their tea. It is unfair to judge everyone based on their interest in celebrity gossip, they’re not bad people or dumb people; it can make you feel better about yourself when things aren’t going according to plan in your life (‘tee hee, she’s gone potty, all I’ve got is redundancy’), and also, it’s usually the only alternative the mass media provides to its sledgehammer of bad news.



Furthermore, I think it is worth pointing out that bad news just sticks in our minds and stands out more than good news does. Somebody could go their entire life as a saint and then slip up once, and that is all you will remember them for. Such a shame indeed. History is thrown away in favour of disgrace. It is very easy to dislike, to ignore, to shun, to prejudice, to complain, to be discontent and unhappy. This has led me to believe that happiness is a high energy state whereas unhappiness is a low energy state, therefore is an energetically favourable state, which is why we reside in unhappy form for most of the time. It’s just a theory; perhaps I could study it later in my studies… hmmm.



The news is very good at causing the disillusionment of a nation. Seemingly credible ‘facts’ are churned out, bombarding you at light speed (quite literally in the case of the images). At the end of the day, who else do you have to turn to if something major happens somewhere in the world? It is understandable. It’s not as if the news jumps up and down screaming its’ dishonesty at you. The best you can do is analyse the news item (perhaps CRAVEN it while you’re at it) and make your own decision. Or even better, go to different news sources independent from each other, which is probably a challenge seeing as Rupert Murdoch has recently acquired Planet Earth media, but if you find the corroborating pieces of information, you can be a bit more sure that at least those facts are truthful.



Every now and then the news finds a particular person or people to victimise. They don’t victimise them for the sole intention of victimisation. It’s more of a commercial victimisation (a victimisation without intent) – ‘give the people what they want’ news. Allow me to present an untrue, hypothetical news piece. The first news piece will be detailing that an Estonian individual went and molested a stick insect. Fair enough, an Estonian individual did indeed molest a stick insect, shame on him. All of a sudden, people are aware of Estonians. It’s similar to when you hear a distinct word on the radio (or read it in a book)and all of a sudden you’re identifying that word everywhere. It probably isn’t being mentioned any more than usual, but you are aware of it (I remember the word ‘exacerbate’ was mentioned in The Apprentice once and since then I haven’t been able to get rid of it). As is the same with the prior Estonian individual. Now the news knows that it will grab the attention of the consumer by emphasising Estonians in its news items wherever they’re involved, no matter how big or small – and if it is unclear who is involved in the next stick insect abuse case, just suggest that Estonians could have been involved. Darn Estonians. Why can’t they leave the stick insects alone? Anyway, the news provider will, in most cases, want to attract viewers, or readership, so it can gain more sponsors in order to ‘earn’ more money. Eventually, the news providers will have all realised that news about Estonians (particularly bad news) is money, and every news provider is bleating about Estonian Phasmatodeaphiles and before you know it, it feels as if most Estonians are involved in a Phasmatodeaphile conspiracy. The media can change public opinion in the matter of a few years. Governments are aware of this, and try to utilise the media whenever they can, though in the modern consumer driven societies of Britain and America, it is harder to do so as the media answers to no-one and will attack anybody it sees fit. Governments included. With the exception of the Grey suited men and women in the boardroom on the top floor in the news corporation building, pretty much everybody is a loser in the media game.



The late great Michael Jackson said, “In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”



Yes, we do indeed live in a world filled with hate, anger, despair and distrust – and we are all ultimately boned as a result. But don’t lose hope. Why? Just don’t; the hope you feel may be true or false, but hope can be the greatest feeling in the world and is the best antidote to the discount poisonous depression being sold to us.

The Captain describes nothing, and in doing so, analyses pretty much Everything

Somethings, nothings, everythings and chaos theory

Existence is a peculiar thing, and it is the only ‘thing’. Indeed, something either exists or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t exist, then it is nothing and by nothing, I mean it isn’t anything at all. This is all hypothetically speaking, of course, as to truly not exist, is to not have a physical presence, but also not to be thought of by anybody. The presence of ‘nothing’, diminishes its concept. Simply naming it as ‘nothing’ defeats the object of ‘nothing’. It has been given a name, and is hence ‘something’. It is now an idea, a concept. So if I am going to write about something that doesn’t exist, I am not going to acknowledge its’ existence, I am not going to think about it, and I am not going to mention it at all in this… whatever it is that I am writing. Which is good because I now have a lot of scope with which to explain whatever it is that doesn’t exist.

The very fact that we are living breathing organisms is enough to prove everybody’s importance. Every organism has its’ place, otherwise it wouldn’t have evolved (or come into being). There’s importance in everything. The very fact that it exists is a testament to that. It is able to exist, and it does. It is able to exist in its relatively negative entropy. At some point in existence, whether billions of years in the past or yesterday, energy was invested in the system you see. It could be a gnat, a spider, a virus, a stone, a piece of dust, a nebula, a Sega Saturn games console, a blue whale or a Take That Album. We people tag and label everything in one way or other, and I do not condemn this, I do this also, but in tagging things, we attach some sort of ‘importance value’ to it. We’ll deem something ‘common’ or ‘rare’.

‘The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world’, says the G-Man in the opening scene of Half-Life 2. Everybody in the world is important in their own way. In this context, I don’t mean that to come across in a philanthropic, ‘I-love-everybody’ way. Acknowledging something’s existence and its place in things doesn’t always mean we have to like it. I just said that everything has its importance, yet I am still discontent with general aspects of modern attitudes and values, and the shortcomings of society. Things are exactly as they were meant to be, as decided by prior forces (as I shall explain later), but this doesn’t mean that it is good. ‘Good’ is a relative concept, determined by perception and the position in space which you occupy. There is physical reality and then there is psychology. The physical reality of something is hard to dispute – so live with it. The psychology of how you deal with its existence is down to your mind and perhaps the external stimuli and experiences which have shaped your mind into what it is.

We are slaves to the stimuli bombarding us like shells at a trench. Our basic thoughts are influenced by external stimuli. It is external stimuli which ultimately make every living thing unique. Identical twins are natural clones. They have the same DNA and the same genetics yet they are different. Each occupies a different position in space. Therefore, they are subject to slightly different stimuli. They both experience different environmental factors and they think and perceive independently. Both could be standing next to each other, but because they occupy two different positions in space, the stimuli they receive are slightly different. The photons of light which enable them to see come from slightly different angles, the molecules in the air around them are different, and these (amongst thousands of other stimuli) are summated and amplified by a process explained by chaos theory (explained later).

We could have initially been exposed to a stimulus early in life or just this second, but it influences our thoughts. We may have a random thought – it seems random because we cannot pinpoint its stimulus. The stimulus could have been something apparently ‘insignificant’, something we barely registered in our conscience. You could have been walking in the street and a man in a red tie sneezed, momentarily diverting your attention for the slightest fraction. This could be enough to reside in your subconscious, and then rear its random head when you least expect it due to some unidentified plasticity event in your neurons. A mixture of unrelated ‘insignificant’ events could merge together to generate the most abstract, peculiar thought imaginable but it happens due to some distant object in existence, which you may have only walked past, or heard a stranger mention. A stranger may have seen a peculiarly shaped red-green rock which sounded like a constipated tortoise when she tickled it, and could have been conveying this peculiarity in the time space continuum to a friend. You may well have been on the phone to a friend who was in the near vicinity of these complete strangers and picked up the word ‘tortoise’ and ‘rock’, and suddenly they’re in your mind. Later you have a weird thought over dinner of tortoises and rocks in red ties, having a sneezing contest. The existence of this rock, somewhere in the universe, has been transmitted to you by a series of unconnected events to cause weird electrical activity in your brain while you indulge in a Dominoes pizza. Someone or something you believe is unimportant to you can make all the difference. It is an application of chaos theory.

Chaos theory is basically a very small event culminating in something altogether larger and near unpredictable. Like a snowball effect (or as it is more commonly known; The Butterfly Effect). A small alpine swift could be flying past a mountain, and the air currents formed from its’ wing beats could knock a single snowflake at the top of a mountain out of place, causing it to fall, knocking a few more snowflakes and clinging to them in the process. The tiny snowball dislodges other snowflakes, until so much snow is dislodged that an avalanche occurs, crashing down the mountainside destroying everything in its path and claiming the lives of some skiers on the slope. One of these skiers could have been running for the presidency of the nation he was from. His death resulted in him not going into power and instead, his rival gains office. His rival subsequently invades the neighbouring country which escalates into a world conflict culminating in a nuclear war. The single wing beat of this small bird caused a nuclear holocaust. This is an exaggerated hypothetical scenario of course, but it isn’t impossible. I haven’t invented magical beings. I have used existing entities such as birds, snow, people and nuclear bombs, and linked them together using standard physics into a story of bloodshed and apocalypse. But that is what chaos theory describes. Everything is influenced by big events and tiny, seemingly insignificant events which nobody knows about and probably never will, yet their legacy is just as large as the legacy of the memorable event itself. That swift may never have seen a human being before. Mankind may never have seen this swift. But this organism made an impact. We could extrapolate this even further backwards and determine what factors lead to the bird flying where it flew, and the circumstances in which it hatched and so on.

This could apply to anybody who feels hopelessly insignificant in life… on Planet Earth anyway. As we look at the grand scale of the universe, our impact diminishes. It probably diminishes exponentially as we get further away from our tiny area of space. Verily, the universe is just too expansive for most of us. Most people would rather not know. The universe is depressingly large. But for some reason, this only instils me with awe and wonder. However, as far as we’re concerned right here and right now, the right man in the wrong place can indeed make all the difference. And that is a comprehensive study of that thing which doesn’t exist.


Captain Nitrogen out.

Home

The universe is vast. Impossibly vast.

The Earth is part of the solar system of 8 planets and 5 dwarf planets.

The solar system revolves around our star, Sol a.k.a. The Sun.

The Sun is just one star… and not a particularly large one at that.

The closest star to our system is Alpha Centauri which is 4.4 light years away, meaning light from our sun would take 4.4 years to travel to it.

The stars in our galaxy, or indeed any galaxy, are many light years away from each other.

The Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light years across.

Our single galaxy is the Milky Way, and contains around 200 billion (200 000 000 000) stars.

Our Galaxy is just a single galaxy part of a local galaxy cluster. Our nearest neighbouring galaxy is Andromeda at 2 500 000 light years away. It contains around 1 trillion (1 000 000 000 000) stars.

There are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in the Milky Way.

If there were 200 000 000 000 stars in as many galaxies, that would mean there were around 40 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars in the known universe. And that’s probably an underestimate.

The galaxy clusters are so many light years apart that light takes millions of years for the light to travel to other galaxies.

Some stars we see are so far away that by the time their light reaches our planet, they themselves have actually died. We are only seeing their imprint in the universe.
And our Earth is just one tiny planet, in a lonely solar system, around a single small star, out of a universe so large that a million years is no time at all.
On the grand scale, we humans are transient, not even a blip in the galactic time scale.

Our entire human history isn’t even a millisecond in the grand expanse of the universe.

We haven’t found life on any other celestial body except our own planet.

We humans are all living in a universe so large that it is nearly impossible to envisage.

We are all living organisms, we are all the same species, we all have functioning brainstems and beating hearts; we are one mankind.

A single lifetime for a human may be something like 70 years. On the universal scale, that is absolutely nothing. It is not even the blink of an eye. It isn’t even close to a millisecond and here we are, in our insignificant corner of the universe, where we are seemingly forgotten. We are more united than we think, yet we choose to fight amongst ourselves over small differences. It would do us well to see our place in the universe and perhaps put into perspective just how small our existence is.

In the great, wide, empty universe, we are alive. We exist, and we are aware of it. We are aware of each other, yet we argue over little differences, when really, all of us, have so much more in common. We are ‘us’. We are human beings. We breathe, we eat, we think, we maintain ourselves. We can move, we can respire, we can reproduce, we can eat, we can excrete, we can sense and respond, we grow, we feel, we hate, we love. All of us. All 6 billion of us. On this single tiny planet in the universe. The universe is so much larger than us, and makes our numbers look small. In the darkness of space, we live. Not for very long, but we live.

And even though our existence in the universe is unnoticeable on the grand scale, we can actually understand the universe. We can make sense of it. We can think about the impossible numbers and sizes, the beauty and majesty of the heavens and the galaxies, the ancient raging fury of the supernovae and black holes of the firmament. We, the insignificant humans, can understand something so grand and ancient. We possess a brain, very likely the most complex entity in the entire universe. We may be impossibly small and transient, but we can appreciate our tiny existence and our transience. And that makes us special.

The 'Noughties' - A Eulogy

Divided and United

Goodbye, dear Noughties, the first complete decade of my life. I turned 9years of age in the first July of the new millennium, and I turned 18 in the last year of the first decade of the new millennium… wow. From the humble seat I took in this new century, here is what I surmised.

There have been a number of things which made the 200x’s a decade of immense upheaval.

Social networking really took off in the second half of the decade (though it had been around since the nineties), and it completely revolutionised social relations. No longer would old school friends lose contact with one another after they graduated. A new, extroverted culture erupted on the internet, with statuses and activities reflecting the moods of social-network-site users. But of course, mobile technology for the masses, and very handy technology at that, made communication very easy, stylish and dare I say it… sexy. Mobile phones had evolved from their brick sized (and weighted) ancestors with only monophonic ringtones and SMS messaging to boast about, to miniature computers, with complete touch screens, proper internet (not the snail-like WAP of days gone by) and high resolution camera facilities. Phones became fashion icons.

The widespread of availability of internet, and increased computer-literacy rate meant that people from across the world could bandy together to unite and support causes. For good or for bad. It is easier to unite over the internet as it requires a minimum effort and you do not have to see who it is that you are uniting with. This removes any initial prejudice. The most recent success of Rage Against The Machine for Christmas number one, overthrowing Simon Cowell’s dominion of Christmas is exemplary of this notion. Of course, Facebook comes to mind when we think of this (probably because all anybody does is join groups these days, I have often said that you can tell the character of someone now by simply reading all of the pages they’ve joined, you don’t even need to speak to them anymore… weird, try explaining that to a Victorian), but there are other means which allow people to come together for a common cause; Youtube, MySpace, MSN messenger (not a website but close enough in this context) just to name a few.

The music industry underwent a complete makeover. The rise of Peer to peer sharing diminished chart sales, meaning that the charts were no longer representative of what music people were interested in. Music went truly digital. Ipods and MP3 players meant that you didn’t need to carry CD’s and cassettes around with you everywhere. You could store thousands of tracks on a device the size of a pack of cards, only it was thinner and lighter, and you could play cards on it. Many artists could now gain global recognition, despite not gaining any TV exposure and only limited radio exposure, on an obscure pirate radio station being broadcast from the Siberian wastes. Music lost one of its Kings in Michael Jackson, one of the most prolific artists of all time, and also gained 50 cent, one of the most prolific losses in music history.

The gaming industry took off with its close-to-life graphics and amazing interactivity providing a most immersing and delightful experience. Similar technology, though decidedly more refined was used in the film industry to bring to life the most fantastic worlds and wonderful stories. This newfound technology was welcomed by most with open arms, as it served very well to detract from the pre-apocalyptic world we live in today.

Yes, if we believed everything they said in the papers, it should be doomsday by now. The newspapers have still retained a considerable amount of influence in this digital decade, which I must say, is surprising. I don’t think that newspapers and books will ever become obsolete. They are very handy, if I must say so myself. They have literally endured for millennia, and the new kids on the block aren’t going to overthrow them easily, especially seeing as our computers have many functional parts thus increasing the probability of breakdown.

Terrorism does seem to have been a problem this decade. Of course, terrorism has existed for as long as the word ‘terror’ has existed. But this was terrorism as a means of war. From the sounds of things, nobody is safe from the terrorists. Well dammit, I’ll just have to sit at home all day and watch your news program some more, so you can earn even more money. Yes, there are coward terrorists out there, but it’s not as bad as everyone thinks… well not here anyway. If you really want ‘bad’, go to Gaza or Iraq where innocent people are in danger of losing their entire families, and they’re not even safe in their homes. Buying into the climate of fear only feeds those willing to tear us apart; their greatest weapon is the spreading of fear, discord and distrust. Denaturing society and causing it to descend into anarchy. This is their ultimate victory, and they are on the way to achieving it. Death is simply the by-product of their terrorism. ‘Divide and conquer’, as the old adage goes.

The tragic attacks of September 11th 2001 changed the global view overnight. New, controversial wars were waged, more innocent lives were lost (on both sides) and countries, peoples and cultures were thrown into disgrace. The media was still the same old dog that it always was, meaning that it was largely responsible for the portrayal of all of these people. Americans turned stupid, Muslims turned terrorists, Somalians turned pirates… the list goes on and on. America ventures into Afghanistan and Iraq after September 11th, and Britain thought it would be a wonderful idea to follow suit. We all need a good war from time to time, I suppose.

Of course, the villains of the 21st century haven't only been bearded Middle Eastern folk as popular culture likes to indicate. There have been injstices and mass murders the world over, in Africa, China, Pakistan, The Middle East, Tibet, Burma, Georgia... the list is extensive. The world is a cruel place.

Mother Nature herself decided to unleash her fury, the boxing day tsunami, the Kashmir Earthquake, the Burma Cyclones, the Darfur famine, another extensive list of which I can barely scratch the surface.An economic crisis, the likes of which had not been seen in God-knows-how-long occurred. My understanding of economics is limited at best… but many people lost their jobs, businesses were driven to the ground and people were disgraced. This further fed the climate of fear and confusion which gripped the western world. People started playing the blame game, incited hate and so on. The People really didn’t so themselves much justice this decade, then again, when do they?

We have seen the rise of China and India as globally recognised powers and we have seen the true colours of our world leaders. Warmongers, crooks, liars and so on. Politicians have never been a trusted lot, but they really got hit hard this decade. We saw the resident superpower elect its first black president, Mr Barack Obama, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the beating of Berlusconi, the execution of Saddam Hussein, the resignation of Tony Blair and so on.

Science continued to deliver breakthroughs such as new preservation techniques for hearts for heart transplants, the heart can be kept beating and alive outside of the body to preserve it for longer, until its eventual transplant. Also, the most ambitious scientific experiment ever, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was constructed, and is currently probing the mysteries of the ancient universe. The solar system ‘lost’ a planet, farewell Pluto. The genetic revolution continued, with the completion of the human genome project and various groundbreaking breakthroughs in genetics and biochemistry which have proven to be crucial in the fight against cancer.

So what has the new millennium/century/decade given us so far?A climate of fear and distrust, elevated violence, the cyberspace revolution, further idiocy, social networking, ultra cool mobile phones, even more ravenous media with no regard for human decency, division, unison, an ever more interactive internet, medical miracles, war, colossal debt you could resink the titanic in, ever more immersing virtual worlds, terrorism, chavs, cyber-warfare, identity theft and the X factor. Cringe or Clap, it’s your choice, but these are the ideas that will be carried forward to start the next decade, and to greet those born in this decade who are just gaining their self awareness. To all, a happy new year, a happy new decade, and a happy new hernia.

“Sing us a song of the century

That’s louder than bombs and eternity

The era of static and contraband

That’s leading us to the Promised Land

Tell us a story that’s by candlelight

Waging a war and losing the fight

They’re playing the song of the century

Of panic and promise and prosperity

Tell me a story into that goodnight

Sing us a song for me”

-Green Day

…That about sums it up.

Captain Nitrogen out.