Author: Paul Handover

20:20 hindsight

One of the great aspects of modern web-based communications is that much of what is said, written and recorded is available to peruse long after the item was ‘broadcast’.

Prof. Ehrenfeld

A few days ago, I introduced Prof. David Ehrenfeld via a short, but stunningly clear, five-minute YouTube video.  I promised to follow that up with more material.

So here’s a book review undertaken by Prof. Ehrenfeld.  The book in question is The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. James Howard Kunstler. x + 307 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005. $23.  Here’s the review in full from The American Scientist website.  Read it carefully and ponder that this review goes back to Autumn 2005, about five and half years ago. Great foresight.

James Howard Kunstler begins The Long Emergency with the hope that “the American public will wake up from its sleepwalk and act to defend the project of civilization” while there is still time. “Throughout this book,” he writes, “I will concern myself with what I believe is happening, what will happen, or what is likely to happen, not what I hope or wish will happen.” The reality that our society is currently refusing to face, Kunstler says, is that time is just about up for industrial civilization as we have known it.

Kunstler’s thesis is straightforward: Malthus was right, but cheap oil has postponed the day of reckoning, creating a century-long “artificial bubble of plenitude” and generating a host of intractable problems partly or entirely related to our prolonged energy spending spree. These problems include serious damage to our agricultural infrastructure, global climate change and the reorganization of living places into unsustainable suburbs and cities. Now cheap oil is disappearing fast, leaving only the problems behind.

What sets The Long Emergency apart from numerous other books on this theme is its comprehensive sweep—its powerful integration of science, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change—along with a fascinating attempt to peer into a chaotic future. And Kunstler is such a compelling, fast-paced and sometimes eloquent writer that the book is hard to put down.

Beginning with the story of Edwin L. Drake, who drilled the world’s first oil well in northwestern Pennsylvania in August 1859, Kunstler takes us through the development of the global oil-based economy of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He carefully traces the origins of the idea, first proposed by geologist M. King Hubbert, that oil consumption by modern industrial society will draw down current and potential supplies in a predictable way. Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of the date of “peak oil” production in the United States (which he put at sometime between 1966 and 1972) was strikingly accurate—the peak occurred in 1970. After Hubbert’s death in 1989, the distinguished petroleum geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère, Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, University of Colorado physicist Albert Bartlett and others adapted his model and applied it to global oil production, yielding a prediction that the global peak would occur between 2000 and 2010.

As pointed out by Richard A. Kerr and Robert F. Service in the July 1, 2005, issue of Science, petroleum geologists tend to accept this “pessimistic” prediction of the date when the global peak will be (or has been) reached, whereas “optimistic” dates farther in the future are being advanced primarily by resource economists. Kunstler sides with the geologists, and his fast-paced but detailed discussion of the economics of oil supports this position. In his chapter “Geopolitics and the Global Oil Peak,” he comes to grips with a complex mix of elements: Middle Eastern and Islamic nationalism, terrorism, Chinese industrial growth and the overwhelming problems of Russia, the world’s second-largest producer of oil. These are set against a backdrop of diminishing supply, as one country after another, including Saudi Arabia, passes its oil peak. Kunstler’s explanations of why the Saudis can no longer control world oil prices (they lack the reserves to increase production much beyond what they are already pumping) and of the immense significance of that loss of control are particularly insightful. American politicians have not yet grasped this new reality.

The book’s lengthy discussion of the alternatives to cheap oil that are so beloved by techno-optimists is straightforward and sobering. Kunstler gives all of the alternatives a critical but fair inquiry, from conventional energy sources such as coal and natural gas, through oil shales and tar sands, synthetic oil, renewable energy (including wind, solar and hydroelectric power and biomass), nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, hydrogen, thermal depolymerization (turning organic waste into oil), methane hydrates and even zero-point energy.

Most of these technologies founder on “the classic problem of energy economics: energy returned over energy invested (ERoEI). “The figure in the case of tar sands and oil shale is approximately three barrels of oil produced for every two barrels of oil-equivalent invested. In the case of ethanol produced from agribusiness corn or sugar cane, the ratio may be less than one. Some alternatives, such as methane hydrates, are dangerous to handle. Hydrogen is not a primary fuel: Its production requires considerable energy. Also, because of the low density of hydrogen gas, it must be stored and transported under high compression, or liquefied at very low temperatures, or combined with other compounds. Each of these options costs still more energy, and they introduce an assortment of complications and hazards into the delivery system. Although hydrogen will have its uses, Kunstler says, his verdict is unequivocal: “There is not going to be a ‘hydrogen economy.'” Nor is he sanguine about such far-out schemes as a process for deriving zero-point energy from the dark matter of the universe; he reminds us that “A useful maxim in engineering states that when something sounds too good to be true, it generally is not true.”

Kunstler’s moderate treatment of nuclear power (fission) has angered some environmentalists. I think he makes a good case, however, that during the transition period to a post-petroleum economy, the United States, which produces much of its electricity from a rapidly declining supply of natural gas, will not be as well off as France, which gets 80 percent of its electric power from nuclear energy. Nevertheless, he does not see nuclear power as more than a short-term stopgap. Its ultimate limitations come first from safety issues with regard to plant operations and the disposal of waste fuel (although he points out that coal has cost far more lives than nuclear power, especially in the West). Second is the large amount of oil needed to mine and process nuclear fuel and to build and maintain nuclear plants. And the third, formidable objection Kunstler makes is that “Atomic fission is useful for producing electricity, but most of America’s energy needs are for things that electricity can’t do very well, if at all. For instance, you can’t fly airplanes on electric power from nuclear reactors”—although, as he notes, the U.S. military has tried.

Kunstler describes a host of natural disasters that will interact with the energy crisis to cause social upheaval on a global scale. No country will be exempt, he says. Some of these disasters, such as climate change, are the direct result of our profligate use of cheap energy. Others, including the widespread shortage of fresh water, have been greatly augmented by the drain on resources brought about by the explosion of high-oil-input agriculture, industrialization and changes in living habits. All of those natural disasters, however, including the emergence of new infectious diseases and the re-emergence of old ones, will be much harder to cope with when cheap energy is no longer available. Our efforts will also be confounded by diminishing returns on technology and by “technological regress—the loss of information, ability, and confidence.”

The Long Emergency is more than a list of disasters, present or impending. It is an attempt to understand how we got to where we are. Nearly 100 years of cheap oil have allowed us, even prompted us, to construct an economic and social system that depends utterly (often without our knowledge) on a continuous, never-failing energy subsidy. The system cannot stand on its own feet. It is unstable, lacking internal restraints and negative feedbacks, and most of all it undermines all stabilizing alternatives, such as diverse small businesses and local community support systems. Kunstler’s understanding of history and economics helps him delineate this clearly.

My only complaint about the book is that it lacks an index, which is inexcusable for a text so crammed with names and facts. Kunstler’s use ofentropy as a synonym for social disorder may bother readers who prefer that the term be reserved for discussions of thermodynamics, but an accepted definition of the word is “inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.”

One question that most readers of this review will ask is, When will the coming collapse occur? As Kunstler notes, Deffeyes—perhaps not entirely in jest—has predicted on National Public Radio that the global oil peak will occur on Thanksgiving Day, 2005, with “‘an uncertainty factor of only three or four weeks on either side.'” But the closest thing to a hint of Kunstler’s position on the subject is found in his remark in the last chapter that “The denizens of Bergen County, New Jersey, or Fairfield County, Connecticut, today may never believe how desperate their localities may become in 2025.” He is probably wise to be vague. As the great biochemist Erwin Chargaff remarked in his 1978 autobiography, Heraclitean Fire, “On the whole, professional pessimists prove right at the end if one does not hold them too tightly to a time scale.”

The last (and longest) chapter of The Long Emergency is also the most innovative and controversial one. Having made a powerful case that it is too late to avoid serious trauma, Kunstler speculates on what life will be like during the painful transition period, as cheap petroleum wanes. The question is well worth asking, if only to stimulate creative thinking about alternatives to a high-energy lifestyle. The book is not a survivalist tract, but Kunstler argues persuasively that life will be better in some geographic regions of the country than in others and better in some kinds of communities than in others. Factors such as the availability of water, the degree of dependence on automobiles and air-conditioning, the regional tolerance for violence and the persistence of strong communities lead him to conclude that the states of New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the upper Midwest that make up the “Old Union” of the Civil War period, along with the Pacific Northwest, will fare much better than the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain states and the Southeast.

Within each region, however, conditions will not be uniform. Kunstler, whose earlier book The Geography of Nowhere established him as heir presumptive to the intellectual legacy of Lewis Mumford, describes America’s automobile-dependent suburbs as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” It is the suburbs, he thinks, that will suffer the most during the coming energy crisis. (I concur, having taught the same message in field courses in suburban New Jersey for 30 years.) And cities, with their skyscrapers and total food dependence, will not, Kunstler claims, be far behind the suburbs in misery.

There is much more in the final chapter than I can do justice to in a review: The many topics discussed include, among others, the new economy and new commerce that will accompany the end of oil-dependent consumer culture (he predicts the demise of the chain stores and the rise of scavenging), possible political fragmentation of the nation, changes in education, the end of romantic childhood and changes in race relations. The picture he paints is incomplete—he doesn’t say what will happen to health care, the arts or entertainment in the long emergency—but there is material enough to provoke scientists and laypeople alike into considering what lies ahead.

Kunstler, like George Orwell, understands that being honest about the past and present is the only way to prepare ourselves for an uncertain future. Civilization, he believes, will survive the end of cheap oil, but not without great loss. “How many … familiar things in time may go?” he wonders. “What will abide in our collective memory?” Not all readers will accept his answers to these questions, but I think we must be grateful to him for showing us the need to ask them.

A timely reminder that so very often it is knowing what questions to ask that matters most!

All in the meaning, postscript!

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

On the 28th March I wrote what I thought was a concluding piece on the subject of ‘meaning’.  I used some of the most amazing details about the universe to highlight the fact that, in the end, if our civilisation doesn’t get it’s collective act together then from the perspective of the universe it is all pretty irrelevant.  In that piece I quoted from Prof. Brian Cox, “Everything we are, everything that’s ever been and everything that will ever be was all forged in the same moment of creation 13.7bn years ago from an unimaginably hot and dense volume of matter less than the size of an atom.”

Now, in fairness, Prof. Cox did allude to scientists exploring the notion of what might have happened before the Big Bang.  Anyway, a couple of nights ago we watched a BBC Horizon programme, now on YouTube, that looked much more closely into this fascinating topic.  The link came to us from the website Top Documentary Films that set out the introduction to the BBC programme.

They are the biggest questions that science can possibly ask: where did everything in our universe come from? How did it all begin? For nearly a hundred years, we thought we had the answer: a big bang some 14 billion years ago.

But now some scientists believe that was not really the beginning. Our universe may have had a life before this violent moment of creation.

Horizon takes the ultimate trip into the unknown, to explore a dizzying world of cosmic bounces, rips and multiple universes, and finds out what happened before the big bang.

Neil Turok, Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, working with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, has proposed a radical new answer to cosmology’s deepest question: What banged?

Answer: Instead of the universe inexplicably springing into existence from a mysteriousinitial singularity, the Big Bang was a collision between two universes like ours existing as parallel membranes floating in a higher-dimensional space that we’re not aware of.

One bang is followed by another, in a potentially endless series of cosmic cycles, each one spelling the end of a universe and the beginning of a new one. Not one bang, but many.

Sir Roger Penrose has changed his mind about the Big Bang. He now imagines an eternal cycle of expanding universes where matter becomes energy and back again in the birth of new universes and so on and so on.

Here’s that programme.  Enjoy!

Plan B Movie for Planet Earth

This is a ‘must see’ video for all to watch.

On the 17th March, I wrote another piece inspired by Lester Brown’s book, World on the Edge.  That piece was about what Lester Brown calls Plan B and shows that there are positive, real solutions to the dilemma that us humans have got ourselves in.

Anyway, I was delighted to see in my email in-box the following,

PLAN B: MOBILIZING TO SAVE CIVILIZATION—THE FILM

Plan B video

For the month of April only, you can watch a streaming edition of the film Plan B on the PBS website. So if you missed the initial release for whatever reason, here is your opportunity to watch it at your leisure.

Based on Lester Brown’s Plan B book series, this 90-minute film, by the award-winning film producers Marilyn and Hal Weiner, follows Lester as he speaks in Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, New Delhi, Rome, Istanbul, Ankara, and Washington, DC, and visits with world leaders to discuss ways to respond to the challenges of climate change.

The film begins with a dramatic portrayal of a world where there is a mounting tide of public concern about melting glaciers and sea level rise and a growing sense that we need to change course in how we react to emerging economic and social pressures. The film also spotlights a world where ocean resources are becoming scarce, croplands are eroding, and harvests are shrinking.

But what makes Plan B significant and timely is that it provides hopeful solutions—a road map that will help eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and protect and restore our planet’s fisheries, forests, aquifers, soil, grasslands, and biological diversity.

Along with Lester Brown, you will hear from notable scholars and scientists including Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and former Governor and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.

Narrated by Matt Damon, well-known for his work raising environmental awareness.

The film is available to view here.  Note that it is only free to watch for the month of April.

David Ehrenfeld

Five minutes of pure sanity

I can’t recall how I came across this wise Professor but it was in recent times.  Not going to say any more at this stage. Just watch the following.

There will be more from David Ehrenfeld over the coming weeks.

Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.

David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978

The day after April 1st!

When it all gets real close and personal.

I have been a great fan of the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, and read his Blog as often as I can.  Recently, the focus has been on Ireland.

A few days ago, before the announcement by the Irish premier and finance minister as to their vision for the future of Ireland’s banks, Robert penned a post that started as follows:

The unbelievable truth about Ireland and its banks
Ireland’s central bank and new government will confirm on Thursday that the hole in the country’s banks is even wider, deeper and darker than seemed to be the case last November, when those bust banks forced the country to go with a begging bowl to the eurozone’s rescue funds and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for 67.5bn euros (£59bn) of rescue loans.

That article then led me to Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor, who also writes a Blog.  He wrote on the 30th March,

A short summary of the Euro snafu that’s about to happen:

1) Tomorrow Ireland publishes the results of bank stress tests. It has to find – or the EU has to find – another E18-25bn to shore up its failing banks.

etc., etc.

Again, while the article is interesting, the whole point of this Post was one comment made to that Paul Mason piece.  Here it is,

At 00:47am on 31st Mar 2011, tawse57 wrote:

I am bored with all these posts about the economy now. Can we go back to cheese and crackers and the mysterious case of Paul Mason’s mobo contacts?

I was just talking with a 35 year old young man who is married and has a young child.

His wife, quite rightly, does not wish to move away from the place where she was born and brought up – Cornwall.

But he tells me that, despite almost saving £100,000 by putting in every hour they could in working and saving, that they stand no chance of ever owning their own home.

He says the house that he rents have asking prices of about £450,000 despite most of them just sitting on the market for years because no one, no one local anyhow, can afford them. What does sell goes to rich Londoners.

He is destined to pay out most of his wages in private landlord rents. He can’t get into a Council house or a Housing Association property because they either no longer exist or the waiting lists are measured in decades.

He is not prepared to have such a millstone of stress, worry and financial drain around his neck. It would kill him. I don’t blame him.

His story is one of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the UK today.

I mention this as the bank stress tests are directly connected with the massive credit bubble, much of it a housing bubble of liar loans, that brought the global economy to its knees, bankrupted banks and still threatens to bankrupt nations.

All of us on here know this. We are an enlightened bunch.

But I think it is worth remembering that the affects of the global credit binge are still directly affecting so many in this country.

The UK is almost alone in the World in not yet seeing a massive housing crash. The Government and the Bank of England have gone out of their way stop it happening in order to protect the banks who so stupidly, but also so greedily, loaned so many liar loans on bricks and mortar not in other countries but here in the UK.

Those UK banks that keep threatening to leave our shores are up to their eyeballs in global liar loans. You name a country in trouble and you can bet your bottom dollar, which might be the only thing most of us have left soon, that British banks are at the heart of it all.

It is long overdue that this giant house of cards came crashing down. It is long over-due that, as a Society, we cut out the cancer of dirty banks and dirty bankers from our lives and from these shores.

They are leeches on the souls of Men. Gosh, I am getting poetic in my anger. It must be that teaspoon of Jack Daniels I put in my midnight cocoa.

So what if the banks fail their stress tests today, next week or next year. It won’t make a squat of difference to that couple in Cornwall. It won’t make a squat of difference to most of us.

The worst thing that can happen is, as Alistair Darling so panicked, that the ATM machines run empty. Well, what would happen then? Would the sky fall in? Would us polite British all sit at home and do nothing.

Or would we take our cue from the Egyptians, the Tunisians and all the rest?

Perhaps what this country needs most of all is for another even bigger banking crisis? If it happens I think I would feel safer being one of the masses instead of one of the banking elite.

I do hope the banks fail the stress tests. I do hope it brings about another crisis. I do hope that, this time, the People say enough is enough and that this rotting cancer within Humanity is lanced with a fiery lancie thingy.

I could murder a bit of cheese on a nice cracker now.

Whoever you are tawse57, I like your style.  Very powerful words.

“It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can stand by itself.”

~Thomas Jefferson (third President of the United States from 1801 to 1809)

April Fool!

If only it was all a giant spoof, a huge joke played on us all!

I was intrigued by a quick look-up on WikiPedia to see that the history of April 1st, as a day for foolish ideas, goes back a very long way.  Here’s a small extract from the relevant page on WikiPedia,

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392), the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is set Syn March bigan thritty dayes and two<. Chaucer probably meant 32 days after March, i.e. May 2, the anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia, which took place in 1381. However, readers apparently misunderstood this line to mean “32nd of March,” i.e. 1st April. In Chaucer’s tale, the vain cock Chauntecleer is tricked by a fox.

I mean wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a press release today from, say, Goldman Sachs, sort of along the following lines,

At Goldman Sachs, success without integrity is failure.

Goldman Sachs’ culture reflects more than a structure. It is a statement of values. Our commitment to integrity, teamwork, excellence, meritocracy and innovation enables us to build our relationships, with clients and with colleagues, on honesty and trust. It drives our ability to deliver extraordinary client service and to generate superior long-term financial performance for our shareholders. Our values inspire us to give back to the community through volunteerism, philanthropy, scholarships and outreach. Each of us in the firm takes pride in our role as a steward of the Goldman Sachs legacy. We understand that our assets are our people, capital and reputation. If any of these is ever diminished, the last is the most difficult to restore.

The above part is taken from the Goldman Sachs website.  Great stuff.  Let me see if I can add to that, in recognition of the date.

Since the publication in the Financial Times in August 2009 of an article referring to our reputation, from which is quoted, “In a survey of 17,000 Americans, Brand Asset Consulting found that Goldman’s stature – as measured by several gauges of brand strength – had suffered in 2008 and 2009.” the Board of Directors have this day resolved:

  • to ensure that no person in the company is paid more than 25 times the annual pay of the lowest worker
  • that the company shall end the practise of claiming tax favours for any form of executive compensation, including stock options
  • that the money saved from the previous two resolutions shall be paid into an industry-wide fund to support all those citizens that are homeless and destitute as a direct result of the global financial crisis of recent times.

There, isn’t that nice!

 

Time for a laugh!

 

 

Joseph Campbell interlude

Just ran out of time!

My apologies but events yesterday conspired to get in the way of me offering a more thoughtful article for today.  So I hope you will be happy with another video of Joseph Campbell.

For those wanting to explore more, this is the link to the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

Inside job

The shocking documentary film about the global financial crisis.

I’m sure many have already see the film Inside Job but we only watched it a few nights ago.  Here’s the trailer.

The film is also available to watch on Top Documentary Films and is summarised on that website thus:

As he did with the occupation of Iraq in No End in Sight, Charles Ferguson shines a light on the global financial crisis in Inside Job.

Accompanied by narration from Matt Damon, Ferguson begins and ends in Iceland, a flourishing country that gave American-style banking a try – and paid the price.

Then he looks at the spectacular rise and cataclysmic fall of deregulation in the United States. Unlike Alex Gibney’s fiscal films,Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Casino Jack, Ferguson builds his narrative around dozens of players, interviewing authors, bank managers, government ministers, and even a psychotherapist, who speaks to a culture that encourages Gordon Gekko-like behavior, but the number of those who declined to comment, like Alan Greenspan, is even larger.

Though the director isn’t as combative as Michael Moore, he asks tough questions and elicits squirms from several participants, notably former Treasury secretary David McCormick and Columbia dean Glenn Hubbard, George W. Bush’s economic adviser.

Their reactions are understandable, since the borders between Wall Street, Washington, and the Ivy League dissolved years ago; it’s hard to know who to trust when conflicts of interest run rampant.

If Ferguson takes Reagan and Bush to task for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, he criticizes Clinton for encouraging derivatives and Obama for failing to deliver on the promise of reform. And in the category of unlikely heroes: former governor Eliot Spitzer, who fought against fraud as New York’s attorney general (he’s the subject of Gibney’s documentary Client 9).

Sony have available on their website a useful study guide.  It appears to be written with students in mind but there is much valuable background information there for all.  The guide, in pdf, may be seen here.

It would all have been worthwhile, if that’s the correct term, if we had seen effective regulatory responses from strong governments but, as the film points out, the millions of people on the receiving end of harsh, downward adjustment of personal wealth are still waiting.

Meanwhile, Europe continues to bleed, American housing is still trending downwards and the real effect of the Japanese earthquake is far from clear.

We are living in interesting times!

Sciences becomes magic.

Only a mystical view can speak to the soul.

 

The Helix nebula

(More on the Helix nebula here.)

I have referred yesterday to the series on the BBC hosted by Professor Brian Cox called Wonders of the Universe.  Well we managed to watch the last episode last night, entitled Messengers.  Like the other three episodes, it was breath-taking.

In this last episode, Prof. Cox speaks of the universe still expanding with the outer edge, if edge is the appropriate word, being about 8.7 billion light years away.  Thus the age of the Universe is about that; 8.7 billion light years.  Note: NASA has a piece that suggests that this figure may not be confirmed.  But let’s not worry too much about the precise value.  But we will take a short detour to understand a little more about the ‘light year’.

From here.

So to measure really long distances, people use a unit called alight year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or:

186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year

A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles (9,460,800,000,000 kilometers). That’s a long way!

That is a single light-year. Now reflect on the outer edge of the universe being, say, 8,700,000,000 multiplied by 5,865,696,000,000 miles away.  Don’t know about your mind, but my mind has no ‘feel’ for that distance whatsoever.

OK, next proposition put forward by Prof. Cox.  That is that scientists believe that ‘The Big Bang’ was the instant that the universe erupted, if that’s an appropriate word, from a single point, smaller than the size of a grain of sand.

That has no rational meaning whatsoever. Now my mind just goes into la, la land!  But at the level of magic, mysticism, the spiritual, then one does experience the deep meaning of the creation.  Our creation.  For we are part of the universe and the universe is part of us.

Just like the rose.  Trying to describe it cuts nothing compared to closing one’s eyes and simply breathing in the perfume.

Here is that last episode, in four parts from YouTube. Watch and prepared to be transformed.

All in the meaning, conclusion

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

It would be so easy to stay with this theme for a very long time, perhaps to the end of one’s mortal days.

Anyway, my topic has taken sufficient shape for me to conclude with this article and then leave these ideas with you, or just out there in the universe. The ‘shape’ being that whether the facts about the way we treat Planet Earth depress you, or whether taking a mystic, spiritual view is more your scene, it’s up to you.  Let’s recap.

The first article was to show that there are very strong and valid reasons to take an incredibly dim view of where it’s all heading.  In fact, those that stay with Learning from Dogs over the weeks, you hardy lot!, will know that the premise that we, as in mankind, are well and truly in the midst of a massive transition, unlike anything ever experienced before, is an idea that crops up here every so often.  This piece on the 22nd is just an example, and there are many more articles resonating around this theme on the Blog.

Then the second article was to show that a simple change of perspective can make all the difference to how we see the world. (Oh, and such a big thank-you to Sue Dreamwalker for that beautiful poem from her.)

OK, to the point of this article!

The BBC have been showing the most beautiful episodes in recent weeks from a massive production hosted by Professor Brian Cox- The Wonders of the Universe.  Here’s the BBC trailer.

Did you pick up on that key sentence?  “Ultimately, we are part of the universe.”

Here’s a recent piece from the British Guardian newspaper, I think written by Brian Cox, the presenter of the series.

The universe is amazing. You are amazing. I am amazing. For we are all one. Everything we are, everything that’s ever been and everything that will ever be was all forged in the same moment of creation 13.7bn years ago from an unimaginably hot and dense volume of matter less than the size of an atom. And that is amazing. [Understatement! Ed.] What happened before then in the Planck epoch is a matter of conjecture; we lack a theory of quantum gravity, though some believe the universe was formed from a collision of two pieces of space and time floating forever in an infinite space, but I feel I’m losing you at this point, which isn’t so amazing.

Read it in full here, but it concludes, almost poetically, as,

Time feels human, but we are only part of Cosmic Time and we can only ever measure its passing. As I stand in front of the great glacier that towers over Lake Argentino, time seems to almost stand still, yet as I explain the effects of entropy in the Namibian desert as sandcastles crumble around me, you can see that the transition from order to chaos can happen almost in the blink of an eye. One day, perhaps in 6bn years, our universe will stop expanding, the sun will cool and die, as all stars must, and everything will collapse in on itself, back into a black hole singularity. I leave you with this last thought: that we, too, will only really die when the universe dies, for everything within it is intrinsically the same.

Brian Cox takes an almost mystical perspective of the size of the universe and the almost unimaginable number of stars and planets it contains.

So, how many stars are out there?  From here, I quote,

It’s a great big Universe out there, with a huge numbers of stars. But how many stars are there, exactly? How many stars are there in the Universe? Of course it’s a difficult question to answer, because the Universe is a vast place and our telescopes can’t reach every corner to count the number of stars. But we can make some rough estimates. Almost all the stars in the Universe are collected together into galaxies. They can be small dwarf galaxies, with just 10 million or so stars, or they can be monstrous irregular galaxies with 10 trillion stars or more. Our own Milky Way galaxy seems to contain about 200 billion stars; and we’re actually about average number of stars.

So an average galaxy contains between 1011 and 1012 stars. In other words, galaxies, on average have between 100 billion and 1 trillion numbers of stars.

Now, how many galaxies are there? Astronomers estimate that there are approximately 100 billion to 1 trillion galaxies in the Universe. So if you multiply those two numbers together, you get between 1022 and 1024 stars in the Universe. How many stars? There are between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars in the Universe. That’s a large number of stars.

Even if one writes down in longhand the number, 1022 , as in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 it still has no real meaning whatsover.  That, of course, does not even get close to estimating how many planets there are out there.

Let’s say, just as a muse, that each sun only had a single planet.  Let us also continue this musing and say that only one in a billion planets had life on it.  In other words, if we divide 1022 by a billion, we still get the eye-watering result of there being 1013 or, longhand, 10,000,000,000,000 planets with life forms. That’s 10 trillion, by the way!

OK, cut it down some more, and then some more, and even more.

But whichever way you cut it, the conclusion is inescapable, the universe must be teeming with life and much of that life intelligent and wise.

So let me leave you with this thought about the meaning of it all.  It’s this.

It is said that the world reflects back what we think about most.  As I hope to have shown, we can think our way into extinction, or we can think our way to more mystic and spiritual outcomes. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.

In the end, if we screw up this planet as place for mankind to prosper and grow, it’s no big deal.  There will be many other humankinds out there in the universe who have taken a different route.

Sleep well tonight!