In more than 1300 essays, I have refrained from using images. And this one might seem to be an odd one to serve as the first. However, this Hubble image of HBC 672's "Bat Shadow" just published fascinates me. It reveals the dual shadow cast by a young planetary disk of accreting matter that is possibly turning into a future solar system. The shadow, according to the Hubble astronomers, stretches more than 200 times the diameter of our own Solar System. And that makes me think--you knew this "me thinking stuff" was coming--of the foreshadowing of everything new. Somewhere on our planet, there's a new idea, a new philosophy, a new movement that is casting a shadow over what is. But, just as is the case with a proto-planetary disk of matter that begins to separate itself into discrete planets, moons, comets, and asteroids, those ideas, movements, and philosophies will break up and cast smaller, more isolated shadows, eclipsing shadows of more local influence that don't extend as far as the one in the image. The giant initial shadow will become a number of specific shadows. Thus, I see the breakup of the proto-planetary disk into those discrete bodies with their own shadows as an analog of psychology, philosophy, and even religious movements. Take models from academia, for example: Psychology in general becomes Industrial Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Psychology, etc. Geology in general becomes Mineralogy, Petrology, Geomorphology, Sedimentology, Paleontology, etc. Those, in turn, break up: Paleontology, for example, becomes Micropaleontology, Invertebrate Paleontology, Vertebrate Paleontology. And in religions? Christianity separates into an almost uncountable number of denominations, and other religions have their variants.    

“What’s goin’ on? Is Nature mimicking humanity? The other way ‘round? Or is it just ‘all Nature,’ and this is just the way ‘things’ always have been, always are, and always will be?”
 
“No idea what yer talkin’ ‘bout.”
 
“There’re always wars, if not full scale, then battles, and if they aren’t raging, then simmering conflicts. That’s always been humanity’s way. Somewhere all the time conflict. It undermines every human accomplishment, every settlement, every civilization. We don’t pay much attention to conflict both because it is a constant and because it isn’t always personal; it’s mostly a distant, albeit a widespread phenomenon. I mean, the general attitude has always been that whatever isn’t personal really isn’t meaningful. In an interrogative form: Who cares if some conflict occurs on the other side of the planet? Who cares if another city’s citizens suffer ‘naturally caused’ or ‘human-caused’ disruption? Sure, there’s sometimes a pang of empathy possibly driven by recognition that ‘it could happen to me,’ but that’s usually a fleeting feeling.”
 
“But what’s this ‘bout Nature. You sayin’ that conflict is the way of the world? Nothing new there.”
 
“That, but more. I was thinking about this current year, the 2020 COVID Year, the sickness that connects all of us if not by its danger, then by its economic and political ramifications. And certainly about its reach. It’s like lightning in a way; it came as an unexpected flash, a big flash with a rolling thunder that keeps reverberating. Throw in some civil unrest, and walla! A flash that seems to go on and on.”
 
“Naw. Lightning isn’t it. Lightning is fast, a flash that comes and goes. Short burst over short distance between clouds or cloud and ground. Sure, unpredictable, but not long-lived like this epidemic.”
 
“Did you see what happened in Brazil a couple of years ago? Lightning strike, according to the World Meteorological Organization, 700 kilometers long.* Seven hundred! That’s over 434 miles, like stretching over America’s East Coast megalopolis, just the way the disease ran from Boston to D.C. or from northern to southern Italy. That’s a long flash in distance. And a flash that occurred over northern Argentina probably about the same time that the pandemic was just about getting started in China lasted 16.73 seconds. That’s what I mean about Nature mimicking humanity—or maybe even foreshadowing it. Are the flashes getting longer and lasting longer?”
 
“Four hundred miles! Sixteen seconds! Where’d people hide? No, I take that back. How many people just stood and watched the dangerous display? Free fireworks. Must have been mpressive as typani in Mahler’s Symphony Number 2** or in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastic.*** Sorry I wasn’t there to see that; and, yeah, I ain’t as dumb as I sound; I had music appreciation in seventh grade.”
 
“See what I mean? Even you understand the significance of a long flash. And you also understand the ‘not being too concerned unless it’s personal.’ Off in the distance, the flash is entertaining, a momentary disruption in the brain, but not perceived as a danger: Makes me think of tourists staring at an elephant on an African safari or at a bison in Yellowstone. Fascinating, but, hey, how often do they charge? Lots of elephants and bison and lots of tourists, but very few flashes of animal anger, of charging the tourist, and not many tourists injured considering the number of tourists. Lightning, even megaflashes…’What’s the chance of hitting me?’ we ask. Virus. Many sick, but not me. Rioting somewhere on the planet; wars, too, but not in my neighborhood. If it isn’t personal, it isn’t meaningful.”
 
“I was just thinkin’ about how a 400-mile long lightning strike would look. Couldn’t see it all even if you stood on a mountain, curve of Earth and all that.”
 
 “Yeah. But back to what I said. Seems we’re always in the midst of a long flash. Can’t imagine what the people living in the 14th century plague days might have thought other than, ‘Is there an end to this?’ Long flashes? ‘This just in,’ as the news anchors say to punctuate continuous bad news that runs in a ribbon across the bottom of the TV, continuous ribbon of bad news. Maybe it’s because we get thunderous news coverage of stuff, a rolling sound of story after story about whatever’s goin’ on that’s bad, especially if the news agency wants to make some point, nowadays, usually a political one, anyway, maybe because one lightning strike can be exaggerated into a widespread flash in 24/7 stories impossible to avoid, maybe it’s because the news people can keep the rolling thunder rolling because they know that they have an audience off in the distance who just can’t stop staring at a lightning strike that continues for 16.73 seconds or one that travels 434 miles, maybe because of that, I’m driven to think that Nature itself is mimicking humanity.
 
“But then I remember that humanity is, in fact, part of Nature, part of the makeup of this planet. We’re not something separate no matter how we like to bill ourselves on the marquis of civilization. We are that long lightning strike, that rolling thunder, that ‘flash’ that lasts longer and travels farther. And everything we do has the potential to be a long-lasting, far-traveling flash. We’ve been keeping up the intensity of conflict for all our existence. We are the continuous flash and the rolling thunder. We are the typanists in Nature’s orchestra. We put on the entertaining display that is so only as long as it isn’t personal. If it’s personal, we all know, it’s meaningful.”****
 
  
 
*Phys.org. 25 Jun 2020. 700-km Brazil ‘megaflash’ sets lightning record: UN. Online at https://phys.org/news/2020-06-km-brazil-megaflash-lightning.html   Accessed June 26, 2020.
 
**Hear Bernstein’s version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edA9Zard3-U  , but skip right to about 11:45 in the video; the rolling typani section occurs at about 12:00 and then occurs again at about 16:00 (Sorry, I’m not a Mahler fan; he just doesn’t compose hummable stuff).
*** Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastic, Jansons’s version at about 41:25 and also at 55:59 (in the Dies Irae movement) in the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK6iAxe0oEc  . There are, of course, other pieces that include powerful typani.
 
****Are we both orchestra and audience? We definitely are Nature watching itself.

I hope you find the following statement to be inoffensive:   

“So, I was reading about some tech people at the U. of Michigan who made a model to provide robots with “a visual search strategy that can teach them to look for a coffee pot nearby it they’re already in sight of a refrigerator” among other search patterns.* The idea is that robots need to learn how to find things in a complex environment the way you do. Of course, you’re the model for the model since you never misplace your keys.”
 
“Well, I do misplace them sometimes. I’m just glad I don’t have to be aware of some multimillion dollar Stradivarius. As inevitable as a broken bow string, I’d forget where I put it, maybe even before I had to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I’m always looking for something. What’s that they say? Senior moment? Absent-minded? Too busy for my own good?”
 
“This effort to make human-like robots is getting pretty intense, competitions and prizes and all, and grants galore. Nothing like having money to pursue your favorite tech toy. But seriously, the difficulty of making a human-like robot explains how perfectly faulty we are.”
 
“What? Perfectly faul….”
 
“Yes, if we were perfect, then we would be, if we use the medieval meaning of the word, ‘complete.’ And that which is complete doesn’t change. It is what it is. No, here we humans are, struggling to understand not only other humans but also ourselves. That makes modeling a human pretty difficult. Incompleteness is part of what we are. We’re so darn variable, so unpredictable, so, how should I say it? Oh! Yes, incomplete.
 
“Maybe we’ll be able to invent a robot that can find a coffee pot in a kitchen filled with all those other appliances, cookbooks, and utensils. That would be good, I guess. And if it could find the coffee pot unfailingly, then wow! That would be sensational. The next task, of course, is to see whether the robot could take a vacation without going the first 10 miles without asking, ‘Did I turn off the coffee pot?’ Such is the real and incomplete human’s nature. I think I would believe in the human-like nature of the robot if it couldn’t find the coffee pot or remember whether or not it turned off the pot before leaving the house.”
 
U. of Michigan. 19 Jun 2020. Model helps robots think more like humans when searching for objects. TechXplore online at https://techxplore.com/news/2020-06-robots-humans.html  Accessed June 21, 2020.

Few or many interacting bodies present challenging problems for physicists. On the quantum level, a number of subatomic particles and their “uncertainties” make for some trying Schrödinger-like problems, problems too complex for yours truly to solve. It’s one thing to determine how, for example on the macro level, Earth and the moon interact. It’s another to throw in the other planets and the Sun. And on that micro level, all those interacting subatomic particles that act as both wave and object make up a dizzying mix. Anyway, the point is that as more bodies interact, complexity grows exponentially in what is called the “many-body” problem.
 
Families also have to deal with the “many-body” problem. To solve the problem, they usually rely on an evolving family Constitution that they amend as they add bodies, that is, children. Typically, families enact a series of spoken and unspoken amendments in an attempt to solve their “many-body” problem, a problem that is exacerbated by the whims of, say, teenage children. Those families with unamended constitutions typically find themselves constantly defending a strict, more dictatorial or even totalitarian regime against rebelling teens. It’s almost impossible to write a predictive constitution, given the nature of unpredictable life.
 
Was there always a need for a “constitution”? Did the Neanderthals establish them—unwritten, of course, like most family constitutions—in tribes of cave dwellers? And in communes? Remember all those “hippie” communes of the sixties and seventies? We could even go back to Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist Utopia that, like so many other communes, even the Franciscan Orders of monks, began to decay or change in a relatively short time. Can you count the current number of Franciscan orders at this time? And they supposedly all started from the Rule of Saint Francis approved as a “constitution” by Pope Innocent III in 1209. The “First Order” had split so much by the late nineteenth century, that Pope Leo XIII had to “recombine” them under a constitution, joining the “Observants,” “Discalced,” “Recollects,” and “Riformati.” The “First Order” also includes the “Conventuals” and “Capuchins.” Then there’s the Second Order that includes the “Poor Clares” organized under another “constitution,” that called the “Rule of St. Clare” approved by Pope Innocent IV. Other groups split from them with their own constitutions: Colettine Poor Clares, Capuchin Poor Clares, and Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. I’m not even going into the Third Order of Franciscans; all this is too complex and probably nothing like what Saint Francis might have had in mind.
 
Point? Even with a constitution, a group inevitably changes. And those groups without a constitution fall apart pronto.
 
So, some advice. If you intend to start a new group for whatever reason (religious, political, economic, social, philosophical), think well about writing a constitution that anticipates variations that arise in any society, from family to nation to world organizations like the United Nations. What you don’t anticipate will lead to fragmentation and more separations, more offshoot groups like those of the Franciscans.

Thanks to LORRI, an imager on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, we now have a baseline for parallax measurements that is wider than the diameter of Earth or the diameter of our orbit.* It’s like separating your two eyes by four billion miles before holding up your index finger at arm’s length and alternatively winking your eyes to see the apparent movement against a more distant, and ostensibly unmoving background. Previously, astronomers could use parallax movements to determine trigonometrically the distance to about 700 stars, that is, through triangulation. The new baseline should add accuracy to distance measurements of those 700 stars and to the distance measurements of other nearby stars.
 
Practice: Alternatively wink while holding that index finger at arm’s length. Then do the same for an object across the room. Try it outside with a more distant object, say a tree. As you keep lengthening the “triangle’s height,” you’ll have more difficulty noticing the apparent movement of the object in view. To see that movement, you’ll need to widen your eyes, which, unfortunately you can’t do. There’s a limit imposed by the width of your eyes.
 
Imagine the consequences of increasing the parallax baseline for human perspectives. Distant cultures could be more accurately seen; even closer cultures could be more accurately observed, their precise social distance from the home culture identified for better understanding. Of course, the problem lies in how to widen the baseline.
 
Travel is one mechanism. The baseline widens by exposure to other cultures in situ. Another mechanism is reading. Exposure to what people of other cultures and perspectives write not only in books but also in newspapers helps in measuring the distance between one and another’s culture. And of course, there are the other forms of communication: Music, art, drama including films, and speeches. But just as NASA had to go to great lengths to establish that new astronomical parallax baseline, so anyone who wishes to expand the baseline for perspectives must also “go to great lengths.”
 
It’s easy to live with approximate distances to other cultures. One needs only to use what the two eyes fixed in the head and the optic centers of the brain provide for a baseline. But in relying on such a limited baseline has led people to misunderstandings and even to war.* It might be wise to introduce parallax as a fundamental principle of education, first as a lesson in triangulation for objects and second as a lesson in triangulation of cultural differences.
 
Unfortunately, convincing people with a narrow baseline that widening it might enhance their existence is, for the most part, just a pipe dream. “Hey, I have two eyes in my head, and I can see just fine with them where they are. Don’t go tellin’ me to start movin’ my eyes apart.”
 
* http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/new-horizons-parallax-measurements-proxima-centauri-wolf-359-08533.html
**Two of the oldest academic pursuits are the study geography, and, since Euclid, the study of geometry. Both are rooted in geo, “Earth” (Gaia). It’s unfortunate that for the sake of peace there isn’t more emphasis placed on geography in schools around the planet. It’s the ignorance of others’ cultures and their relative locations and environments that often leads to conflict or petty hatred.

.“I remember the line spoken by actor Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: ‘Life finds a way.’* Some life-forms just don’t give up, he intimated, bacteria for example, which we have found in the harshest of conditions, and those unisex dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and, if I might add, the Ailanthus altissima.”
 
“Eye—whadja say?”
 
“Ailanthus altissima, quite common in eastern United States since the eighteenth century, anyway; it’s an invasive tree, proliferates in temperate zones. Lots of them in China, too. Member of the Simaroubaceae family, which, by the way, also includes tropical plants. Ailanthus, it’s a weed, basically, and as with most weeds, it grows wherever it can, an opportunist found along highways, in sidewalk cracks, on really bad soil. Originally, a tree brought into the United States because it was adaptable to an urban environment, Philadelphia’s streets at first, and then other eastern urban centers from where it spread like, well, a weed. As I said, it’s opportunistic. And, by the way, it’s the tree in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it’s popular name is the Tree of Heaven, a supposedly Latinized cognate of an Ambonese Malay word.** You’ve seen the tree. It’s an odd-pinnate tree, its stems or branches are lined with parallel leaves, but they end in a single leaf that moves to the side as the branch grows.”***
 
“You some kind of botanist?”
 
“No, it’s just that I find lessons in everything, and that includes in a tree or even in many trees, what we call a forest or the woods. As a kid, I called the Ailanthus the ‘skunk tree’—no idea where that came from, probably other kids, maybe from parents, maybe just from experience with the tree. I didn’t know that far from my neighborhood, the Chinese called it chouchun, ‘foul-smelling tree.’ I didn’t even know it was also called the ‘Tree of Heaven.’ I just knew it was ubiquitous, growing, for example, in the black, oil-saturated soil behind the gas station across the alley from my house, springing up along the train tracks where my cousins and I sometimes played (‘Watch out for the hobos,’ my mother warned, knowing that many rode empty boxcars) and definitely in every un-tended lot. Heck, it seemed to me that Ailanthus was everywhere. Had it hitched rides on trains like those hobos, those wandering people who never planted themselves and altered a landscape ‘for the better’?”
 
“So, what’s the lesson?”
 
“Might be silly, but it occurs to me that the Tree of Heaven grows in some of the most abused environments on the planet, that is, where humans have created “Hell on Earth.” It grows where humans have destroyed—altered, if you euphemistically will—the ‘natural’ ecology, places like Manhattan, for example, or Brooklyn. Places where people cut down the native forests and covered them with concrete, asphalt, and buildings. Wherever we continue to make our own versions of Hell on Earth, the Tree of Heaven keeps showing up, keeps invading, keeps reminding us that we aren’t completely in control, keeps telling us that even when things seem to be getting worse, when the product of our actions is destruction, there’s a somewhat oxymoronic malodorous reminder of Heaven. Ailanthus altissima sends the message that the moment we stop tending our artificial forest of buildings and soils of concrete, it’s available to start a new forest, that given the smallest crack in a sidewalk or an untended berm along a roadway, it will ‘find a way.’”
 
“And?”
 
“This might disturb you, but I’m going to jump to something that might seem irrelevant: It is odd that we demand others to do what we don’t do, and trees help prove the point. As proud as we are about our mastery of Earth, we find ourselves dependent upon some natural processes to restore what we destroyed. We insist that everyone contribute somehow to the ‘restoration’ of degraded landscapes turned brownfields by industry and urbanization, landscapes denuded of trees.  You realize that we’ve cut down billions of them. Who knows? Probably trillions of them over the centuries of mastering the planet. Right now, Brazil is cutting them down fast. Deforestation in the Amazon Basin in May, 2020, stripped an area 14 times larger than Manhattan.**** Big dozers and chainsaws make the process easy. And as the knowledge of this current rate of forest decimation spreads around the planet, people far from Brazil will express their indignation. ‘Somebody should do something about that.’ See what I mean? We demand others do what we don’t do.
 
“Now, before we get all huffy about cutting down trees, we should see deforestation in historical perspective—which ironically isn’t something that people in their ignorance of history do. We can’t change history, of course. We can’t reforest Manhattan without reducing its urbane nature, and you know people who live there and are concerned about Brazil’s forests won’t allow. ‘What? Remove a building, my building, and replace it with trees? Plant a tree where I have a favorite coffee shop? No way. Can’t you put more trees in the park, in Central Park?’ Anyway, we might consider the history of deforestation just to put things in a larger context.
 
“North Americans have been at it, it being deforestation, for centuries, as old wooden buildings and denuded landscapes attest. Yeah. The pilgrims cleared off Cape Cod, deforested it enough so that soils eroded and sands blew about in the wind to form dunes. Sure the Cape was a dune field between the time the glaciers melted and the forests grew. But then for at least eight to ten millennia before the Pilgrims landed, Cape Cod was a forest interrupted by wetlands. The Pilgrims sent some of those trees across the ocean to become ships’ masts and used others for local shipbuilding and urban construction. And to the south, Manhattan, once under ice like Cape Cod, also became a forested land when the ice melted, being naturally transformed into an island with happy little bunnies and frolicking deer tromping over wetlands and through streams and stands of trees. (No wonder it sold, as the elementary school story goes, for a mere $23 in baubles, a real bargain before real estate prices soared for multimillion-dollar apartments) The descendants of those Europeans who settled the Northeast in the 17th century cut down forest after forest, working their way westward toward the Mississippi River, not at the Brazilian rate of 14 Manhattans per month, however, but then they didn’t have chain saws. It took three centuries to cut down North America’s trees. The history is this: Over the relatively slow deforestation of eastern North America—relative to the Brazilian May clearing—no one thought to say, ‘I think I’ll abandon my desire to clear and use this land and instead preserve it as a slice of Heaven for all to enjoy.’
 
“In modern Brazil, which is on track to outstrip its previous record of forest-stripping, the destruction of the rainforest has drawn international attention, even from people who live in urban and suburban areas where landscapes are stripped of their forests. No doubt the outcry is genuine. I mean, who doesn’t love a rainforest at least from a safe distance, where none of those bugs, piranha, or parasites live. But let’s consider the concern. Everyone wants the other person or even the other country to do what is right, that is, to do what is more protective of the environment. At the same time, ‘Everyone,’ allegorically speaking, contributes to the decimation. Go, for example, to Scranton’s nearby mountainsides, to Norfolk’s Mount Trashmore, or to similar ‘mounts’ of trash in New Jersey, or even to Mumbai, India, to see piles of trash discarded by those who accumulate and discard without much concern about making some other place a Hell on Earth.
 
“Everyone wants the other person to care for the planet and its natural organic resources. Other countries, for example, want Brazil to stop cutting down trees. I get it. All of us can look around to see what others are doing without looking at what we as individuals are doing. Regardless of our concern, how involved can we be in something that is remote, like the burning of forests far from Europe, America, or even from Brazil’s big cities. It’s the rainforest, for goodness sake. It’s a wild area. It’s not suburbia. Who’s going to police and protect the Amazon Basin’s interior?
 
“Hold on. That’s not completely true. Brazil recently sent thousands of troops into the Amazon Basin to protect the trees. I just read that somewhere.”*****
 
“Didn’t know that. Thanks, but consider the fate of forests. They’ve always been under attack, and that means long before people slashed and burned. Can you say ‘beaver dam’? Furry critters can gnaw down a tree. And naturally-caused fires. That makes me digress a bit: Speak of a double whammy on a forest! Chernobyl blew up in 1986 and spread radioactive dust over the local forest, and now recent fires in the Ukraine, specifically in forests adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have burned the radioactive trees. Speak of Hell on Earth! A charred radioactive forest! Composed mostly of pine trees, those Chernobyl forests will take a long time to recover. But then, who cares? Isn’t that a Ukrainian problem?******
 
“I suppose I should say, ‘Fortunately, forests have a way of re-establishing or replacing themselves. Forests have a way of returning.’ ‘Life finds a way,’ as Jeff says. Heck. According to a study by John Marshall et al., Devonian forests, arguably the first forests on the planet, suffered widespread devastation from UV light under a naturally depleted ozone layer some 359 million years ago.*******You know what I’m interested in seeing?”
 
“No, what?”
 
“If the Tree of Heaven begins to grow there, I mean in the burned Ukrainian forests. You know, on its own, without human help. Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be a blow to our egos? Or maybe to our devilish Ids? In our hubris we built a supposed wonder of artificiality, a nuclear power plant. And now it lies beneath a giant tomb we had to build to shield the environment from the Hell we made in the midst of what was once a forested land. It took a bunch of money to build the machine that destroyed the environment and then a bunch more money to cover and entomb it. It cost the Ukrainians an urban area and a nearby forest. Worried about that forest? It was already off limits because of the radiation.
 
“Seems that the news about our destruction of the planet is all bad and unending. One might think that all that is human is bad. (Some do consider humans a blight—except for themselves, of course) Some think the planet is doomed because we are here. But wait! As the guy says in infomercials before offering a two-for-one product (except for shipping and handling). Maybe humans haven’t decimated the entire planet. Maybe there are as yet largely untouched landscapes. And so, in fact, say researchers from the National Geographic Society and the University of California, Davis. According to their tally of relatively untouched lands, ‘Roughly half of Earth’s ice-free land remains without significant human influence.’******** So, Heaven on Earth still exists for half the planet in spite of our centuries of trying to convert the entire surface into Hell.
 
“Of course, we have altered the other 50% of landscapes, and we can’t deny that. Just look around. Blame you. Are you some hermit living in the woods? Probably not if you’re reading this online. And if you are sitting and reading this, are you saying, ‘I’m concerned about the planet, about those rainforests’? But, are you doing anything other than saying, ‘Someone should do something about that’? Well, not to worry. Heaven, it seems, has a plan. There’s always the Tree of Heaven. Sure, it comes with a foul smell, maybe a hint of Hell’s sulfur and brimstone that reminds us that even a fully ‘natural world’ isn’t some perfect Garden of Eden. But look at what the Tree of Heaven can do: It transforms industrial brownfields into the green fields of summer and, before losing its leaves in the fall, turns the landscape into splotches of anthocyanin’s brilliant scarlet. Just as the decimated Devonian forests were replaced hundreds of millions of years ago by the widespread Carboniferous forests of the Pennsylvanian and Mississippian Periods, today’s life, at least represented by Ailanthus, ‘finds a way.’ You don’t have to do much; just walk away from your highly artificial setting. Within a relatively brief time—that is, in a count of decades, centuries, millennia, and tens-to-hundreds-to-thousands of millennia—Heaven’s tree, or some other tree will, either in your presence or in your absence, do what life always does: It will ‘find a way.’”
 
*https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-sz-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=sz&p=jeff+goldblum+life+finds+a+way#id=1&vid=53f2f9a9a9e3271c5b448173e1475a4f&action=click
 
**Why Ambonese Malay? Well, it was, until it was introduced elsewhere, an Asiatic tree.
 
***Here are pics.: https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/ailanthus-altissima.html
Note that the tree turns scarlet in autumn.
 
****Several reports: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-12/brazil-sends-military-to-protect-amazon-as-deforestation-surges/12237232 ;  https://phys.org/news/2020-06-brazil-worldwide-forest-loss.html; and the one that gives the areal extent of deforestation in May, 2020: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-brazilian-amazon-deforestation.html   Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020.
 
*****https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-rainforest-fires-brazil-soldiers-deforestation-jair-bolsonaro-a9510421.html
 
HOLY COW! HOW MANY REFERENCES DOES THIS GUY NEED? IT’S LIKE READING SOME RESEARCH PAPER FOR A COLLEGE COMP CLASS OR A JOURNAL ARTICLE.
 
****** https://phys.org/news/2020-06-ukraine-scientists-huge-chernobyl.html
  Story in Phys.org.  Accessed June 12, 2020.
 
*******https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/no-asteroids-or-volcanoes-needed-ancient-mass-extinction-tied-ozone-loss-warming
 
********Kerlin, Kat. U.C. Davis. Half the earth relatively intact from global human influence. 12 Jun 2020.  https://phys.org/news/2020-06-earth-intact-global-human.html   Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020. It's possible, however, that in a relatively short time, much of that "untouched" half of Earth's non-ice land surface will be affected. For example, see the article on the deforestation in British Columbia: Lynda V. Mapes. Seattle Times. 1 Jun 2020: Scientists say the last of British Columbia's old growth trees will soon be gone, if policies don't change. Online at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-last-of-british-columbias-old-growth-trees-will-soon-be-gone-if-policies-dont-change/ Accessed June 16, 2020

Every so often, it behooves one (Behooves? Where did That come from?) to ponder deep time. Pondering deep time is a mechanism that puts all present action in perspective. I’m thinking paleontologically and geologically, even cosmologically, here. Cosmologically? An explosive event in the middle of the galaxy at about the time that Little Lucy, our distant Australopithecine relative, walked across muddy ash in the Afar Triangle.* Paleontologically and geologically? Extinct organisms, all of them once living in a delicate balance of environmental conditions far different from today’s: A sea in New Mexico, for example, and long before that, warm muds in Scotland located not far from the Equator and attached to Greenland.
 
And as it is now, all life was balanced between safety and danger: The quick on the edge of the dead. That life has always lived on an edge isn’t a new observation, but it is one that throws today’s world into the mix of yesterdays’ worlds. Reflections on deep time tell us that.
 
What would Little Lucy have seen in the sky? A bright light in the night? A persistent glow in the night sky? The explosive event associated with the supermassive black hole in the middle of the galaxy might have shone for a million years. Surely, she could have seen it had she merely looked upward. But a persistent glow for a thousand millennia engulfing the lifespan of Lucy’s short life might just have been the “ordinary sky,” nothing to draw one’s attention any more than the Milky Way’s persistent light draws our attention nightly. Could she have “wondered?” Was there any wondering 3.5 million years ago? Could Lucy entertain a thought about time, about her finiteness?
 
By deep time, I’m thinking long before primates, back to the time of herbivorous horned dinosaurs like triceratops that have captured the imagination of many children, and frankly, probably of many adults. Recently, paleontologists dug up two previously unknown ceratopsian dinosaurs in New Mexico.** They date the fossil heads to a period known as the Campanian Stage (83.6 to 72.1 MYA), that is, sometime between 18 and 7 million years before the big extinction event that obliterated the non-avian dinosaurs like the ceratopsians. Let’s take that time frame as a point of departure for more pondering. Ten million years or so BEFORE the extinction event arguably caused by an impacting bolide as big as a mountain: Say it, “Ten million years before the extinction.” I know you know the math, but every million is thousand thousand, that is, a thousand millennia. Go back just ten millennia from today, and humans have little or no agriculture, no cities, no towns, even. Heck, we don’t see the Pyramid of Djoser until about 4,700 years ago, not even five millennia.*** Ten million years minus ten millennia is 9,990 millennia. This is 2020. That’s just 2 millennia plus twenty years since Christ and the Caesar Augustus. Why am I belaboring the point? Because in any “current” time, that is, the time of people who are alive, those who believe they are a center of both place and time seem to have no perspective on where they stand in either.
 
In another discovery, paleontologists have unearthed a millipede from Scotland. It dates to the Silurian Period, some 425 million years ago. It might not be the oldest millipede; it’s just the oldest ever found, and it dates to a time when the first land plant, Cooksonia, was growing in what is now present-day Scotland. And Scotland’s equatorial location back then? It was about 300 miles north of the Equator. The newly discovered fossil millipede scurried around in warm mud.****
 
Of course, deep time runs even deeper. Run the timeline of life backward from that millipede, and you get the Cambrian Explosion (of life). And before that? The Ediacaran life-forms of Australia lived between 635-541 million years ago. And before that? The bacteria that possibly go back to 3.5 billion years, each billion, I’ll repeat for emphasis, being a thousand million.
 
And back to the deep time of cosmology: Earth’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago; the universe’s formation at 13.7 billion years ago. So, when the pressure of current events overwhelms you, take a deep breath and ponder deep time. No, it won’t solve your current problems, but it will give you a larger context for those problems. Two thousand years ago people thought their current events occurred in the center of time. Four thousand years ago, people thought similarly. Six thousand years ago… Admittedly, for everyone, the present is the center of time, but maybe pondering deep time can lessen the significance of those events that though seemingly significant are actually insignificant, like arguments over perspectives.
 
 
*Video at: https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-sz-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=sz&p=big+explosion+in+the+center+of+the+galaxy+3.5+million+years+ago#id=1&vid=3a6922890fa02ec0f3802896615dad48&action=click   Story at: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-intense-milky-black-hole-illuminated.html    Accessed June 9, 2020.
 
**Yes, Gobekli Tepe seems to be much older than that pyramid, arguably having been built 12 millennia ago.
 
***Fowler, Denver Warwick, and Elizabeth Anne Freedman Fowler. Transitional evolutionary forms and stratigraphic trends in chasmosaurine ceratopsid dinosaurs: evidence from the Campanian of New Mexico. bioRxiv 854794; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/854794   Accessed June 8, 2020.
 
****M. E. Brookfield, E. J. Catlos & S. E. Suarez (2020) Myriapod divergence times differ between molecular clock and fossil evidence: U/Pb zircon ages of the earliest fossil millipede-bearing sediments and their significance, Historical Biology, DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2020.1761351 

“What’s Albert doing with the flashlight and sweeper?”
“He’s studying light in a vacuum.”
 
Spacetime reveals itself in Einstein ring gravitational lenses, funhouse-mirror-like distortions of distant galaxies whose light must pass by intervening galaxies. The light bends, warps, refracts. Sometimes a galaxy will appear as four copies of itself; sometimes as a semicircular, lenticular slice of light; and sometimes like a full ring around the closer galaxy.* Gravitational lensing is an interesting phenomenon at the very least. That it operates in our universe is a cause for a thinking pause.
 
“What did one photon say to a companion photon as they passed a barred galaxy?”
“?”
“Let’s go on a bender.”
“?”
“Barred. Get it? Bar, bender…oh! never mind.”
 
Fortunately, Einstein’s explanation for the bending of light preceded the images captured by ever-more-powerful telescopes like the Hubble. Had we no knowledge of spacetime effects on light, we would be scratching our heads when we see all those distant distorted shapes ringing other galaxies. Thanks to his insights, we had in our knowledge base the potential to grasp what we saw indirectly: Distant galaxies hidden behind other galaxies and revealed only through a lens created by those relatively closer galaxies. In other words, we knew after Eddington proved Einstein was correct that the spacetime effects of closer galaxies determine how and what we see.
 
“What’s Albert doing with his summer vacation photos?”
“He’s sorting them to show us only what he wants us to see.”
 
Every time we see something or someone indirectly, that is, through others’ eyes, we might consider that there is a psychological or sociological analog to spacetime light-warping. When others report on what they see but we can’t see, assume there’s a bending of some sort, a distortion of some sort, maybe an exaggeration, maybe a dismissive diminution. What you see is often bent by the lens of an intervening person.
 
“Why is Albert weighing his Hubble images?”
“He’s trying to determine the mass of galaxies.”
“?”
“Well, then, when he knows what how much mass they have, he knows to what extent they distort galaxies we can’t directly see.”
 
And on Earth in the absence of a direct line of sight, the weight of others’ opinions often determines perception.
 
* https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/tAnpNyACfZ2xyWX3WrNwjA-970-80.jpg   Numerous images that show gravitational lensing are available online.  

For some reason, the discovery of a 3,000-year-old sprawling city at Aguada Fénix in Tabasco, Mexico, seems to startle some anthropologists. They don’t appear to be startled because it is “the oldest monumental construction ever found in the Maya area,” but rather because it was built at a time when there might have been “less social inequality” than that seen in the contemporaneous San Lorenzo Olmec site. In other words, the Aguada Fénix site doesn’t reflect a top-down reason for building; rather, it reflects a bottom-bottom cooperative venture of the local people. Neighbors seem to have decided by consensus to build. No hierarchy of rulers seems to have ordered the construction because the site holds no thrones or statues.
 
Now, of course, we don’t know for sure whether or not there were no demands from a king or high priest of sorts. According to Professor Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology, “the extensive plateau and the large causeways suggest the monument was built for use by many people…we don’t see the evidence of the presence of powerful elites. We think that it’s more the result of communal work.”*
 
Why should an ancient community-building project surprise us?
 
I’m thinking of all those current buildings that dot communities around the world and serve as gathering places and, in the United States, especially those in sites where a uniform ethnicity initially prevailed. Having moved into an area, the people by consensus seem to have decided to build places of worship, clubs, and halls. In those structures lies some evidence that people build what is mutually beneficial or significant without orders “from above.” And as ethnicities merge to form second or third generation communities, such cooperative efforts seem to continue. Look, for example, at the many parks, firehouses, and playgrounds built and maintained by volunteers.
 
Now jump for a moment to any colonial organism, say prairie dogs. Even if there is a hierarchy, a pecking order, the community still has to work cooperatively to build and maintain tunnels. Then look around to any ancient place of residence built after humans moved out of caves and rock shelters. Organizing and building seem to be an integral part of social existence. There appears to be a drive to alter place for the perceived needs, desires, and camaraderie of the group as a whole.
 
In the discovery of the ancient site lies a reason for hope. In place after place spanning centuries of human habitation, there is evidence that humans naturally cooperate. True, there lies in the ruins of such places evidence that human cooperation can break down. The invasions of the Roman Empire certainly stand as testimony to the breakdowns. But after every breakdown, the building renews itself, thus the layers of Schliemann’s ancient Troy and other long-lost cities.
 
Ypres, Dresden, Hiroshima, and a number of revitalized cities stand as testimonies to hope. Cooperation resurfaces with or without dictatorial leaders marshalling a population into “service.”  That’s definitely the good side of humanity.  
 
*SciNews. 4 Jun 2020 Archaeologist Discover Largest and Oldest-Known Maya Monument. Online at http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/aguada-fenix-monument-08503.html
Accessed June 5, 2020
Inomata, T., Triadan, D., Vázquez López, V.A. et al. Monumental architecture at Aguada Fénix and the rise of Maya civilization. Nature (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2343-4