Five trillion times per second. That’s how fast iron selenium atoms can vibrate. Boggles my mind. Here I thought my Spin toothbrush was fast, or my 5.7-liter hemi. What am I by comparison? How would I see the quick move in the macro world around me if I lived that quickly?
 
Obviously,    s      l      o      w      e      r.
 
Then there are those fast-paced big things: Hypervelocity stars that run through our galaxy and stars that whirl around black holes at thousands of miles per second. By comparison, we live rather sluggish lives in our trains to Yuma and in our planes to meetings.  
Is it ironic that we think of ourselves as creatures caught up in the rat-race civilization of the quick? That we think our choice for survival in our civilization lies between acceleration and go-nowhere failure? We’re virtual cosmic snails regardless of our speed.
 
Of course, perceptions count, and we believe we move both fast and furiously. Plus, if everything and everyone in our individual field of view is moving at similar or close-to-similar speeds, then, well, all perceived speed is relative. Isn’t it?
 
Maybe those iron selenium atoms and hypervelocity stars can teach us something about how fast we really go as we take on numerous tasks and responsibilities in our attempts to multitask, tweet, or eat fast food. Chill out. After all, we move as slowly as glaciers. We’re not going anywhere at true breakneck speeds. That’s the stuff for little atoms and big stars. Perched as we are on a scale of size between the two and on a scale of velocity about the same, we might consider whether or not our true speed is an illusion society and our minds accept. Think Parmenides.
 
Human speed is the most ironic in the cosmos as we, the fast-paced quick, race toward the motionless dead. It isn’t the actual speed of our lives that seems to matter as much as the perceived speed. I know: Almost a Parmenidean denial of change. But even if you and I disregard that ancient philosopher’s seeming denial of change—of motion—there’s still something about his thinking we can use when we think our lives are in a runaway acceleration.  
 
The next time you and I think we’re moving much too fast, we might think of those little atoms bouncing up and down five trillion times per second. My goodness! We probably can’t even imagine the beat of a hummingbird’s wings, the pistons moving in my 5.7-liter hemi, or the spinning rate of the very celestial body on which we stand. Except for light, all speeds are relative. The speed of your life and mine, as seen from that perspective and the perspective of vibrating atoms and hypervelocity stars, is really slow. Often, as Parmenides might argue, we pace ourselves in the illusion of speed that society in general and the people around us accept.

We’re not going to set any cosmic speed records, so we don’t have to race toward motionlessness. We can pace ourselves, and when we have to speed up a bit, we can recognize that all human speeds are relative, and indeed, relatively slow. Unlike the physical force exerted on an accelerating body, illusion's force is a matter of perception. From that perspective, the so-called rat race, the speed of modern civilized living, might seem like a motionless snapshot, a glacier, a widely accepted Parmenidean illusion.

The smallest and largest of entities and processes operate in ways that are, at best, only slightly fathomable. At best, we guess. That applies to subatomic particles, for example, and also to human interactions. Through most of our lives we act on what seems probable. Often, consequences of our actions are not those we intended.
 
On the scale of individuals, we see misunderstandings, misinterpreted motives, and malignity where none were intended. Much ado about nothing is a prevailing way of the world. You make an innocent comment. Another takes your word as insult. When you spoke, you operated on the probability of a certain, but different response from your listener’s actual response. So goes, for example, the back-and-forth by political opponents. And the misinterpretations that negate the probable outcomes extend through all aspects of human interactions.
 
World War I is an example of an outcome different from what seemed probable prior to the fighting. Before the war, the British believed there was a way around conflict—some peaceful solution whose probability seemed great.
 
In 1920 Viscount Richard Burton Haldane published his account of the pre-war period. He had been Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912 and Lord High Chancellor from 1912 to 1915. Haldane’s book, Before the War, was his attempt to define the “thought and action” his country had taken in its efforts first to avert war and second to prepare for it. Those thoughts and actions were driven by what seemed probable.  
 
“With those responsible for the conduct of tremendous affairs probability has to be the guide of life. The question is always not what ought to happen but what is most likely to happen.”*
 
For eight years prior to the war, Great Britain’s policy toward Germany had been based on the preservation of peace “by removing difficulties and getting rid of misinterpretations” and on making preparations that would provide some security without “provoking, and possibly accelerating, the very calamity against which it was designed to provide.” And here we are, long after not only the First World War, but also after the Second World War and numerous other wars, still operating on the same principle of probability.
 
Germany obviously misinterpreted. War occurred. And now you operate on the same principle of probability when you address others, particularly those who seem bent on taking some path that might not be in your—or even their—best interests. Must be some kind of human problem, this misinterpreting stuff and this miscalculating of responses.
 
If our own experiences with others are lessons, then the one that we need to learn is that probable outcomes are not guaranteed outcomes. Oh! Sure. You and I will still operate on that principle of probability, will still look for what we expect. And sure, you and I, like Haldane and the British long before us, will continue to discover that how we think and act will not necessarily result in the outcomes we once thought probable.
 
 
* “Chapter 1: Introduction,” Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York and London, 1920. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17998/17998-h/17998-h.htm

So now one of the great minds of our time is in panic mode. I’m referring to Stephen Hawking, the ALS-bedeviled genius physicist who wants us to escape the planet before it becomes another Venus shrouded in clouds and rains of sulfuric acid and baking in temperatures hot enough to melt lead. He made his statements about colonizing Elsewhere after the USA pulled itself out of the Paris agreement on climate.
 
Hawking seems certain the first drops of that predicted acidic rain are about to fall. So, we need to leave before we disintegrate under the coming deluge of boiling liquid. “Save the genetic heritage of our ancient ancestor Yug who walked the tundra during much colder times.”
 
But where do we go? Certainly, life on any other body in our Solar System would be as harsh or even harsher than Stephen’s future Venusian Earth. And exoplanets, though incredibly numerous, are too distant to reach through an intervening stretching realm of dangerous cosmic rays and debilitating microgravity. Could you imagine a fourth generation child born in microgravity trying to move through the one G that makes climbing stairs a chore on Earth? Should we listen to Stephen and build our space arks to float through space until we settle on Planet Ararat?
 
Isn’t there anything “we” can do short of leaving our changing planet? Is there no hope of stability here on Earth? Was there ever the stability Stephen desires?
 
Alexandria and Syene lie 7.71 degrees of latitude apart on Earth’s surface. In the third century B.C.E. Eratosthenes used that difference to determine the circumference of Earth. He could do so because the angle of the Sun’s rays run through a cycle for each spot on our planet’s surface. If you know just a little bit of either geometry or trig, you can make the same measurements today that he made all those centuries ago. You can do math identical to that of Eratosthenes because there’s a long-term continuity in many physical systems like the Earth/Sun relationship. Both experience and celestial studies reveal that the angles of the Sun’s rays make a seasonally cyclic progression over Earth’s surface. Just check to see where you see the rising sun with respect to your bedroom window during three-month intervals.
 
Because Earth is tilted to the plane of its orbit and its tilted axis is oriented toward Polaris, the Northern Hemisphere alternatively in summer and winter leans toward and away from the sun. That self-luminous object is so big that from the perspective of tiny Earth its rays can be thought of as parallel as they strike Earth’s curved surface. So, for Eratosthenes, the noon illumination of the bottom of a well in Syene was not paralleled by the angle of shadow in Alexandria. He knew, therefore, that Earth’s surface was curved.
 
But enough of the description. There are some lessons in what I’ve written so far, and they concern panic mode, history, and personal choice. That the angles of the sun’s rays for different parts of Earth’s surface are now what they were when Eratosthenes used them as a measuring device gives us an example of how our planet has maintained its hospitality for us over thousands of years. Superimposed on this background of long-term stability are fluctuations that make natural accommodations for humans more or less comfortable in a given decade or even hazardous to our health in a single physical event.
 
The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are examples of fluctuations that affected humans. Those apparently natural fluctuations were caused by phenomena like diminished or increased solar radiation and volcanic activity and like wandering ocean currents. The problem for humans occupying the accommodations provided by our planet during such “aberrations” is that our lifespans prevent individuals from long-term personal experience. That Warm Period lasted more than a century. The Little Ice Age lasted more than three centuries.
 
So, we infuse our minds with predictive models. Now living at a time when the planet appears to be 0.6 degree Celsius warmer than the Medieval Warm Period, Stephen is predicting a temperature rise of hundreds of degrees; thus, his advice to leave Earth.
 
An adult who as a child experienced tragedies brought on by hurricanes and has children in a time when the tropical atmosphere becomes too quiescent to produce subsequent landfalls, might tell the children, “Well, when I was a child, we really had bad weather.” And so such stories are told by individuals of times past when things were “much different.”* But those sun angles keep repeating themselves throughout the seasons, year after year, decade after decade, millennium after millennium. Stubborn continuity long before Eratosthenes and long after you.
 
And now future stories will be fostered by a particularly hot, dry summer or the next very cold winter, by years of drought, or by episodes of precipitation. In the Sierra Nevada a great deal of snow fell in the winter of 2016-2017 compared to the previous winter. Maybe the winter of 2017-2018 will repeat the snowfall, maybe not. Depending on where one lives in eastern United States, the snowfall can be heavy for a few years and then, for whatever reason the jet stream shifts, such as El Niño or La Niña, light for a few years. Memories get shaped and ideas about the nature of the world then form in the short-lived—even genius—brains of humans.
 
Of course, we can argue with Stephen that this time is different. People have added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and its level is already over 400 parts per million in a dramatic rise that coincides with a global average temperature rise of 0.8 degree Celsius. Then there are warming feedback loops that involve other greenhouse gases like methane. Causes of causes of causes of warming. Venusian. Except.
 
Except Venus has an almost exclusively (96%) carbon dioxide atmosphere and is a third closer to the sun than Earth.
 
Stephen, as most people care, cares to make a sustainable future, but sustainability means and is worth different things to different people. Take India, one of the 152 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement, as an example. India signed the deal with the following caveats:
 
     “The Government…declares its understanding that, as per its national laws, keeping in view its development agenda, particularly the eradication of poverty and provision of basic needs for all its citizens…and on the assumption of unencumbered availability of cleaner sources of energy and technologies and financial resources from around the world; and based on a fair and ambitious assessment of global commitment to combatting climate change, it is ratifying the Paris Agreement.”
 
Maybe Stephen signs contracts on deliverables with so many caveats, but would you? India’s participation is dependent on outside money, new technology, the commitment of other countries by comparison, and the “basic needs for all its citizens.”
 
So, what is that lesson? Be concerned about the temporary changes you experience, but never panic. If you want a world with less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, then don’t personally add more. Even with an international agreement you can’t guarantee that the signers will reduce their anthropogenic emissions. India made that clear as air under a blue sky.
 
Just as those sun angles keep repeating, so you should know that a larger overriding continuity is most likely undergoing a temporary fluctuation even with human participation. The average will, whether someone in panic mode wants to believe it or not, be always close to average because Earth doesn’t care. Species, even human ones, have come and gone. But our survival as a species since the time of Yug and for more than 200,000 years of ice advances and retreats—of cooling and warming—seems to be evidence that Earth’s hospitality is a bit more stable than Stephen seems to think it will be. And the arguable effect of an agreement in which all signers are not equally bound hardly justifies building a space ark to places unknown.
 
Will the planet continue to warm? Right now it looks that way, but at what rate and to what degree is debatable. Will the signers actually do something to decrease their contributions to carbon emissions? Do India’s caveats call into question those commitments? In the meantime, all those large natural continuities play out their averages. Surely, those who roamed the ice fields and tundra of 10,000 years ago would think that Earth’s warming is a rather pleasant change. “Look, Yug, trees! Trees, Yug, trees!”
 
More: Whose genetic line gets to go to Planet Ararat? Stephen’s? Or, in general, Yug’s? And when the ark lands, will those on board disembark to find a stable world devoid of climatic aberrations and an unending supply of clean, green energy?
 
 
* In memory and hyperbole, it was a time when people wore duct tape for shoes and walked uphill in knee-deep snow both ways between home and school. 

Oh! How sensitive we’ve become. We know the realities of past and present, but we decide that future generations shouldn’t know them. Of course, the problem is that the next generation will probably discover the truths we try to bury. They might do so by stumbling on some historical document or by witnessing the realities of their own times.
 
Take, for example, the Los Angeles Times report by Hugo Martin (Monday, 6/3/17) that Disneyland has plans to “scrub” its Pirates of Caribbean ride to alter an animatronic scene. Seems that the “Auction. Take a wench for a bride” theme is just too raw and demeaning for women and children to see.
 
Disney has always faced a quandary: How does one balance experience in a virtual world with experience in the real one while still making the former seem as real as the latter? To play it safe, Disney scrubs, and the latest change to eliminate the auction of women for brides is an example. Did such scenes occur in real life? Yes, but in a theme park for little girls and boys to see? Aren’t we just asking for imitative auctions down the road of iniquity?
 
Don’t we all face this dilemma? How do we balance “ought-to-be/should-have-been” with “is/was”? The world as it ought to be or should be is the one in which mutual respect and kindness allows no demeaning actions toward others. But the world that is and was manifestly wallows in demeaning actions. There are and were such auctions, and pirates, among other segments of current and previous societies, perpetrate and perpetrated the unjust selling of women. There’s ugliness out there, and it chafes the souls of the innocent and charitable.
 
The wounds of past and present can’t be eliminated by eliminating their animatronic, graphic, or computer-generated representations. Acknowledged: One goes to Disneyland or Disney World to escape. Subtle or overt scenes that depict “man’s inhumanity to man” are, one might argue, more appropriate in some history museum than they are in a kid’s theme park. But scrubbing can both clean and chafe.
 
Probably, only a minority of Disney fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride will notice and object to the scrubbed scenes they once knew. For them the scrubbing chafes. Probably, most of them see the auction scene as a simple depiction done in comic style and thus have no personal desire to sell or buy women.
 
It’s difficult to balance sensibility and reality, but are we destined to live in a society so obsessed with depiction that we take it for reality? Look around. You’ll find something that offends you and that galls your kibes. But erasing historical representations doesn’t change either past realities or their present manifestations.
 
What if an overdose of political correctness eliminates our ability to distinguish virtual and real worlds? What if exchanging “should-be/should-have-been” for “is/was” suffuses all perspectives like bruising within chafed skin?
 
Kibes aren’t the destiny of everyone, of course. Some few make it through life without any chafing. And some who have kibes suffer no further galling. Nevertheless, social kibes are an historical and worldwide phenomenon. Knowing that fact is a practical point of departure for changing “is/will-be” into “should-be.”
 
Let’s not wax too philosophical, but stop a moment to consider what George Santayana (the guy credited with saying that ignorance of history condemns one to repeat it) said with regard to the arts: “The more superficial they are and the more detached from practical habits, the more extravagant and meaningless they can dare to become….”**
 
So, how meaningless, how detached from reality, do you want your entertainment to be? And how meaningless and detached from reality do you want your knowledge to be? I can only pose the questions. But the next time you go to a theme park for a virtual experience, ask yourself both questions.
 
* http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pirates-makeover-20170702-story.html
 
** Reason in Art, Chapter 1. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15000/15000-h/vol4.html